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Teachers Advised to ‘Get Real’ on Race

Everyone at Columbus High, the pseudonymously named school where researcher Mica Pollock taught in the 1990s, worried about the “hall wanderers”—students who roved the building, seemingly unimpeded, while their peers sat in class.

Yet, although a disproportionate number of the wanderers were African-American, educators at the highly diverse high school shied away from raising the race flag when the hallway problem came up in faculty meetings. The issue was left to fester.

That pattern of response—or nonresponse—is what Ms. Pollock came to describe in an award-winning 2004 book as “colormuteness.” In other words, teachers saw a problematic racial pattern but, in an effort to appear colorblind, refused to talk...