Can We Say the N-word? Exploring Psychological Safety During Race Talk

Williams · Power & Equity, Voice & Silence, Culture & Context · Research in Human Development · 2016 · Paywalled

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The paper that takes psychological safety into the racialised classroom, and the earlier work of one of the authors of the Black feminist critique already on this map. Williams, Woodson and Wallace analyse video from two ninth-grade English classrooms in the Measures of Effective Teaching dataset, one working through To Kill a Mockingbird and one discussing racial profiling, looking for what they call provocative moments, at which the opportunities for student engagement in race talk shift. Race talk they define as inherently risky dialogue about race and racism, and their working definition of psychological safety is worth carrying for its precision, that it is not the absence of discomfort or potential harm but a sense of comfort that one has the necessary supports to engage the potential consequences of risk. Three teacher moves organise the analysis. Attunement, being in the moment with students, genuinely invested in understanding their perspectives and responsive to their expressed needs. Authenticity, selective transparency in intentionally chosen moments, the teacher positioned as a fellow thinker willing to be vulnerable. And power sharing, awareness of the teacher's own power and of each student's, redistributed as needed so that a range of voices is heard and various ways of thinking validated. The strength of the paper is that it reads failures as carefully as successes. A teacher who ascribes shame to a character her student had not described that way, and who corrects her own phrase from opposite colour to different colour without saying why she is doing it, masks her authenticity and forecloses the discussion the correction should have opened. A student offering an alternative reading of the case against Tom Robinson is cut off in favour of the answer the teacher has already decided is the right one, and the analysis names this as a missed opportunity for power sharing rather than as routine classroom management. That reframing is the contribution: the ordinary business of steering a lesson toward the correct answer is also a distribution of who gets to speak. Its place here is as a bridge between the psychological safety literature and critical race scholarship, and as the argument that a general account of interpersonal risk is incomplete without an account of whose identity is at risk in the particular conversation. The authors are explicit that the psychological frameworks they inherit fail to treat classrooms as racialised spaces, which leaves the identity-linked risks facing students of colour undertheorised. The limits are considerable and stated. Two classrooms, one led by a teacher the paper identifies as White, analysed from video with no access to what any participant thought: the study infers psychological safety from observable moves rather than measuring it, and the authors say directly that they could not explore how students interpreted the moments described. It is exploratory and hypothesis-generating, and is best read as a vocabulary for looking rather than as evidence about effects.

Williams, J.D., Woodson, A.N. and Wallace, T.L. (2016) 'Can we say the N-word? Exploring psychological safety during race talk', Research in Human Development, 13(1), pp. 15-31.

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