Much of my research spurs me to call for more “precise” race talk in schools. I have seen many vague conversations about student needs go awry; accordingly, I suggest that people struggle to name exactly who needs which opportunities, for example. (See “Talking Precisely about Equal Opportunity,” in Everyday Antiracism.)

To assist students, we also need talk that clarifies confusing race issues. To start talking about whether race groups are “real,” for example, I often use the succinct phrase “race groups are social realities built on biological fictions.”

Yet research (including mine) suggests that educators, parents, and youth themselves also need talk that inspires. To have well-functioning schools, we need language that inspires people to offer opportunity to children, to teach, and to learn.

I just came back from a meeting at Stanford’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. In that meeting, a host of professors worked together to name “transformational” ideas from research on race. Over the coming months, I’ll be posting various such ideas from research on this blog.

For now, let me share one reference offered by George Lipsitz that I found particularly inspiring.

In 1865, black delegates in Charleston, South Carolina petitioned the legislature for basic rights in the post-Emancipation South. In defiance of increasingly common "Black Codes" restricting black people's pursuit of opportunity, the delegates presented a list of human rights demands. For example, they demanded the right to assemble to discuss politics, to amass wealth, to farm and conduct trade, and so forth. And as Vincent Harding writes in his book There is a River (1981, p. 326), “To this, they added a summary human right not normally found in the public documents of the nation:

'the right to develop our whole being, by all the appliances that belong to a civilized society.' "

I find this an unusually inspiring description of what education is supposed to be about.