Becoming The Anti-Racism Teacher: A Process
In November of 2014, I was a Graduate Assistant who had 70+ college essays to grade by the end of the month. However, when a grand jury failed to indict Darren Wilson for murdering Mike Brown — even after his bogus claim that Mike Brown, an unarmed teenager, “hulked” through a barrage of bullets to attack Wilson, which evokes centuries of white, fear-based, bias about the “monstrous” nature of black people, I completely shut down for a week. I was numb, and my Master’s felt so pointless. Then December came and so with it the decision of no indictment for Eric Garner’s murder at the hands of Daniel Pantaleo and Justin Damico and I slept for almost two days straight. I was exhausted and extremely demoralized. I remember a conversation with my friend, who was working on her PhD, where we both questioned, “What’s the point of doing all this work for this degree if we can just get murdered for any reason while driving to the grocery store or wherever?” And we weren’t the only ones who felt like this, apparently. My friend and I both lived in a place where police was all around us, a college campus, and we both resented that we didn’t feel safe because we knew the police were more likely to see us as potential criminals. But you know who did make me feel better and safe? My professors and colleagues. We returned back to school after Winter break and every single professor I had did not hesitate to genuinely offer their office as a safe space to talk about Ferguson and “I Can’t Breathe”. I also noticed the professors who were quiet. My white classmates were not shy about expressing their outrage over Brown’s and Garner’s murder either, and I noticed the ones where expressive about it, and I really noticed the ones who were silent about it. You can guess that I put a little distance between my silent professors and classmates and drew closer the vocal ones who were supportive and willing to learn. I built lifelong friendships and relationships with my white friends and professors who sought to be allies during that time. And one who teaches can guess that their black students notice their silence and their support and it makes a hell of a big fucking difference. Students don’t come into the classroom as humans that live in a vacuum exclusive from the real world — quite the opposite — their vacuum is the real world, and it is the air they breathe.
Now, the public education system was literally created during the Industrial Age to mimic, well, factories. Students move through the grades like products on an assembly line to be molded into a citizen who fits into the societal status quo as educator, Ken Robinson expands on in this animated rendition of his TEDtalk. There are obvious problems with this factory model of education that entire dissertations have been devoted to, but the one problem not much scholarship has considered is how teachers facilitate a status quo of racism by not challenging it or by actively endorsing it. It is a teacher’s job to either change the world and/or equip their students to change the world. Neither of these objectives can be accomplished if teachers are not willing to be courageous enough to challenge the status quo — especially if the status quo is a racist one.
Racial Battle Fatigue is real and if one is not black, they don’t experience it directly, but I felt it and it effected my grades and the quality of my work, and I was a professional student who was used to juggling life and education. Imagine how our black students feel. And this is why teachers must evoke their courage and learn about systemic racism and how it effects black people and the ways they can support students who see their existence devalued in every facet of their life. Black students matter and diversity improves performance in business and certainly in schools, and one who teaches and understands that diversity matters, must realize that without strategies and efforts of inclusion, students of diverse populations will suffer.
So what are the solutions? There is an infinite amount, and there is no ONE solution, but there is a journey one can start. First, realize that becoming an anti-racism/oppression ally is not an identity; it’s a process that never ends and calls us to remain students so long as the oppressive system remains. To further clarify, anti-racism allyship asks us to be a student who is open to new ideas that may make us uncomfortable and learning new definitions to words or concepts to replace the ones of our social conditioning. For example, “reverse racism” is a concept that seems morally accurate, but systemically, it’s nowhere near as fatal as actual racism and to evoke the myth of “reverse racism” usually absolves a white person of any wrongdoing, which is historically typical.
- I also suggest Teaching Tolerance library of webinars that are super informative on a number of topics, e.g. gender, race, class.
- Define systemic racism and seek to understand how it works in public and private realms of everyone’s life.
- Listen to black people. Listen to understand not to reply. Listen to empathize.
- After you have done these things, take a moment to do some reflective writings where you capture your thoughts on race. Write a statement and then ask and “why”. Repeat. This is called meta-awareness and it aids insight to ourselves and our core beliefs. It’s uncomfortable because you might be exploring parts of your ideas that are inadvertently racist, and that’s okay because once you identify the problem, you can now seek ways to remedy it. We call that process “unpacking racism/sexism/homophobia”.
- If things are still not making sense to you or you have questions or you want to know how you can further your anti-racism work, get in touch with Being Black at School and we can offer one on one sessions and other resources.
