The Racial Divide: Differences in White and Black Students’ Interpretations of U.S. History

In this chapter, I examined the explanations of historical actors and events and interpretive themes with which students began the school year, focusing on differences in white and black students’ explanations and interpretations. I then analyzed their end-of-the-year explanations/ interpretations and compared them to those they had constructed at the beginning of the year (see Appendix C for an explanation of the research methods). The analyses provided evidence about the effects of family/ racialized community discourses and teachers’ pedagogies on students’ explanations and interpretations of race and rights in U.S. history and contemporary society.