Abstract
Close your eyes. Bring into focus the picture of the cafeteria in your grade or high school, perhaps even your college dining hall. Where are you sitting? Who is sitting with you? The answer may vary depending on the racial and ethnic identities in the school of your memory. Twenty years ago, the question that plagued teachers and administrators witnessing this phenomenon was, “why?” Today, however, this still salient question is now charged with a new literacy of race consciousness as it is also shaped by the unfolding of new and heightened racial tensions.
In 1997, Beverly Daniel Tatum published her first edition of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race in an attempt to explain why students of color seemed to be voluntarily engaged in self-segregation. Just before the publishing of her book, the nation witnessed the acquittal of Los Angeles police officers who were filmed beating black motorist, Rodney King, and the popular food chain Denny’s was accused of racial discrimination against black patrons. Soon after, the controversial Bell Curve (Murray and Hernstein 1994) claimed that racial differences in IQ scores were not confined to environmental factors, black football legend and Heisman trophy winner, O. J. Simpson was found not guilty of the murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman and a million black men marched on Washington. In Hopwood v. Texas, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the use of affirmative action by the University of Texas law school was invalid. New York City police officers arrested and then beat and sodomized Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima.
Enter Beverly Tatum who defined terms like “race,” “racism,” and “prejudice” for readers trying to make sense of a divided world. Along with white identity development, she covered early, adolescent, and adult racial identity development and provided examples of activities she assigned to her college students. In 1997, the book was immediately met with critical acclaim, became a national bestseller, and Tatum was sought out for her expertise on race and racism.
Twenty years later, Tatum’s updated book is a welcomed revision, offering the still foundational framework for understanding race relations in the United States with a new introspective into an ever-changing racial climate. In the updated edition, Tatum concisely talks about race relations in the past 20 years and offers even deeper historical perspectives when contextualizing historic cases like Brown v. the Board of Education and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 against contemporary institutional racism. Tatum now covers new discourse on immigration, the “myth of the color-blind millennial,” contemporary surveys of racial attitudes held by whites, the Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name movements, and the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States to answer the question “why are all the black kids still sitting together in the cafeteria?”
Tatum ultimately provides an expanded and thorough lesson on the identity development of members of different racial groups and does so in three ways. First, as “black kids” are often rendered invisible in the U.S. school system because of their marginalized racial identity, Tatum shines a spotlight on black youth and maps out early, adolescent, and adult black identity development models as defined by James Marcia and William Cross. Second, as white students are socialized in private and institutional spaces that race talk is taboo talk, she details white identity development to illuminate that which whites often struggle with in conversations about race. At the heart of this text is the fact that Tatum is initiating a conversation about race, one that is especially overdue as hate speech and hate crimes are on the rise (Barrouquere 2017). Finally, as savvy readers will note that racism is not a black/white issue, and as she did in the first issue, Tatum’s last lesson on identity development acknowledges different racial groups and identity development in multiracial families—in this new edition, she adds the contemporary Latinx spelling instead of the Latina/o alternative.
Tatum’s new edition solves the issue of outdated cultural references (although she still does invoke the cantankerous “racist but loveable” television character “Archie Bunker”), but just as today’s college students have all but forgotten figures like Rodney King and O. J. Simpson, what will happen in another 20 years when Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Sandra Bland are blurry images in our collective and amnesiac rear view mirror? Tatum believes that even across characteristically different social landscapes, her objectives, tweaked for a new generation, hold strong. In a recent interview with The Atlantic (Anderson 2017), she explains, Today we are a nation at war, suffering from economic anxiety and the combination of “post-racial” rhetoric, simmering racial resentments, and an increasing 140-character culture of communication that has made productive conversation more difficult to have. That said, it is still the case that in a race-conscious society, we all have a racial identity that develops in predictable ways, shaped largely by the interactions we have with others. I still believe that an understanding of that identity-development process can help all of us begin to build bridges across lines of difference.
It is possible for Why Are All the Black Kids…? to be used by noncontemplative readers to come away with a politically correct vocabulary but not the critical depth needed to dialogue about race after reading this book. While Tatum (and other authors in her field) uses anecdotes and personal narratives to illuminate and humanize the experiences of people of color in a racist society and attempts to make a contribution in teaching us all how to heal from the deep wounds of racism, without much-needed follow-up dialogue, this book and the messages it contains could lose its power and miss its intended target. This book should still be assigned in educational settings with the caveat that administrators need to provide the necessary support to keep Tatum’s dialogue alive. I suggest when assigning it, one think critically about how best to follow Tatum’s invitation with a more concrete survey and critical analysis of the many possible responses such formative race training is likely to evoke.