Publication | Closed Access
Color in the Classroom: How American Schools Taught Race, 1900-1954
45
Citations
0
References
2012
Year
EthnicityCritical Race TheoryMulticultural EducationRace LawRacial PrejudiceWord RaceEducationRacial StudyRacial Segregation StudiesAfrican American HistorySocial SciencesRaceContemporary RacismAfrican American EducationAfrican American StudiesCultural DiversityRacial GroupEthnic StudiesMinority StudiesRacismDense ProseRacial EquityCaucasian RaceRacialization StudiesIntersectionalityHistory Of EducationAnti-racismCultureRacial ViolenceRace RelationSocial Diversity
Color in the Classroom describes the efforts of school reformers who worked to change American attitudes toward race during the first half of the twentieth century. Despite dense prose, the book effectively demarcates different phases in the effort to promote tolerance and combat bigotry. At the dawn of the twentieth century, when many Americans used the word race as a synonym for ethnicity, schools sought to Americanize immigrants recently arrived from Europe. Some teachers tried to suppress every vestige of non-Anglo ethnicity, while others fostered assimilation by encouraging respect for carefully selected aspects of immigrant heritage. After immigration was restricted in the 1920s, the latter approach came to prevail. The more tolerant approach had an unintended effect: it reinforced the belief that all European Americans were members of the Caucasian race. According to Zoë Burkholder, this “recasting [of] previously racialized white minorities as members of the dominant racial majority” led to a “hardening [of] the racial distinction between ‘white’ people and those who were ‘colored’” (p. 13).