…half as much.
“Don’t ask questions if you’re not ready for the answer.”
I often interrupt my nine and eleven-year old daughters with this saying as they ask me about how clean the dishes are, or what I think about the sugary concoction they’ve put before me. My wife might raise her eyebrows at my curtness, but I credit it to my immigrant upbringing. My mom made Indian breakfast from scratch every morning before heading off to an eight-hour shift as a registered hospice nurse. I’m lucky if I can get my kids up and dressed before breakfast closes on the weekends. We complain at the idea of Saturday classes; she worked nights and weekends at a second nursing home to help pay the mortgage. I think my retort pays homage to my parents’ lack of bandwidth in applauding mediocre attempts. Now, I find myself similarly short on patience.
In the fallout of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, what has changed as we approach November? In response to Black@ movements this summer, what have we seen besides well-crafted statements from our institutions? But such questions are the ones that I believe our schools have been avoiding for many years now. I don’t blame those who hold out on the hope that incremental changes will build up over time, somehow snowballing to deal a crushing blow to the daily slights that BIPOC members of the community manage continuously. An eternal optimist, I hope that myself.
It is why to this day, I am relieved that my daughters tromp around campus so happily and imagine themselves as students here. It is why I am proud of the speakers we’ve brought in, the tutoring programs we’ve institutionalized, and how my colleagues have worked to learn how to pronounce every student’s name. It is why I work to recruit other teachers of color, and to create systemic opportunities that will be engrained into the culture of my school.
But in this moment, with the election looming, I am feeling disillusioned. I was on duty that night in 2016 as fifty-plus students packed around the wood-paneled common room, with factions cheering and rebuking every state result. I let the students stay up past lights to watch the numbers come in. When the reality finally dawned on me, I shunted them to their halls and went home to be with my family.
As we all know, four years have passed: three regular ones and one eternal. There was that time when the local news interviewed a handful of us after the Muslim ban. We have heard speakers on topics such as accumulated impact and belonging. But how has life changed for our students in the day-to-day?
I’ve been watching election prep webinars and only feel more nauseated. They are a symptom of the difficulty around equity work. They remind us of all the polarizing language that is being spewed, how we have to cater to a loose sense of false equivalency, but without giving us the language to combat the disorientation of seeing a MAGA hat forgotten on our classroom floor. They are miles away from helping us process our complicit role in an ever widening the achievement gap, one our student enrollments are subsidizing through this pandemic.
As a math teacher, I bore even myself with my repetitive instructions to students: “How do you study for test? No, not ‘reviewing your notes.’ No, stop watching videos. Do problems!” In recent years, I happily interleave the exact same question I asked students from one class prior, trying to reinforce the idea that watching a teacher do math is not “knowing” how to do math. Few teachers would disagree: our students don’t learn to do the work of the discipline by watching us do it.
Around conversations about equity, however, most of us (myself included) have plateaued at watching clips and joining book clubs. We can be inspired by the merits of Kendi’s words, but we are less likely to use his lens of anti-racism to reflect on our own policies.
Maybe we aren’t there yet: many of our schools have to yet familiarize ourselves with the problems before we can even begin to dive in more deeply. I know my colleagues — we saw their dedication in their coming to meet us in the evening of our day-long interview, after a full day and a seated meal. It’s what inspired my partner and me to pick this school. Sure, the housing and the city are wonderful, but the faculty are the reason we stay. These are the life-long learners that our school trumpets on every brochure, and I do not disagree. Seventy percent of us have advanced degrees. Yet when was the last time our school led us in a vulnerable conversation? Do we even know what vulnerable looks like in a professional setting? Honestly, I am not sure, but I am sure there are norms and protocols that we can use in the next four years to get better at having these interactions. Instead, we avoid them altogether.
This past weekend, a colleague asked, “What does allyship look like for a white faculty member?” He was trying to navigate the muddy gray of allowing people of color guide the conversation but not leaving it to us to do the heavy lifting. Although I hate having these kinds of conversations over email, I spent forty-five minutes of prime morning time to respond. I appreciated his authenticity, but more than that, I wanted to document the moment.
I wanted to document that this summer’s DEI report was never circulated among senior administration. I wanted to document the exhaustion of the assumption that I would organize a socially distant Diversity Day that was not included in my contract. I wanted to document that this was the fifth hour of this particular week that I spent in conversations about DEI. I wanted to document my disillusionment.
Despite my careful attention, my response missed the mark. In retrospect, I wonder if I should have responded with the question I ask my children: “Are you sure you’re ready for the answer?”
For teachers and administrators of color, traversing these well-manicured lawns has always meant that we have had to not only demonstrate expertise, we have also had to bite our tongue when parents asked to better understand “teaching modalities,” questioning our work, our craft, our identity. We have accumulated advanced degrees and presented at national conferences, only to be reminded to wear a blazer in our own halls. Our expertise is discounted, and our missteps magnified. And we brush it off, because we see the bigger picture. We are trained to compartmentalize each of those acts as an isolated incident. This is the game to which the BIPOC members of our elite communities have steeled themselves. We are used to working twice as hard to earn half as much — half as much recognition, half as much legitimacy, half as much support.
But how will my white colleagues respond if after a summer of reading, attending socially distant protests, and listening to the “Nice White Parents” podcast, they are not praised for their actions but only remembered for mistakenly calling a student of color by another student of color’s name in a moment of exhaustion? How will they respond if they realize that we as a school notice our students of color in a public setting and are drawn to call them out first for not wearing a mask or having a shirt untucked or being ‘loud’? How will they respond as they come to understand: the actual work is not a checklist of books or summer conferences to attend. The only path is a long-term individual investment — one that might only impact, in the end, a small handful of students and colleagues.
The desire to quickly level-up and become a better ally reminds me of a visit from my mom, when my oldest daughter was about two. Within a day of her arrival, I found my toddler at the kitchen table eating chicken curry by fistfuls. After twenty-five years of avoiding the complexities of my mom’s recipes, I realized it would be on me to make this food for my daughter. So, I asked for measurements and a list of ingredients. “It’s all to your taste,” she said. I insisted on chicken breast that could cubed easily; she reminded me that bone-in chicken soaks in the spices and dissipates the flavor for days. All of her recipes come from years of practice, generations of traditions, and hours in any individual session. There are no measuring spoons. She can give you a grocery list and an order of tasks, but years of tinkering is what makes the food delicious, and eventually fun to make. Until then, it’s work.
Striving for equity and justice is similar. The desire to provide a solution is honorable, but it is misplaced. This work will take time, it will be messy, and our first results will be a terrible facsimile of what we hope to achieve.
How will our white colleagues negotiate the reality that not only is there no checklist nor satisfying conclusion, they come into diversity work at a deficit model simply because of the color of their skin? Their expertise will be discounted, their missteps magnified. What does white allyship look like? Like working twice as hard, for twice as long, for half as much gain. Then coming in and doing it again.
Over the past seventeen years I have been instructed that we are not supposed to just name problems, but also solutions. The idea that BIPOC members are expected to solve the issues is problematic in its own right. I come with my attempt at systemic solutions, nonetheless.
In the words of Bryan Stevenson, we have to make our work proximate. In this context, my definition of proximate means sustained engagement with diversity issues and how they inform our pedagogy and culture. In its ideal, we need to know the diverse community immediately outside our bubbles. We need DEI directors who have time to meet with every one of our faculty members, to process last month’s reading and this month’s curriculum, and to look ahead together to engage with the work next month. We need to look at book clubs through the lens of equity and vulnerability in order to push them into the realm of identity work. Trained facilitation such as SEED groups in affinity and anti-racist spaces allow us to engage with our colleagues and process issues at intersectionalities closest to our own.
Finally, we can then take on frank and open debates as a whole faculty about the insidious ways these issues show up in our schools: from the mundane, such as how to proceed with conversations regarding the enforcement of dress code, to the deep and authentic outcomes for every student of color that enters our lives.
All the while I would recommend that we make sure that when we publicly correct the actions of our students of color, we make sure to cue to our intentions by ensuring none of their white peers are making the same infractions. Implicit bias training reminds us that we will notice “the other” in large spaces. If we want to remove the generational prejudices passed on to us, we can begin by noticing: Are our brown and black students at risk of being targeted by our faculty? The reality of stereotype threat requires each of us to actively inventory our interactions while enforcing the rules outlined in our handbooks.
Over past seventeen years of my career, I’ve been asked to write articles that haven’t been published, and lead committees to write reports that have never been shared. Surely, we’ve all had this experience. But when it happens with equity work, to the only three people of color in your school, you have succeeded in further marginalizing the marginalized group. By asking for expertise, and then tabling solutions, you make the linear problem into an exponential one.
It is a dangerous task we are left to take on. When scrutinized, each policy often hints at a tradition that it was created to preserve. We face the added concern that, if the changes we make are too big, our financial supportive alumni may feel that “their” school is no longer the same. Our price tags reflect that most of ours schools were built with exclusivity at their core. The events of 2020 give us an opportunity for reflection, an opportunity to evolve, and the chance to assist this generation in correcting for the misconceptions of the last. I wish we would take it.
Working twice as hard and getting half as much isn’t a terrible outcome if you chose to immigrate to this country, short on connections and self-conscious about your accent. It must have been frustrating as hell for my dad to hide the fact that he had a master’s degree because interviewers did not hold one themselves. And shoot, at least my parents had the luxury of choosing to enter into this fictional meritocracy. But if you are accustomed to finding your first job through a friend of the family or your next job by leaning on your alumni network, or just fall into the thirty percent more likely to own home because of the color of your skin, then finding success in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion initiatives is a terribly long road. Are our colleagues ready for that road? Maybe we have all been avoiding the question because we know the answer.
