Created Equal: Beverly Daniel Tatum On Her Book, “Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?”
“If everyone looks like you in your neighborhood that’s who your friends are going to be,” says Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum on the role structural racism plays in our relationships.
Season Three of the podcast Created Equal explores “Writers on Race: From Ralph Ellison to Colson Whitehead,” and features some of the most important voices in literature as well as the national conversation on racial inequities.
The conversations were conducted on the radio program Detroit Today in the WDET studios on Wayne State University’s campus throughout the pandemic and civil unrest of 2020. Each episode consists of a conversation between Henderson and one writer exploring the role of their work in the conversation about race in America.
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Episode 13 Guest: Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum
Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum is a psychologist and the best-selling author of the book “Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria?”
Discussion Points:
On the genesis of housing segregation and how it impacts young friendships:
“I think we should start with the fact that most of us are living in segregated communities and that is not by accident. We know that one of the patterns of racism, one of the ways racism has manifested itself over time, has been the way our neighborhoods are structured. It’s not a surprise that so many white families are living in largely white communities.”
“If we go back to the ’40s and ’50s when a lot of suburban communities were being created … they were structured as all-white communities. That segregation has persisted, and we know school segregation has persisted. So, kids make friends with kids they have contact with.”
On the importance of cross-group connections in the classroom:
“When you create opportunities for kids to work together … let’s say you have a racially mixed class and you want kids to work together on a project and you bring the kids together and ask them to work on a shared goal where they are being encouraged to do that by the teacher, the authority figure in the classroom, and they are being treated as though they are all equal to one another in this project, that kind of opportunity fosters positive cross-group connections. The classrooms where kids have been encouraged to engage with each other, get to know each other, have some commonalities … those kids are more likely to spend time together outside of the classroom.”
Created Equal Season 3 is supported by the Michigan School of Psychology
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