This one is dedicated specifically to my educators of color and conscience,
When I became a teacher, I inherited a tradition of Black teaching that spans this country’s history since time immemorial. Similar to Black people in any official government role, Black teaching came with the complications of the job. From the standards and curriculum to the policy mandates handed down to us from administrators from every government level. Like so many of those roles, we are truly agents of the state working at the behest of the tax-funding apparatus. Unlike the other professions, Black teaching has just enough of a wedge for us to do so subversively and, in many instances, outwardly activist.
Teaching with justice in mind doesn’t necessarily contradict the job itself, unlike, say, law enforcement.
Once I learned what it meant to teach through my identity at my center, not simply as an aside, I noted the difference in my expressions of said teacher. I, like many of you, found elements of my pedagogy and curriculum that needed remaking and, where possible, complete abandonment. Scripted lessons never made it past my classroom bulletin board. Math problems that didn’t make sense to my students became solutions steeped in the neighborhoods and resources they knew. I learned when I needed to put my foot down as an authority and when to teach kids how to teach themselves.
When they graduated, I would tell them that I taught them to teach themselves because I didn’t know who would oversee their learning next. The stakes feel so damn high.
Growing up on the Lower East Side, I knew the sound of gunshots at night the way my classmates in college knew the sounds of crickets and squirrels. The incidents that felt foreign to most had raised us. I bought chips after school in the same grocery store where Amadou Diallo worked. I knew countless cousins and classmates who had or saw cops physically assault in the name of stop-and-frisk. I knew classmates who excused the behavior by highlighting their good and honest law enforcement family members. Some of my classmates became those police officers. Some of them work in the same neighborhood I live in now.
None of the personal anecdotes excuse the systemic, historical, and societal decimation of Black people in America. What’s more, when America refused outrage about this original sin, America gave permission to sustain this oppression to every other group that it did not deem normal. That’s what we mean by “white supremacy” in function and form.
We know outrage. What I’ve learned about our histories is that outrage is as germane to our work as pride and systemic underfunding. We whose consistent rage led them directly to teaching our most vulnerable, our Blackest, most underserved use that rage to point to justice when systems fail. Many of us may differ on the processes of schooling, but education is paramount to the elevation of all humanity, even more so when our country continues to deny us said humanity.
Educators of color and conscience have been ready for this moment when America has faced any reckoning. This moment hurts, as have so many times whether they prompted protests in the streets, hashtags, vigils, or funerals. The word “peaceful” has been bastardized when our laws and economic policies continue to ostracize 99.9% of our nation’s citizens and our government’s representatives have proven complicit in that robbery. The aggressions multiply when it feels like we’re alone in the professional development meeting where the facilitator let out one slight about us, then another.
The times when we’ve been told to mourn the victims of the Holocaust, but pretend that the Transatlantic Slave Trade was so very long ago that we ought to forget how enslaved people built this country. The complacency over children in cages, citizens behind bars, workers under breathtaking poverty, fascists in the White House. The history books that, at once, dilute this country’s theft of land and murder of its indigenous people, and lionize the bombing of lands from Puerto Rico to the Middle East to Hiroshima, and so many places in between and around. The writings that keep suggesting the pursuit of liberty and justice for all in our pledges while our students and communities have rarely seen our country hold itself to said ideals.
We called that in and out without apology and with full hearts. We lost colleagues, privileges, titles, positions, and maybe some sleep over it. But we didn’t lose our integrity for this. Bless us.
Along the way, we’re sure to have differences with many of our colleagues. We’d be right to be indignant with our teaching colleagues who voted for Trump because “we gotta give him a chance.” We’re also right to get annoyed at our colleagues who only now want to explore anti-Blackness and other forms of oppression after you’ve been banging on the drum since you came into this. You’re equally right to point to injustice around the world in other places where systemic oppression and global destabilization makes our work as educators that much more difficult.
I also want to make sure we hold space for justice and vigilance in the self. Whether you’re into the healing talk or not, we need to believe in ourselves and our work. Full stop. We mend our hearts constantly in community with one another. We lift our souls through song, dance, and art. We wipe our chins, dust off our clothes, and organize in our spheres. We know that these atrocities shouldn’t have happened. We recognize that our humanity shouldn’t have to depend on the eradication of the elements that ostracize us.
We are here. We were built for this. Let our struggle in the name of our kids and our predecessors fortify the joy entrenched in our bones. Let the love we have for this energy coat the consistent work and words we do. Let us perpetuate the understanding that we are socially connected through many dimensions even as we’re physically distant. As we mourn over the names, places, and events of these tragedies, we never have to tell America “We told you so.”
America already knew. It’s a lesson it needs to keep learning.
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