TeachLab with Justin Reich

Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum Reboot

Episode Summary

This week on TeachLab, we’re republishing our first episode with the brilliant Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, to bring her lessons of equity and race back into light during these challenging times of the COVID pandemic. Now with a new segment called “Dear Teacher”, a message from Dr. Tatum directly to teachers around the world. Next week, we’ll be back with a new episode in our COVID-19 series, talking with Paul Reville, founding director of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Redesign Lab, and former Secretary of Education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Episode Notes

This week on TeachLab, we’re republishing our first episode with the brilliant Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, to bring her lessons of equity and race back into light during these challenging times of the COVID pandemic. Now with a new segment called “Dear Teacher”, a message from Dr. Tatum directly to teachers around the world.

Next week, we’ll be back with a new episode in our COVID-19 series, talking with Paul Reville, founding director of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Redesign Lab, and former Secretary of Education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Episode 1 Summary: Our host Justin Reich has a powerful conversation with renowned author, psychologist and educator Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum. Dr. Tatum shares some of the stories that inspired her bestselling book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race and offers tips for addressing the ongoing challenges of racial issues in classrooms and schools.

 

Note to the audience

The Teaching Systems Lab and the TeachLab team would like to thank all of our audience for their patronage as we attempt to shift our production and content in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic. We think it is of the utmost importance to continue distributing as much content as we can, and as widely as we can, to assist those who are in need of information in these difficult times. We are working to improve the quality of our content with these new constraints and get back to a more regular scheduling. Thank you for your patience.

 

Additional Resources

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race – Read Dr. Tatum’s book updated and reissued in 2017.

ROPES – This blog post describes a protocol for collaboratively creating shared rules and expectations for the classroom. It could also be used to kick off challenging conversations with educators.

“White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard to Talk to White People About Racism” – Dr. Tatum recommended teachers read Dr. Robin DiAngelo; this article provides pointers based on her book.

Is My Skin Brown Because I Drank Chocolate Milk? – Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s presentation at TEDxStanford about how people talk (or don’t) about race and how to approach the conversation with young children.

 

Transcript

https://teachlabpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes/dr-tatum-reboot/transcript

 

Produced by Jesse Dukes and Garrett Beazley

Edited by Aimee Corrigan

Recorded and Mixed by Garrett Beazley

Filmed by Denez McAdoo

 

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Episode Transcription

Justin Reich:                 From the home studios of the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT, this is TeachLab. I'm your host, Justin Reich. This week, we're sharing our very first episode again; a conversation with the incredible Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum. Throughout our conversation, Dr. Tatum offered some important guidance to teachers that we thought would be particularly useful to our listeners during these challenging times. Deep inequalities in our education systems are being revealed as never before through COVID-19, and it's more important now than ever that we develop the skills to talk about race, and difference, and other taboo topics in our education systems. When we interviewed Dr. Tatum last fall, we asked her to write a personal letter directly to teachers, and we'll play it for you now.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Dear teacher, if you're a new teacher and you're teaching in an all white classroom, a multicultural classroom, a majority kids of color classroom, it really doesn't matter what your student population is. What I hope for you, is that you will get used to thinking about race as a topic you should talk about, because if all your kids are white, they need to understand racism and how it operates in our society. If your kids are kids of color, they need to understand that what they experience in their daily lives has a name, and that if you can name it, you can change it. But you can't change it if you can't talk about it. So if you're nervous about having those conversations, I'm going to invite you to read my book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race? If it makes you uncomfortable to have those conversations, I'm going to recommend Robin DiAngelo's book, White Fragility, I think that's got a lot to offer, particularly young white teachers. But if there's anything I would urge you to do, I would urge you to practice those conversations with each other, because they do get easier with practice.

Justin Reich:                 The advice that Dr. Tatum offered, was about talking about race, but it applies to so much of the work that we're doing right now with emergency remote learning. There's so much that we need to do that. We have to try to tackle, even when we don't always have the right answers. So we have to dig in, we have to listen to our students. We have to listen to our colleagues about how things are going. We have to be willing to practice and iterate and try again and get better for some school systems, you're beginning to wrap things up, you're celebrating graduation, you're getting ready to send your younger students home. In many places in the country. There's still a few more weeks left. And I hope that during that time, you can keep thinking about what are the systems here that are really working? What are my students telling me that are really working? And for the things that aren't quite working yet, what's one more thing that I could try before the end of the year to make this a little bit better for the kids that I'm working with?

                                    Next week, we'll be back with a new episode in our COVID-19 series talking with Paul Reville, founding director of the Harvard Graduate School of Education's Redesign Lab, and the former Secretary of Education for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Until then, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Dr. Tatum, as much as I did.

                                    From the Teaching Systems lab at MIT, this is TeachLab, a podcast about the art and craft of teaching,, I'm Justin Reich. Today, Beverly Daniel Tatum. She's a developmental psychologist and author and the President Emeritus at Spelman College. Her book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? was written for educators, and maybe you can relate to this. She developed the ideas in the book by teaching them to her students. It was part of a class she taught at Mount Holyoke called The Psychology of Racism. And one of the key ideas she tried to impart to those college students, is that all of them, all of us, can take a leadership role in making institutions more sensitive towards inclusivity, and more aware of the context of racism.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       We often think about leaders as the people who run organizations, but the fact of the matter is we're all leaders, everyone influences other people to some degree. Teachers are leaders in their classroom, parents are leaders at home. And so what was most rewarding for me was for my students to really give serious thought to their own leadership capacity, and to think about how they could use it. So at the end of every semester, I would ask students to develop an action plan. And those action plans might vary from leading and unlearning racism workshop in their residence hall, to planning a family intervention at Thanksgiving, to doing a letter writing campaign about stereotypical advertising, or problematic messages in a favorite television program. Lots of different ways of thinking about it.

Justin Reich:                 Dr. Tatum's book did impact education, but of course the issues she addressed in 1997 are still with us today. I asked her to share what advice she has for schools who are tackling the challenge of creating an inclusive, welcoming learning environment.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Well, I would probably talk about what I call the ABC. A stands for affirming identity, B stands for building community, and C stands for cultivating leadership. So to elaborate on that, the A is of course, I like to think of the AA as the most important starting place. The A, affirming identity, really speaks to the fact that everyone wants to be seen, heard and understood. And how do we know we have been seen or heard or understood? When we see ourselves reflected in the environments around us, then we know that someone's noticed us, right? That we have been seen. And so, for example, if we were all together in a room, and someone took a group photo, the photographer took a picture of everybody in the room, told us to arrange ourselves and smile, and we got our picture taken, and a copy of that photo was given to each of us. The first thing any one of us would do when we got our copy, would be to look for ourselves in that photo. You look to say, "Okay, where am I in this picture?" And not only would you want to see yourself in the picture, but you would want to see yourself in the picture looking good. You would be evaluating it, "Was I smiling? Are my eyes open? How did that outfit look today?"

                                    And so if we think about the learning environment, the classroom, the school, as like a big photograph, we stepped into that photograph and we want to see ourselves in it. We want to see ourselves in the curriculum. We want to see ourselves standing in front of the room sometimes, if not all the time. We want to see ourselves being recognized as part of this learning community in very tangible ways, in ways that white children regularly see themselves. They don't really have to think much about it because even if the teacher doesn't look like them, they're in the textbooks, they're in the reading room, library materials, they're everywhere. And so we have to be more intentional about making sure that kids are not invisible.

Justin Reich:                 Well, I want to make sure you get a chance to tell us about [inaudible 00:07:12] too, but drilling down on affirming. So there's some things that teachers and educators can do to build a more affirming environment before kids are in the room. They can think about what's on the walls. They can think about what's in their libraries. They can think about what materials, what topics are we choosing to delve more deeply into? And knowing something about my kids and where they're from, how are they going to see themselves in that? If I was in the classroom with a teacher who's doing a really good job of affirming identity, do you have examples of sort of what moves I would see that teacher making, or what kinds of things that teacher might be doing? What are the sort of actions, what are the behaviors that we can kind of cultivate in teachers, that are characteristic of people who are really good at affirming?

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Well, let's imagine that the materials are there. Let's imagine there's a diversity of materials, and let's imagine that kids are being given some free choice time. And let's imagine you have a reluctant reader. Maybe that reluctant reader says, "I'm not into books. I don't really like to read." And you might say to that person, "I know it's not your favorite thing, but I have a book that I think you might really be interested in," and then pulls out a book that does represent that kid in some meaningful way. I had an experience of this with a relative. I have two sons. My sons are four years apart, six and 10, at the time that this happened. They're now in their 30's, but they had cousins, two cousins, similar age, six and 10. And they were spending several weeks with us in the summer. And the ten-year-old said just that, he wasn't into reading.

                                    My kids were voracious readers. And I was trying to get him to read. And he said, "I don't like to read." And he wasn't an excellent student. He was doing okay in school. But anyway, I said, "Well, I have some books you might be interested in. Let me just show you one." And I handed him a book. The title of it was Wagon Wheels. Some of your teachers listening might know this book, but it's about a black family after the end of the civil war, traveling west to settle in what was a black community in Kansas, Nicodemus, Kansas. And according to the story... It's based on a true story, actually. According to the story, the mother unfortunately has died. And so the father is single parent with these two boys and they're going out west to settle. It's very adventurous.

                                    And at a certain point, the father has to go ahead alone and leaves the oldest boy in charge of his younger brother. There might've been actually three boys. So two younger siblings. And they have to really survive on the trail out west. And it's quite an adventure and they are very successful. They have some assistance from some local Indians I think that they meet up with. But when I offered him this book, he was skeptical, but then he read it voraciously. And so the question we have to ask is are we engaging kids in a way that captures their imagination and allows them to feel part of this story?

Justin Reich:                 And for us here at MIT I think one of the things that we try to think about in our lab is not only doing that in the humanities, but where else does that fit in the science and technical subjects? That was why it was such a tremendous contribution, the movie Hidden Figures. That there's this incredible history of African American women, women in general, who are absolutely central to the history of computer science and trying to both say, "Look, the conversations about power and race and identity are meant to be part of technical topics." Physics and chemistry and math and computer science. It's not just how we accomplish things, but it's realizing that these are things that are part of society.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Absolutely. And of course, right now we're talking about the missing information, the Hidden Figures, particularly as it relates to African American history in the United States, but similar stories could be shared about other underrepresented groups as well. And so that's the A. So let's talk about the A. So the B is about building community. How do we create a sense of shared belonging? And the B and the A really go together. Because if we're doing activities in the classroom where some of the kids feel left out, feel invisible, feel marginalized, they don't actively participate. Every learning community, every teacher, every school leader is thinking about how do we create a sense of belonging so that people are motivated and want to be part of this community. Sometimes they're reluctant to focus on the A because they think, "Well, if I really pay attention to the differences, I will somehow lead to-"

Justin Reich:                 Make things worse.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Exactly. I will make things worse rather than bring people together.

Justin Reich:                 If we don't talk about it, it's not a problem.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Exactly, exactly. But the fact of the matter is it may not be on your radar that it's a problem, but for the kid who feels invisible in that classroom, it already is a problem. It already is a problem. So thinking about the B in the context of the A is the really critical thing. How do we think about what we're doing in new ways? And sometimes those new ways might mean creating a special club, particularly at the middle school level. We might have affinity groups, some schools have them and have used them very effectively. Other schools worry that that's going to cause separation. But acknowledging the developmental needs of kids who are really thinking about their identity issues, particularly in early adolescents, can be an important part of building community.

Justin Reich:                 But certainly [crosstalk 00:12:46] all the way through higher education. I mean we have really powerful effective... The black student union here is an incredible group for organizing, but both I think conversations with people about what does it mean to be an African American at MIT, which is a challenging thing given the limited number of faculty. We have amazing African-American faculty here, but we don't have as many of them as we would like. And as well as the programming that they can offer to the rest of the community to help us see what things look like through their eyes and through their perspective. So through middle school all the way up through older ages, I think there's room for-

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Well and then the C, cultivating leadership, is about helping all of our students, whether they are underrepresented or part of the majority, think about or develop the skills for connecting across lines of difference. What we know in today's society is that most of our students are growing up in relatively segregated communities. And as the consequence of that, particularly when they come to college or go into the military, or go into the workplace, they find themselves in communities that are more diverse than the ones they grew up in. Those who come into higher education have a unique opportunity to have direct contact with people they didn't have direct contact with in their elementary, middle, even high school sometimes. And so it means that there's an opportunity to learn some new things, but if we don't take full advantage of that opportunity, then it is lost and perhaps won't be replicated again.

Justin Reich:                 The question, "Why do all the black kids sit together in the cafeteria?" One of the things it evokes for me... So I was a young white teacher. When I finished in college, I went and I taught high school. I actually taught in a school that was organized. It was a high school around a really long hallway, and there were five alcoves. So the freshmen had an alcove and the sophomores had an alcove, the juniors and the seniors. And there was one alcove in the middle that was called the black alcove. And this was a place where African American and then eventually Latino students would congregate

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Regardless of grade year?

Justin Reich:                 Yeah, regardless of grade year. So obviously they're... And there's sometimes that are white kids who are sitting in the black alcove and sometimes there are African American kids who are sitting with the sophomores because they were sophomores, but it was a distinctive feature of school life. I thought a lot at the time about walking by the alcove. So when the black kids are sitting together in the cafeteria or in my case when black kids are sitting together in the alcove, what are some of the most productive ways that white teachers can walk by, can be near that space? Is the thing to do to leave them alone and to do their thing? What can white teachers do in that moment in interactions with the black kids sitting together that build upon the ABCs as you described them?

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Well the first thing I think to acknowledge is the value that can come from gathering with students or having a shared experience. So when I wrote my book back in 1997, the first version of it and titled it Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria and Other Conversations About Race, it was in part because of my experience working as a consultant sometimes coming to do professional development in schools that were majority white but had a significant population of black students, enough for them to be sitting together in the cafeteria. People would always ask me that question and they would ask it as though they were concerned that it was a problem. "Why are all the black kids sitting together in the cafeteria and what can we do to make them stop?" It was that kind of a question.

                                    And so part of what I talk about in the book is the value that can come from sitting together with people with whom you have some shared sense of identity, particularly when you're a teenager and actively beginning to explore that identity.

Justin Reich:                 Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       So I want to say it's a perfectly fine question to ask, but let's not assume it's a problem.

Justin Reich:                 Right, right.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       That said, it is also important for students and teachers to learn how to connect across lines of difference. And so I often say, "Let's worry less about who's sitting where during the break times, and think about what's happening inside the classroom."

                                    Social psychology tells us that the best way to build positive cross racial relationships is to give a group a task where they're working together toward a shared goal, where they've come together on equal footing, and where that cooperative collaborative behavior is sanctioned by an adult in authority.

                                    So a teacher at the front of the classroom can put kids in mixed groups, can have them working on projects together, can give them opportunities to really get to know each other on a level playing field, relative to the task that they've been asked to do. Sports teams are an example of this, of course, where the coach is supporting the cross group engagement. But when you give kids those opportunities, that activity often spills over into the classroom, or into the alcoves.

                                    And the teacher who is seen as an ally, as someone who authentically cares about knows me, knows my name, talks to me about my interests, engages me in conversation inside the classroom, is likely to be the teacher that I'm going to spontaneously speak to when they pass by me on the hall.

Justin Reich:                 Yeah building those relationships in classroom, being attentive. I remember in my third year of teaching, part of what shaped my experience there was I taught a class called Race in America as a social studies elective, but the experience of building more relationships as a teacher there... I remember being more deliberate my third year of walking more slowly by the black alcove and thinking to myself, "If they're having a good time, I'm not going to do anything, but I want them to see that I'm looking at them. I want them to..." If I see some kind of like they want to wave and say, "Hey, Mr. Reich, hey Coach Reich." Or if they want to reach out, I want to be there for them, and if they want me to just keep walking by because they're doing something else, I want to sort of leave them alone. But trying to be intentional about, I see you and I'm here if you need me.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Yeah, yeah. It's not unlike a parent-child relationship in adolescence. There are times when your teenagers want to talk to you and sometimes they don't.

Justin Reich:                 Sometimes they don't, yeah.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       And sometimes it's just being available, so if they do, they will.

Justin Reich:                 So one of the things that we try to do in our lab is to create opportunities for people to practice difficult situations. And so whether through simulations or other kinds of things, we create these moments where teachers have to tackle particularly challenging moments in teaching.

                                    If you were creating some of those situations, what would be ones that you would put together to provoke, particularly for new teachers, or particularly for white teachers, challenging interactions that you wish teachers on average would be able to do better than they currently do?

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       In general, I would say to teachers, "Don't be afraid to talk about race." Now, I know that's easier said than done.

Justin Reich:                 Yep.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       And one of the things that I found when I was doing a lot of professional development in the Greater Boston area, I was often working with white teachers, but yet these were teachers who were working with kids from the Boston area who were bused into their communities through what is known as the METCO program. And of course, listeners in the Boston area will know that that's the voluntary desegregation program that's been in place probably close to 50 years now.

                                    But one of the things that I found was that white teachers in particular, struggled with giving honest feedback to students of color. Particularly adolescents, because their fear was that either this kid or the kid's parent would perceive their negative feedback, or I'm going to call it critical feedback, as somehow being racially motivated, you know, like, "You're picking on my kid, you don't like my kid. You're telling my kid isn't doing what he needs to do in your class, because you are quote a racist."

Justin Reich:                 Right.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       And I once asked the teacher what would it feel like if someone said that to her?

                                    And she said, "I would feel like I'd been punched in the stomach." Because no one wants to be labeled with that R-word.

Justin Reich:                 Right.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       And because of that, because of that fear, unfortunately it was leading to some very unproductive behavior, as in not giving the feedback.

Justin Reich:                 Right.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       So let's say you've got Michael in your class, and Michael has not been getting his homework done, and hasn't been turning it in. And you need Michael to do that in order to be successful in your class. And yet you're hesitant to either give Michael that honest feedback, or you don't want to call Michael's mother or his father to talk to them about Michael's performance for fear that somehow your critique of Michael will be misunderstood.

                                    If you withhold that information, then in some ways you are being discriminatory because you're giving that information to Tommy, the kid in the suburban white family. His parents-

Justin Reich:                 Who needs that and can use that to better, but Michael's not getting it.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Exactly. So we talked about, "Well, let's imagine that happens. Let's imagine you have some concerns about Michael's performance, not just his homework, maybe his attitude, you've got some things you want to share with Michael's parents; and Michael's parents accuse you of being racist. What would you do?"

                                    And she talked about how she would be very, just paralyzed by that. And the first response perhaps is to defend oneself, "Of course, I'm not, not a prejudice bone in my body."

Justin Reich:                 Right. "I don't even see race. I don't see color."

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Yes, exactly. That is not a useful response.

Justin Reich:                 Yeah.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       But what would be a useful response?

                                    The response that I tell teachers is to ask for more information. What if someone said, "Well, I think that was really a racist response."

                                    "Help me understand that. Why did you think that? What was it that I said or did that gave you that impression?"

                                    You're asking for more information. And usually the person on the other end responds with surprise because they're expecting the defensive response. But if you say, "That was not my intention, can you help me understand what I did that left you with that impression?" That's the opening for a dialogue, which can then be very productive.

Justin Reich:                 And there may be ways that teachers can even practice some of those hard moments and say, "Well, what could I do more?"

                                    I mean, it's probably somewhat challenging to ask that question to a parent. It's, "What do you feel like I did that was racist?" It's probably even more challenging to ask that to a 16 year old, or 17 year old. And say, "No, no, no, really, honestly, I just want to hear from you, I'm not trying to ask this in accusatory way; just what was it that I did that made you feel like I was racist? Because I want to know."

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Well, and I found that when working with teachers, when they did ask that question and they asked it sincerely, they often learn things that they weren't even aware of.

                                    I'll give a common example in a high school situation where one kid has raised his hand and asked for the pass to go to the restroom, and gets the pass and goes and comes back; and another kid asks for that pass, and either he's told to wait, or takes the pass and is criticized for being gone too long. And someone in that room is timing.

Justin Reich:                 Probably not the teacher.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Yes. Someone in that room can come back and say, "Well, when John went, I was looking at my watch. He was gone two minutes. When Jamal went, he wasn't gone more than two minutes either." But you said something to Jamal; you didn't say anything to John. Jamal's absence was noticed more than John's absence was. So that is part of the conversation, but being open to the conversation, getting over the fear of even having it, is really important.

                                    One of the things that... I did a research project a long time ago, which turned into a book of a different title, that book is called "Assimilation Blues. Black Families in a White Community." And I was interviewing parents about their experiences in their children's schools. Black parents were living in a predominantly white community where their kids were often, sometimes, the only black kid in the class; one of a few. And one father said it really bothered him when teachers said they treated all the kids the same. And his response to that was always, "The same as what?" You know, the same as though they're all white? They're not all white. My kid is having a different experience in this school than the white kids are having, if for no other reason than he's not seeing himself represented in the curriculum. And so being willing to acknowledge that not all the kids are having the same experience, and that there is a context in which we're all operating, a context which reinforces messages about what I'm going to call a hierarchy of human value, where some groups are valued more highly than other groups. And if we don't acknowledge that, we can't fix it.

Justin Reich:                 If we can't talk about it, we can't fix it.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Yes. And so that, I think, is something that teachers can practice with each other in a supportive way.

Justin Reich:                 Some of the organizations that I've worked with; for instance, Facing History in Ourselves, an amazing organization-

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       I know all about it.

Justin Reich:                 That works with teachers around identity. And there's a sort of background, constant, fear talking about the Holocaust, talking about reconstruction, that teachers are going to talk about this in ways that are harmful to students. That they're going to... The classic Holocaust example is when people do simulations of... Just things that make you go, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe that you would think that would be okay." As you encourage teachers to have more conversations about race, are there any things that particularly worry you? Like, have more conversations around race, but not like that; that's not what I meant.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Well, I think it is really important to create a community of practice so that you can get feedback. We all make mistakes. And I started teaching my class on racism... I taught that class for the first time when I was 26 years old, in 1980, and I certainly made mistakes. So I always like to say, "If we wait for perfection, we will never get started." So we know mistakes are going to happen, but if you have a community of peers that you're regularly talking to, you can get feedback; you can get better. If you make a mistake in class, you can come back next week and say, "Class, we were doing this thing, and I said something I wish I hadn't said," or, "I did something that I'm not sure was that helpful. And so I really want to see if we can revisit that today, because I've been thinking about it." There are ways to correct one's errors that students appreciate. That said, there's nothing better than being able to have real-time feedback from peers who are also working with these issues. And there are schools that create those learning groups, that read things together, that talk to each other, about these issues, and I think that helps.

Justin Reich:                 That's such great concrete, actionable advice. Have conversations about race, be ready to have those conversations around race, do it with a community of peers so that there are people checking about the things that you're trying to do, that you're bouncing ideas off each other. "This is what I'm going to do for the next couple of weeks. And it's going to be new. How does this sound?" And then being willing to recognize that you'll make some mistakes, to acknowledge those mistakes, and to go back to your students and say, "I don't think that was what I meant to do. I think I did that wrong. Can we have a do-over? Can we talk about why I don't think that was right?" Or, "You're already telling me why I don't think that's right, and I want you to know that I heard it." Those sound like great, actionable things to be able to do.

                                    Well, Dr. Tatum, this has been an incredibly productive and rewarding conversation.

Dr. Beverly Tatum:       Well, I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

Justin Reich:                 That was Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum. Dr. Tatum is President Emeritus of Spelman College, and the author of, "Why are all the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: And Other Conversations about Race." I'm Justin Reich. You've been listening to TeachLab, from the Teaching Systems Lab at MIT. You can find more resources from Dr. Tatum at our website, teachlabpodcast.com. That's teachlabpodcast.com. This episode was produced by Jesse Dukes and Garrett Beazley, edited by Aimee Corrigan, recorded and mixed by Garrett Beazley, and filmed by Denez McAdoo. Everything we produce at the Teaching Systems Lab is licensed under a creative commons license, and we encourage you to share it and use it. Thanks for listening to TeachLab, and special thanks to Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum for this powerful conversation. Be sure to subscribe to TeachLab, and join us next week for our conversation with Paul Revel. Stay safe. Until next time.