Kaitlyn Muldez
Aug 8, 2017 · 2 min read

Reconciliation and healing I would agree are definitely needed, and should be the goal within this topic.

My first year teaching opened my eyes in a different way than I had imagined when it came to race. Both of my classes were diverse. I knew how important it was to make every single individual feel heard and noticed. But I was so surprised to see a type of judgment that was placed on me specifically by my black high schoolers (these were actually the relationships I ended up investing in the most). They did not carry this same judgment with their black teacher across the hall. All year I really had to win a couple students over to trust that I am out for their best interest. But that took giving them special attention and having those difficult classroom conversations. They had assumed because I was a white female teacher with a shiny wedding ring who had graduated college, that that meant I could not possibly understand them, their lives, their struggles, their everything. So I felt like I had to work from the bottom up. When I brought in a polaroid picture of my husband, whom you know is dark-skinned, the WHOLE class about flipped. Literally. People were running up to my desk grabbing onto the picture because they couldn’t believe I didn’t marry the white guy they had in mind. In fact one of my students even said, “Hey, he kind of looks like so-and-so in our class!”. From that day forward something shifted and they began to think I wasn’t so closed-minded.

But that broke my heart at the same time. That it had to take this picture for them to start believing that I don’t see skin color as a dividing line between us.

The reason I mention this is because I realized how wounded some of these kids are, and also that they learned these things from their parents, often quoting them. I started to see first-hand how generationally knotted this can get. But it is beautiful when you finally connect and we can laugh together.

I think our education system has so much power to directly influence this matter…and I hope it will be for the better.

    Kaitlyn Muldez

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    It is only for ourselves to find out.