The fire this time: A review of taking it personally.

• Date: 22 December 2002
• Published date: 22 December 2002

Ann Berlak and Sekani Moyenda, Taking It Personally: Racism in the Classroom from Kindergarten to College. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

THE FIRST PARAGRAPH IN DERRICK BELL'S FACES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL (1992: ix) unambiguously states: "racism is an integral, permanent, and indestructible component of this society." Bell and his surrogate, the fictitious "lawyer-prophet" Geneva Crenshaw, "divine" a racial realism theory based on that assumption and speculate on the role Blacks and those whites committed to antiracist activity can play in a redefined struggle for whatever racial justice can be wrenched from the society.

Taking It Personally: Racism in the Classroom from Kindergarten to College, by Ann Berlak and Sekani Moyenda (2001), can be read as a post-Bell confrontation with the persistent reality of institutional and personal racism in the classroom. Though it does not and cannot solve the problem of racism, it presents as raw and direct a discussion of racism as I have seen in the educational literature. Divided into sections written separately by Berlak and Moyenda, the book centers on a single class session in a California state-mandated diversity course, taught by Ann Berlak in a San Francisco teacher credential program. The great majority of the students in this class were white. Berlak invited Sekani Moyenda, an African American former student, to take over the class for that particular session.

Moyenda prepared what she describes as a "Boot camp role play" for the class. The improvisation was "set up for them to fail" (p. 55). A white male student named Jim volunteered to be the teacher; and 12 other students were assigned roles as children in Jim's imaginary class. Each volunteer:

was given a sheet on which were written the child's goal (for example, to sleep, to get kicked out of school, to learn), a script (a few lines describing the essence of the child's classroom behavior); the child's tactics for accomplishing the goals (for example, sleeping, hitting, name calling, reading a book); who the child interacts with ("partners in crime"); an academic level; an "escalation" level; and selected aspects of the child's background ("parental drug abuse," "absence of mother or father," "mother is a paraprofessional") (p. 55).

Four escalation levels were assigned to different characters: angelic, usual, disruptive, and destructive. Moyenda's objective was "to raise the issues of administrative procedures, laws, and paperwork associated with classroom management, and how understanding the children's home culture and experiences is relevant to management strategies" (p. 55).

Before the role play started, Moyenda shared with the class two stories about how she, as an African American, experienced racism in her life and how she came to her suspicious view of white people's values and intentions. One incident occurred during Moyenda's elementary school years when a blonde girl harassed her incessantly, but their teacher ignored Moyenda's complaints, supporting the girl instead. Later that day on the playground, Moyenda beat up the girl in frustration. Another incident happened during Moyenda's adult years as a teacher when a colleague, a white woman, continually spoke to her brusquely and with condescension, belittling her knowledge as a Black woman teacher. Moyenda chose these two experiences to illustrate to the class how they "contributed to the particular sensitivity I have to questions of classroom fairness and justice. Not just because I often feel abused and mistreated by white people, but because I don't like having to defend myself with one form of violence or another" (p. 21).

Moyenda's stories and her forceful narrative voice set the tone for the Boot camp role play. Moyenda designed the improvisation to last for 20 minutes, but the situation grew Out of control after only seven minutes, and the improvisation had to be stopped. The "teacher" could not manage the "bad" students; as long as everyone played their assigned roles, the only possible ending was chaos. As Moyenda had told the class, the situation was set up to fail, but not so quickly or thoroughly...