From now until Juneteenth 2020, I will share resources that have deeply challenged my thinking and guided my activism for racial justice. I will share my learning and my story, too.
When I was 16, I boarded a plane alongside my older sister Jean, for what felt like the first time. I had flown one other time, when I was 4, to South Korea to meet my mom’s entire side of the family for the first time. I remember very little of that trip other than being shocked that there were so many people that looked like us, picking cucumbers on my grandma’s farm, and using the outhouse, aka cold ceramic pot sitting right outside the sliding door in my grandma’s Hanok style home.
We were visiting our oldest sister Sue, who was attending college at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. Philadelphia was also where my parents first settled down upon immigrating to the United States, and also home to Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and The U.S.Constitution had been signed. The purpose of this trip was to visit our sister, and to get a sneak preview of college. “It’s like camp, but all the time,” Sue told us. For us Shon sisters, that meant freedom.
All three of us had spent our summers in Midlothian, Texas to attend Camp Hoblitzelle, all free of cost, thanks to the Salvation Army. By the time we each reached 15, we spent our entire summers working there. Not only was it a way for us to make new friends and earn money to buy clothes without distressing our parents, but it was an escape. It was an escape from those awful Barron’s SAT books; an escape from Gulf Coast humidity and hurricanes; an escape from financial upset; an escape from isolation. All three of us counted down the days of May each year for camp, which began in June. The month leading up to spring break for this trip felt exactly the same.
To calm our nerves, I shuffled mindlessly through a travel stack of SAT vocabulary cards that my dad compelled me to bring, and Jean shuffled through her case full of CDs she had either ordered from Columbia House (“first 12 cost a penny”), or the many she “burned” from Napster with her very Shon-style preferences: Silkk the Shocker, Hanson, Juvenile, Mariah Carey, and Selena.
When we finally arrived on campus, the sun was low. There were lots of people shuffling around, but I was too enamored by the English landscape style lawns and the Georgian and Federal style architecture to notice who was on campus. Never before had I seen spaces designed for people to actually live in community, across different buildings, streets, and blocks, and without cars.
Sue didn’t live in one of the old-style dormitories; she lived in one of the three “high rises”. I thought it was very fancy that she lived in an elevator building. When we finally got to her dorm on the Xth floor, I couldn’t believe how excited Sue’s roommates were to meet us. I also couldn’t believe what they looked like. Somehow, it seemed as if every shade of brown was represented within the first 10 minutes of college. The visibility of their, our, differences, and their warmth, put me at ease, instantly. I knew from the rare instances in my life that I had experienced this degree of diversity, like at camp, that this meant I could be myself.
Under more typical circumstances, for the entirety of my life, I was forced to stand out. In kindergarten, my classmates stretched their eyes out and asked me how I could possibly see. In first grade, all of the girls in gym class circled around me to chant “Chinese! Japanese! Dirty Knees! Look at these!” They stretched their eyes upward with “Chinese!,” downward with “Japanese!,” pointed at their knees, and then pointed at their chests with “Look at these!.” My teacher sent me to the counselor when I refused to put my head up upon returning to class. At the time, I didn’t know why I hurt. The counselor was supposed to help with that. But unfortunately, she responded with, “Well, aren’t you Chinese?”
Without a dominant culture, Sue’s roommates and I were able to get to know each other as individuals, while also better able to share, proudly, each of our unique cultures. I remember bonding with all of them over how all of our mothers reuse yogurt containers to store the funky foods of our different cultures. I also remember all of them speaking openly about the importance of applying to schools with need-based financial aid. Apparently, none of them would have been at UPenn without it.
But this was within the safety of Sue’s dorm room. When we walked out on campus, the student body was overwhelmingly white. A stark contrast from my mostly Black high school.
I was able to join Sue at a meeting led by one of her closest friends at the time, who was a Black man. I wasn’t sure what the meeting was for or what it was about, but looking back, I assume it was some sort of BIPOC identity group meeting. Sue’s friendships with BIPOC in an overwhelmingly white institution, in concert with the many African-American studies courses she enrolled in, transformed her. Even though she, we, grew up in a community with a strong Black culture, it took, at least for me personally, going to an institution with a white dominant culture to actively seek to understand Black culture, history, and community.
I was blessed to have a sister who shared her non-Eurocentric course learnings with me and my family. I remember the day my sister told my dad to stop using the word “oriental”. He was resistant, but also laughed in glee; his daughter was coming home with new perspectives and confidence to challenge norms.
Sue brought back so many books during every break that I couldn’t keep up. But at that point in my life, I hated reading. Sue urged us to read them, so of course, I was drawn to the thinner books. One of those thinner books happened to be one of the books that changed me forever: The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (by himself). After shocking myself reading the entire autobiography cover to cover within a few days, I remember feeling very ashamed, thinking, the people who were enslaved were brilliant. I was ashamed because it meant that I was racist. Today, I am not ashamed. I recognize that my learning was a product of an education system that taught me that Frederick Douglass, and all of the Black Americans forcefully enslaved for generations, were subhuman.
When I was able to read Douglass’s words directly, my world both fell apart and came together in the same moment. I learned that I had been deprived of the most powerful, critical perspective, and couldn’t wait to learn more. From Douglass’s oppressed standpoint, he understood very clearly what was wrong with the country, and the structures that protected white wealth and white freedom. He knew the critical importance of education, activism, and public speaking. He knew the power of an abolitionist movement in driving systemic change. This abolitionist movement lives strong today.
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave was the commencement of my ongoing journey to critical consciousness. The more I learned, the more courage I gained to challenge what is normal and dominant; to challenge my own internalized racism; to challenge systemic racism in my own workplace. I revisited the book to write this post, and found that all of his words in 1845 still apply today. This particular quote really stood out to me in this moment:
“I have observed this in my experience of slavery, — that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man.” ― Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
For the folks who know me personally as a public school teacher and activist, you know that I am a fierce advocate for school diversity and school integration. I had the honor of serving on the D15 Diversity Plan Working Group that developed the D15 Diversity Plan. Our recommendations were informed by the longstanding history of racially disparate outcomes of NYC students in our district and city, by the people we each represented, and by the ongoing feedback we sought and gathered at public workshops and hearings. The process, of course, was imperfect. But we did our best to discuss, debate, merge, and negotiate ideas into the policies that represented our collective lived experiences and legacies. The plan would have been an utter failure if the working group itself lacked racial, linguistic, cultural, ethnic, and economic diversity. The diversity of the team in developing policy was a critical precursor to advancing diversity in our schools. That diversity, among students and staff, I also believe is critical to advancing equity.
Earlier this week, in Black Teachers are Good For More Than Race Stuff, José Luis Vilson, my very good friend/master teacher/activist/#Educolor ED wrote:
“Teaching well is also teaching justly. So whenever teachers of color, especially Black teachers, come into a teaching context, we teach regardless and because our identity often put us there. In a week where America wants to know how we can build a way forward, a small but significant thing our country can do is listen and learn from Black math teachers who’ve developed racial and social justice as a core of their work.” — José Luis Vilson
I’ll share more of Jose’s work in future essays, but I share this quote because he makes visible a fundamental problem facing all systems in our country. The people in de jure leadership positions, the people who can change policies in a moment’s notice, are overwhelmingly white. In Understanding Whiteness, I note that the historic exploitation of power and violence, by white people, has been hidden from our view, especially to white people.
Without diverse representation, especially Black representation, to inform and drive policy change in education, in criminal justice, in healthcare, we all remain vulnerable to replicating and upholding racist systems. In every sector of our society, Black people are harmed most. How can we possibly understand how to fix these systems without Black representation?
Seemingly small but harmful policies sit in the blind spots of too many of our supervisors. But they are big, they are loud, and they are impossible to overlook, especially for those who are harmed most by it.
As an Asian-American, I am racially privileged in the NYC public education system. I represent a race that teachers, administrators, and students have visualized and internalized as viable in “rigorous” academic spaces; a race that has devastatingly played an active role in upholding racist meritocratic systems that continue to harm our Black and Brown students. But Frederick Douglass taught me to use my power to fight for those who are most marginalized; to always look to those most harmed by oppressive systems to learn; to lift up their voices.
I am fully committed to making those small and big harms that sit in the blind spots of my supervisors visible, while also seeking to be called out/in for my own blind spots from my Black brothers and sisters.
Diversity in books, in academic spaces, in perspective, has been my source of freedom. As a public school educator and activist working toward an anti-racist education system, I challenge us all to think about how to not only increase the diversity of our schools and classrooms, but to actively lift up the most oppressed voices among students and staff. We cannot empower our Black students if we do not model empowering Black voice within our own teaching staff, administration, our curricula, and our libraries.
With that being said, if you haven’t already been transformed by Frederick Douglass, please read The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (by himself). I’d be honored to discuss it with you.
