Why I support the Black Lives Matter Movement

Earlier today, one of my former high school students, whom I haven’t seen in person since he graduated in the year 2000, asked me to share my thoughts on the Black Lives Matter movement in a Facebook comment he made on another former student’s post.

As a Latino male, he said he was struggling with what appeared to him to be a singular focus on “white racism” in the BLM rhetoric. He asked me to share my thoughts, explaining that his request was sincere, and that he wanted to better understand the situation.

I thought about his question for hours and finally came up with some thoughts to share with him, based on my years as a high school teacher and now a faculty member at a prominent university.

I have to admit that when I first started seeing the Black Lives Matter nomenclature, metaphorically speaking, it raised my hackles a bit… My initial reaction was to push back with “Hey, I agree that Black lives matter, but I also believe that brown lives matter, and white lives matter, and the lives of people in general matter.”

The more I listened, though, to the underlying message the more it began to resonate for me.

Now, when I hear “Black Lives Matter”, I reflect on the many ways in which the societal structures in the United States suggest the contrary.

I think about the many empirical articles I’ve read documenting the disproportionate representation of people of color in prison for crimes for which White people more often receive lesser penalties. I remember the articles about disproportionate discipline policies in K-12 schools which result in students of color being more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers, even when the transgressions are the same.

How did we get here? How can we find a better path forward?

I think part of the underlying issue is the different treatment/expectations our society has for non-white people (again, this is a general statement; we could easily find exceptions).

In many school settings, for example, there are much lower expectations for students from poor backgrounds and for students from non-white families and for students who speak with an accent (these are not necessarily the same).

I taught public high school for twelve years. Four of those years I taught at an incredible place — Anzar High School in the Aromas-San Juan School District in Central California. According to ed-data.org, roughly 60% of Anzar students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch (commonly used to document the proportion of students from “low-income” backgrounds) and about 42% identify as Hispanic (ed-data.org). Despite these demographics, one of the things that I most appreciated about Anzar was the explicit and very conscious decision educators there made to have high expectations for ALL students.

To graduate, we required all students to complete the “UC A-F Requirements for graduation”. In other words, the courses required to earn a high school diploma from Anzar were the same courses required by the University of California system for admission. In most schools I’ve known, including three others at which I’ve worked, students from non-white backgrounds, those whose family economic situation put them in the lower bracket of wage earners, recent immigrants, and those whose parents had not graduated from college are all-too-often scheduled into “lower tracks” — low-level math courses, minimal science classes, and basic English. If you look at the demographic composition of the “honors” track classes at most (not all) U.S. schools and compare them to the demographic composition of the school as a whole, you will often find that there is a mis-match.

In addition to the U.C. A-F requirements for courses, Anzar required all students to successfully complete projects very similar to the work graduate students complete for their Masters Theses. These projects, referred to as Graduation Exhibitions, required students to demonstrate their mastery of content and ability to think critically. Anzar students chose topics to researched in social studies, language arts, mathematics, and science. They then wrote in-depth reports about their findings and presented on their topics before a panel of community members. In order to pass their Graduation Exhibitions, Anzar students had to be able to provide satisfactory responses to their panels. In the years I worked at Anzar, I was astounded at the quality and depth of the work our high school students produced.

Thinking back on it now, I am struck by the importance of the fact that Graduation Exhibitions were not something that only “honors graduates” were expected to do. They were the high bar over which all our graduates were expected to leap. And students consistently rose to the occasion remarkably well.

So… what does this have to do with Black Lives Matter?

When a society values something, it treats it with respect. Part of treating a group of people with respect is having high expectations for them.

In the U.S. society, all too often (not always), people from non-white backgrounds (as well as the other groupings I’ve mentioned before… low-income, immigrant, first-generation college or high school attendees/graduates) are not expected to do as well academically as their white peers (particularly their white peers who come from higher-income backgrounds or whose parents graduated from college). These low expectations permeate school systems from the earliest grades and set students up for bleaker futures than they might otherwise attain.

And, it’s often not very noticeable because of the way the U.S. society tends to segregate our neighborhoods — not with official “you have to live here” regulations (anymore) but by the choices people make to live next to their friends and family members (who often — not always — look like them/ have similar backgrounds), as well as by more subtle things such as real estate agents showing people places they think they are more likely to find appealing / be comfortable living. Much of this is done without ill-will; it’s done because people are often not aware of the implicit biases that underlie the decisions they make / the things they do.

Now, let’s move away from education for a while. Let’s think about how laws are differentially enforced, sometimes, by law enforcement officers and the court system.

Statistically speaking, when a Latinx or Black male is driving with expired plates or a broken tail light, he is more likely to be pulled over than I am when I am doing the same thing. I’m female and often pass as white, particularly when I’m sitting in my car, even though we’re Native American on my mother’s side (I’m a registered member of the Delaware nation), and our paternal grandmother came from Mexico).

What’s more, even if I’m pulled over, I’m much more likely to be told that I need to fix my taillight or make sure my registration is current than a Latinx or Black male would be. He would be more likely to receive a ticket — and in some parts of the country, if the officer pulling him over was feeling the desire to exert his power and exact a little revenge for some perceived wrong — he might experience a lot worse than a ticket.

The justice system has its own set of “wrongs”. If you research incarceration rates and sentencing outcomes for people of different races (as well as for males compared to females), you will see that for people found guilty of the same crime, the sentences differ substantially, with people of color disproportionally receiving much harsher sentences, and white people disproportionately being given lighter sentences. That doesn’t mean that white people are not found guilty of crimes, nor that white people are not incarcerated — or even given the death penalty, nor that people of color are not occasionally given “the benefit of the doubt” when they are sentenced, but if you look at national trends, you’ll see some really disheartening patterns.

And… (and this is the part that felt like a kick in the gut when I realized it for the first time), the likelihood of being charged with a crime, sentenced to incarceration, etc. goes up substantially if the crime is committed by a person of color against a white person.

This relates to the whole “lower expectations” idea. If a black person kills another black person, or a Latino kills another Latino — or a black person — the investigation related to solving the crime is often less rigorous than it would be if the crime were committed against a white person by a person of color.

A person of color killing a white person — usually rigorously investigated and persecuted.

A white person killing a white person — usually rigorously investigated and persecuted (less so if the person killed is from a low-income background)

A person of color killing a person of color — investigation and persecution often depend on the region / composition of the police force and justice system in an area, but often these are not taken as seriously as either of the first two scenarios.

So… “Black Lives Matter” is a call for justice.

It’s a call for higher expectations for Black children. It’s a call for better school systems in areas with high proportions of black residents.

It’s a call for more equitable policing — for investigating and taking seriously black-on-black crimes as well as not assuming that a Black person is guilty of a crime just because he “fits the description” (“I didn’t see him very well, officer, but he was black.”).

It’s a call for more equitable sentencing and incarceration.

It’s a call to examine the implicit bias — and, yes, sometimes explicit racism — that creates unequal and inequitable life experiences and opportunities for people based on the color of their skin (and the income level of their families).

For me, when I hear “Black Lives Matter” now, I take a deep breath, and I sit with it for a moment. I reflect on my belief that, yes, Black lives DO matter. And my belief that brown lives matter. And White lives matter.

And I understand that when someone is hurting and trying to call attention to the unequal playing field in which we are living, my support for equal rights, for civil rights, for hoping for a better life for all people, means that the most respectful response in that situation is to agree: Yes, Black lives matter.

It is not to point out that other people’s lives matter as well.

At the same time, I further my commitment to doing what I can to stand for people who do not have the privileges I have (I grew up with a father who has two graduate degrees from Stanford University — the first person in his family to go to college; I, myself, not only have a Bachelor’s degree, but a Ph.D., and that doctoral degree opens up many more doors for me than I’d ever anticipated when I enrolled in graduate school).

I also realize that many people do not share this way of thinking about the BLM movement. There are racist people from all backgrounds, and being racist is certainly not a trait that only white people can claim.

Prejudice, bias, unequal expectations and unequal treatment … these are things that all people experience in varying degrees and at different times/ in different places.

In the end, finding ways to listen to one another, to look beyond the surface and instead find ways to connect, ways to communicate, may be our best hope.