Sign up for our eNewsletter > Recent Posts Mothering Special Needs Children in Contemporary China by Jinting Wu on May 18 “I Feel Sad, and I Don’t Know Why”: Remembering to Be There for Young People by H. Richard Milner IV and Kenny Donaldson on May 04 The Politics of Creating Diverse Schools by Genevieve Siegel‐Hawley on Apr 20 “It’s Our Right...”: The Opportunities Gained by Helping Students of Color Practice Resisting Racism by Daren Graves and Scott Seider on Apr 06 Can Increasing Access to Computer Science Education Remedy Inequities in Tech? by Cassidy Puckett on Mar 09 View All Posts » Subscribe via RSS » Posts archives > More from Harvard Education Publishing Group Youth, Education, and the Role of Society Anytime, Anywhere Leading Instructional Rounds in Education Contact Us | HEPG Recent Posts > “It’s Our Right...”: The Opportunities Gained by Helping Students of Color Practice Resisting Racism by Daren Graves and Scott Seider on April 6,2020 In carrying out the research for our book, Schooling for Critical Consciousness, we spent hundreds of days over four years observing the programming and practices of six public high schools explicitly committed to fostering their students’ ability to analyze, navigate, and challenge racism. One of the great pleasures of conducting this research was to observe powerful practices that other schools can surely learn from. But there are also important lessons from the ways in which these high schools sometimes inhibited their students’ attempts to actualize their learning about race and racism within the school community. For example, Olivia, 1 a twelfth-grade student at Freedom Prep High School, described what she experienced on a day that she and scores of fellow Freedom Prep students organized a walkout to protest the dearth of faculty or staff of color at the school: I felt like the response at first was, [the school administrators] were mad. Like really mad, like they started to tell us that students wouldn’t get bus rides home because they’re not really like attending, they didn’t attend a class, so they weren’t like counted as present at school. We weren’t provided lunch. We weren’t provided with privileges of using the bathroom in here, so we walked to somebody’s house over here to use the bathroom. The parents, they ordered us Little Caesar’s pizza and we sat in the front [of the school]. Yeah, they were like kind of like mad about it. But it’s like, there was really nothing they could do. It was like, it’s our right. As evidenced by Olivia’s description, Freedom Prep administrators and teachers instituted punitive measures to students who participated in the student-organized walkout. These were the same faculty and administrators who also engaged students in powerful action civics projects as part of their core social studies curriculum and facilitated students, faculty, and parents joining statewide protests for more education funding in the state budget. Research shows that the implications for denying students of color the opportunity to practice or engage in resistance can be particularly dire because this denial can run the risk of reinforcing the dynamics of oppression at micro- and macro-levels. 2 In this case, punishing Freedom Prep students for organizing against a lack of faculty diversity likely reinforced a divide between the predominantly privileged White administrators and students of color with far less power and privilege. It also had the potential to send the message that students of color can only engage in social action when the predominantly White administrators give them permission. We understand why the Freedom Prep students were confused, if not confounded, by their school administrators first encouraging them to organize to make sure their school received sufficient funding, but then punishing them for organizing to convince the school to utilize these school funds more equitably. In considering Freedom Prep’s response to a student protest, we argue that school represents a relevant and meaningful site for students to gain practice in resisting racism, and while it may be difficult for administrators and teachers to acknowledge that their students may be experiencing