Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race

First published in 1997, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?: And Other Conversations About Race addresses race and racism in the United States from a psychologist’s perspective. Beverly Daniel Tatum is a clinical psychologist with extensive experience in researching racial identity development. We need to learn how to have productive dialogues about race and racism, and to do that we need to understand how our racial identities form and how they affect our lives.

This guide is based on the updated edition released in 2017, which includes updates to the text as well as a new Prologue and Epilogue covering developments over the 20 years since the book was originally published. This guide also mirrors many of Tatum’s choices with regard to language, including the capitalization of all racial and ethnic terms (including “White” and “Black”), the preference for the gender-neutral term “Latinx” over “Latino” or “Latina,” and the variable use of terms referring to the same group (e.g. “Native American,” “Native people,” and “American Indian”).

The Prologue surveys how racism continues to be a pervasive problem in the United States. People of color are targeted by police brutality, mass incarceration, voter suppression, segregation, microaggressions, hate crimes, and other injustices. After defining racism and introducing the basics of identity development in Part 1, Tatum explores the process of racial identity development for Black Americans throughout their childhood, adolescence, and adulthood in Part 2. Their encounters with racism lead to an exploration of what it means to be Black. They are surrounded by cultural images and messages that devalue Blackness, but the process of finding a positive racial identity can be aided by having the support of same-race peers.

Many White Americans don’t think much about their own racial group, which is the definition of White privilege. They may see themselves as racially tolerant or even “color-blind” but fail to recognize the existence of pervasive racial inequalities. If they do begin to notice racism, however, this may trigger an exploration of what it means to be White, which begins the process of active participation in an anti-racist society. In Part 3, Tatum describes how this process often leads to feelings of guilt and isolation, but that White people can also attain a positive racial identity rooted in antiracism. Part 4 surveys some of the experiences of other people of color. Latinxs may struggle with the devaluation of their Spanish language, Native people may struggle with the demeaning caricatures of their group, Asian Pacific Americans may struggle with being stereotyped as the “model minority” who don’t experience racism, and people of Middle Eastern and North African heritage may struggle with Islamophobia and being stereotyped as “terrorists.” Multiracial individuals may find identities imposed upon them based on their appearance, while children of color in White families may grow up feeling like perpetual outsiders. All of these groups consist of people with an incredibly wide range of backgrounds and experiences, but they are all affected by racism.

In the final section of the book, Tatum emphasizes the importance of breaking silence regarding racism. By providing readers with an understanding of racial identity development, Tatum hopes that educators will have a better understanding of how to teach in their racially mixed classrooms, parents will have a better understanding of how to talk with their children about race and racism, and everyone will have a better understanding of their own daily lives and interactions. We need to be able to talk about racism in order to change it. This book is intended to help readers have the dialogues that are needed to bring about that change.