I teach at an interdistrict magnet highschool in New Haven, Connecticut. In addition to taking their core classes, students choose to follow a particular “pathway” of study over their four years. I teach an 11th Grade Constitutional Law elective in the Law and Politics pathway. After a basic introduction to Constitutional Law and the Supreme Court, I design my units to be thematic- based on a particular amendment and/or issue. One of the units I teach is about the intersection between race and education. We examine the role the Supreme Court has played in both creating and impeding educational opportunities based on race. Over time, as I have taught the unit, I realized that there was a glaring omission: the prominent role that housing segregation played in causing and continuing school segregation. After taking the seminar “Teaching about Race and Racism Across the Disciplines” I also realized the need to disrupt the standard/dominant method of teaching law as neutral and unbiased. With this unit, I additionally wanted to challenge the idea that racism is something aberrant in the legal field, rooted simply in instances of individual prejudice, and that “colorblind” equality is the presumed end goal. I decided to create a unit that would help students understand the systemic nature of racism and white supremacy in government action and the law, particularly as it relates to segregation in the United States, with an ultimate goal that students start to imagine a way to push back against it.
