Growing the Work of Being Black at School
You don’t have to look far to see that the school system is not fair to Black children. The research and data on this is overwhelming.
I quit my job 3 weeks ago to launch Being Black at School and was overwhelmed by all of the support I have received. I started sharing my stories, and people started listening. I get a dozen emails everyday that say the exact same thing, “What can I DO?” These are people who are experts in their field that somehow overlap with the work of BBAS. They are professionals and colleagues working for non-profits, writing curriculum and engaging in course design at the college level, and all around anti-racism and implicit bias work. I’m forming a dream team here.
We see the inequality. We see that schools are not a safe place for Black children, but the problem is enormous in scope on a national level. There are layers of complicated issues that laid the foundation for problems we are facing today mostly pointing back to Brown v Board of Education and how that harmed the Black school community prior to 1954. We are a community of parents and educators who are staring up at this big huge problem with actionable items to break through to dismantle racism and bias in the classroom.
To understand where we got today, you have to look at the history of Brown v Board.
Brown v Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark 1954 case in which the Supreme Court established that separate public schools for Black and white students were unconstitutional. It was considered a major victory of the Civil Rights era but since many white schools were opposed the law, they took their time in implementation to desegregate schools.
Here is a piece from Janel George of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund chronicling the 61 years after the Supreme Court invalidated legally-sanctioned apartheid in the public schools.
That brings us to issues of discipline, consequences, and academics in schools today. The data on that is clear: Black students are punished disproportionately to their white peers. In many cases this is 3 times as much for similar offenses in the classroom. I saw this firsthand in my role as an administrator as Black students were often sent to the office to receive punitive punishments that white students are allowed to get away with in the classroom.
These are delicate and concrete issues. So, how do we fix this? What do we DO?
We educate. We educate ourselves and we train the educators in the system. We get trained in the implicit bias all educators bring to the classroom, we focus on student-teacher relationships, and we focus on education equity. We investigate the policies that are allowing these things to happen and we inspect our practices that need work. We listen to the marginalized voices of students who are punished more often.
We don’t simply admire the data we have and refuse to make an actionable change.
My dream is that every parent and educator would have the knowledge base they needed to provide Black children with the support they need. In many schools, this is a small number of educators who are working towards a huge problem that must be tackled by everyone.
Every school in the country should REQUIRE educators to have diversity training that emphasizes implicit bias and anti-racism pedagogy. To learn about the students they are serving. Every parent in the country should understand what black kids face in the school system, and they should have the tools they need to fix these inequalities.
If I could dream big and magically fix the entire system, that’s what I would do based on my experience in the system for over 2 decades.
This is my dream and it all starts with the book I’m writing.
This book will set the foundation for this movement. It will be distributed to parents and educators around the country. This movement will bring parents together so they can have the difficult yet mediated conversations with their schools, and we can demand change for the Black students they serve with this work.
I invite you to join me in this work either by signing up for our newsletters or joining me by donating to the crowdfunding campaign that will make this possible.
We have some choices here. We can collect all the data and research possible and sit with it. We can simply toil over it and ask ourselves “Why is this?” Or we can implement this into our system to work toward dismantling the racist systems on which our educational history is built. Personally, if we can dismantle something, it was mantled in the first place.
Help me tear it down.
