In the article, The Challenge of New Colorblind Racism In Art Education, Desai addresses some of the issues with the way that our public schools, as well as general society treat the issue of race. The problem is that the idea of colorblindness is often promoted, when in reality this idea doesn't create change that would impact the racism inherent in many systems in our country; it only acts as a placebo/ band-aid solution to help with interpersonal conflict.
This made me reflect on my own public school experiences; I remember in 6th grade reading Crash as part of a unit on 'Bridges to Understanding.' In discussing this book, we talked about the conflict between the characters and why they were judging each other for superficial things, but if the issue of race came up it was glossed over. I'm fairly sure that in this unit (an the other ones like it in earlier grades) that they taught us to be 'colorblind', because people are more important than the color of their skin. While it is critical to understand that everyone is a unique and wonderful person despite the color of their skin, to fail to teach about racism on a systematic level and to only try to address superficial problems is what keeps systems of oppression in place.
As someone who is also double majoring in art history, I often try to find common ground the art ed pedagogy. In regards to the topic of challenging our perceptions of race, I came across a blog several months ago called People of Color in European Art History. This blog has been an excellent resource for me to begin to understand how people of color were really a much greater part of history, even European history than our generic 8th grade history classes would have us believe. This blog is updated often, and always draws on a number of academic citations for any and all claims.
While there are certainly a vast array of contemporary issues with race and promoting the idea of colorblindness, the past has also problematically been whitewashed and the medievalpoc blog attempts to address and correct these misconceptions. I think that many of the examples in this blog could serve as another excellent jumping off points to start dialog about race in an art classroom, besides the activity suggested in the article of having students make an artwork to directly reflect different views of race. So many art lessons are planned around historical and contemporary artists, and to select examples that specifically focus on race is a way to avoid students overlooking race because they have been taught to be colorblind. This would also be a good way to talk about representation in schools, and not just have one token example/ racial caricature, but to really show that there is much more depth to representation in art history than what we might assume.
Desai, D. (2010). The Challenge of New Colorblind Racism in Art Education. Art Education, 63(5), 22-28.
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