Each night I count the stars, and each night I get the same number. And when they will not come out to be counted, I count the holes they leave. — Amiri Baraka
NEWARK — Like similar major American cities of the sixties, densely populated by Black and Brown bodies, Newark experienced an all-to-common fate of the times — pocked by riots and decay — as flocks of white residents fled to the suburbs. Many of those other cities, especially Newark’s next-door neighbor across the Hudson River — bounced back mightily as metropolis after metropolis embraced a new cosmopolitanism. But Newark has always moved forward with a profound and well-deserved chip on its shoulder, slowly embracing progress lest it come at the cost of culture.
There’s a huge newer school complex in the heart of Newark — a welcome signal that the most authentic instrument of change is a rethinking and revitalization of education. If you ask me, it was the perfect place for me to land for my first COVID vaccine appointment. Despite its edgy reputation, everyone I encountered — from the parking lot attendants, to the Essex County Police, to the dozen or so medical professionals — were incredibly kind, patient, and attentive. The atmosphere was warm, welcoming and super organized. Smooth R&B was playing from some unobserved sound system, and there was an obvious and purposeful intent to create comfort out of a stressful situation. Once you break through Newark’s tough exterior, it’s hard not to fall in love with the city.
But that tough exterior is there for a reason. It’s been forged over decades of distrust. Of law enforcement, of politicians, of the medical community. Of the system itself. So I shouldn’t have been surprised — even though I was — that this beautiful facility, set up to accommodate scores of people per hour, was practically empty.
It’s difficult to find a hardship of the pandemic that has not fallen disproportionately on Black and Latinx families. As so many school districts have deftly found ways to move to remote learning, communities of color — already the victims of a tremendous racial gap in education — were quickly falling even more behind without access to ready wi-fi. For all the applause given to “front-line workers” at the beginning of the outbreak, the tragic realization that these essential employees were predominantly African-American and Hispanic only came to light when these populations began getting sick and dying in disproportionate numbers. As Yarnya Serkez of the New York Times observed:
In America, your experience of lockdown — and of the pandemic as a whole — depended not on luck or chance or fortune. It was instead largely foretold by something far more prosaic: the position you held on the socioeconomic spectrum, by your class, race and gender.
After all this, should I have truly been surprised that an intentionally welcoming experience had no chance overcoming the anxiety that the people of Newark must feel? Distrust is so pervasive in communities like Newark that studies show people have deeper respect for used car salesmen than they do for politicians and the mainstream media. These circles of distrust proliferate and interact. Teachers don’t trust administrators. Parents don’t trust teachers. Politicians don’t trust scientists. And, as a result, we find that high percentages of women, front-line medical workers, firefighters and — yes — Black people are routinely turning down the opportunity to be vaccinated.
Sociologists have chronicled the long decline in social capital, particularly in our urban communities. Are experiencing a pandemic of distrust? A pandemic destined to erode our resilience as a community at a time when community is so needed?
Trust is at the core of our design and practice in Big Picture Learning schools. But the process for reaching it is a long slog. The students and families we serve have usually not had success in their previous education experiences and enter with low levels of trust in schools and schooling. We begin the act of earning their trust through caring and competence on day one. In my recent conversation with Nikole Hannah-Jones, acclaimed investigative journalist and creator of The 1619 Project, she remarked by saying that schools begin by helping students to trust themselves, thereby establishing a foundation for building trusting relationships with one another. Students and families need to believe that their schools are committed to and capable of guiding them on their learning journeys, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary in other places.
Our years of working with young people and their families have taught us a few things. First, trusting relationships require mutual vulnerability. Students must feel safe in order to build meaningful relationships with their teachers and peers. To earn their trust, we must first be willing to give them ours.
Second, trust usually requires evidence beyond words — intentional actions that demonstrate caring, competence and commitment. Good intentions are essential but so also is our ability to actually make a difference for students and their families. Intentionality and deliberateness are the keys to this trust. We’ve been fortunate to witness that the building of this trust in our schools only takes years, whereas fundamentally changing the structures and systems that perpetuate injustice — as we’ve seen — can take decades.
Which, again, is why I shouldn’t have been surprised to find myself in a beautiful, yet empty, vaccination center in the middle of Newark.
But let me be hopeful. There are thousands of other reasons why it might have been empty. Perhaps the beautiful weather that day — the first warm day in what seemed like a thousand years — gave people a reason to embrace the sun. Maybe there was a traffic pattern keeping people away that I’d somehow avoided on my own. Maybe there was another event happening in Newark that day bringing the community together that I was simply unaware of as I’m not a resident. I have to believe in those possibilities. I have to trust that we’ll get through this together.
I’ll be returning soon for my second dose. I look forward to quiet R&B playing from somewhere in the rafters. I look forward to the potential of seeing some of the same smiling faces among those kindly guiding me through the process. I look forward to walking through this world again with a feeling of safety. We must all choose to be the ones to initiate trust, in the hopes that in so doing we can serve as a model for those who need one small reason for why they should dip their toe back in the system.
We will get there. Trust me.
