Racism and Teaching It in American Schools as Explained through Sociological Theories
The concept of racism is intuited with sociocultural constructions from colonization to
the post-independence decades to the contemporary period. Out of segregationist ideologies of
the British towards the Native Americans in the early 1600s, Americans have become divided
from the time of slavery to new policy-based systemic racism. The worst-case scenario is a
recent publication by the ABC News Organization on how political misconstruction of critical
race theory is unveiled to impart racism in American K-12 schools. Sociopolitical bigotry
emphasized by the political manifestos during the 2016 presidential elections made racial
discrimination and racial misunderstandings worse cases for marginalized students across
American schools, as reported by ABC News on "Critical Race theory in the classroom;
understanding the debate.”

Summary of the Current Event

Initially, racism and its effects on vulnerable groups like African Americans and other
non-white communities manifested at home environments rather than in learning institutions.
The article by Alfonseca (2021) titled "Critical Race theory in the classroom; understanding the
debate" on ABC News asserts that while many political campaigns led by the previous American
2016 campaigns cautioned schools on what and how to teach the learners about racism, the lead
politics by the Republican party made the race in schools a national discourse. The impacts were
such that the effects took negative turns in further discriminating and perpetuating wrongful
information about critical race theory. The article emphasizes that while politics makes race and
racial proclamations more sideling in schools, the debate about critical race theory should point
to the conversations about positive changes racial movements have impacted in America and its
institutions (Alfonseca, 2021). In a nutshell, looking at racism as divisive and glorifying white

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supremacy continuously provides little comprehension about how young learners can address it.
In contrast, policymakers must change the entire scope of what is taught to the learners in K-12
schools.
Sociological Theories of Racism and Their Application to the Identified Issue
As a racial concept that springs from the ideology of sociology, orientalism postulates a
sociopolitical construction of what separates the culture of the west and the East culture. In this
regard, Keskin (2018) asserts that the rift in cultural, religious, and lifestyle practices of the
middle-eastern people and that of the American or the west ideates the general aspects of
orientalism as racial theory. Numerous studies on what separates the west and the east show that
Americans and the middle-eastern portray double consciousness as a principle that disparages the
identification of communities in the United States as one (Keskin, 2018). Essentially, it is as
racially difficult for middle-eastern American children attending schools in the United States to
identify with larger groups as discrimination and stereotyped exclamations are rampant. The
article by Alfonseca (2021) connects with orientalism as they both identify political policies and
laws as the origin of biased conceptualization of racism. The moment programs such as Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals DACA are politically ostracized despite the good they do for the
immigrants, it leads to a bridge between cultures similar to the ideas Edward Said, a sociologist,
had listed as canopies for Orientalized living.
Anti-black racism theory is a school of thought majorly addressed towards black school
teachers and other professionals in Canada and the United States. Generally, it exemplifies a
movement imparting the black educators through segregation, discrimination, seclusion, social
oppression, and different demeanors. It is essentially part of the systemic racism in areas of
learning that targets the educators of the black race. Inherently, this theory correlates to the ideas

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raised by Alfonseca (2021). Examining racism and how it is taught to the students departs from
the right intentions when the program facilitators are victims of the circumstance. Alfonseca
(2021) describes that teaching racism through critical race theory in classrooms requires teachers
to appreciate historical milestones through racial movements. However, anti-black racism
directly impedes the propagation and realization of that principle, as illustrated by Lopez (2020).
Teaching equitable representation and inclusion in e