Save Black Lives and Unite Against Hate
I am an Associate Professor who trains future teachers for a living. I am also a Black woman who is descended from enslaved Africans. My maternal grandmother’s grandmother was illiterate. She lived long enough to tell my grandmother that her father was the slave master. He freed neither her, her eight siblings, nor her mother. My mother, a descendant of an illiterate slave woman, has worked as an English Professor at Laney College in Oakland, CA for more than 36 years. My father attended a one-room school in segregated West Texas. He earned a Bachelor of Science in pharmaceuticals from Texas Southern University and a Juris Doctorate degree from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. He died three years ago on June 1, 2017, in Oakland, CA. Also of importance, I am a wife and mother of four adult children all of whom attended California public schools. I attended Alabama State University in Montgomery, AL. Montgomery is the home of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. It is located thirty minutes from Tuskegee, AL where the Tuskegee experiment that killed hundreds of Black men was sanctioned by the federal government and Tuskegee University.
My family is a Black family. We are voters. We have been sheltering-in-place since March 2020. We are all valuable Black lives. Two days ago, my 4-year-old grandson asked my eldest daughter, “Mommy, what will happen to me if the cops shoot me?” Our Black children are traumatized by the impact of state-sanctioned terror echoing in their bloodstreams. I am writing this article because I have trained hundreds of California teachers over the past four years to work in diverse settings throughout the State in Cultural Humility (Tervalon and Murray-Garcia 1998). To support my teacher candidates in learning the importance of cultural humility, I tell them a story that I will tell you. I taught English and Theater Arts at a small private Muslim School in Oakland, CA for eight years. I had a playful fourth-grader who was always getting into things. One day, his older sister came to me and said, “He listens to me. If you can promise to treat him with fairness, then I’ll talk to him.” I said, “I’m your teacher. It is not just my job to treat him fairly. I have to treat all of you with fairness.” I made a promise to his older sister to treat all of my students with fairness. By October 2015, the 4th grader had become an adult who was shot and killed in a double homicide in Oakland. When I learned of his murder, I felt like a failure because I could not get the world to treat him fairly.
My job as a teacher educator is a trust. My responsibility is to make sure that teachers learn to treat all of their students with fairness. I tell my students that cultural humility will not only help them to become better teachers, but it will also help them become better human beings. I tell them that I too am committed to these practices. We work to identify our biases and develop plans to disrupt those biases.
Similarly, my request is that each of us, our Federal, State, Local, County, and School Officials do the work of fostering cultural humility in a purposeful effort to treat Black people with fairness. Identify the systemic and institutional biases against Black people and develop a plan to disrupt those biases. Begin by addressing the systemic and institutional biases that are making COVID-19 and state-sanctioned terror genocidal for our Black communities throughout the United States. Stop sanctioning the police to terrorize us. We are risking our lives by protesting police violence. According to APM Research Labs, COVID-19 kills Black Americans at a rate of 2.4 higher than for white Americans (APM Research Lab, 2020). We, Black Americans, are twice as likely to die due to COVID-19 than White Americans. Yet, we are protesting state-sanctioned violence because we can just as easily die at the hands of the police. Recognize that despite the fact that I am an Associate Professor who earned my doctorate from the Univesity of California at Berkeley, a daughter, a wife, a mother, a grandmother, white supremacy can take my life and the life of the ones I love at any moment. White racism does not value Black lives. We need to disrupt biases, systemic, and institutional racism. Treat Black people with fairness. Value our lives.
Yesterday, I left my apartment in San Francisco to travel to Oakland to participate in a peaceful protest that was organized by young Black activists. The organizers made evident that the purpose of the protest was to say the names of those who were killed as a result of state terror. We chanted George Floyd and Breonna Taylor’s names. We could have easily said Stephon Clark, Mario Woods, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Korryn Gaines, Oscar Grant, or countless other names instead. When we passed Kaiser Oakland, the essential workers cheered us and we cheered them. They handed out free masks and water bottles. There were thousands of us. We marched through the streets being saluted by bus drivers, security guards, doctors, and nurses of all different races and ethnicities. Do you know what windows were not shattered in Oakland? They were the ones with signs that read, “Oakland United Against Hate.” They were the ones with store owners who handed out free bottles of water to us as we passed their storefronts.
At approximately 7:15 pm, a dozen officers jumped out of the cars that were parked on 14th street between Brush and Castro. They were wearing riot gear. They made a human shield to block the entrance to the ramp on Castro Street. I saw the lead truck from the protest march and hundreds of protesters walking towards me. The protesters made a right at the corner of Castro and 14th streets. The police started arguing with this young Black woman who was telling them that they have been attacking nonviolent protesters for four days including tear-gassing her yesterday. The militarized police are ambushing peaceful protesters. Let’s work together to stop this ambush. Contact your local officials and make them call off the police and end the curfews. Inform the mainstream media, State and Local governments, University and K-12 School administrators, faculty, staff, and students, the police, and the sheriff’s departments that “California Stands United Against Hate.” “Sacramento Stands United Against Hate.” “Alameda County Stands United Against Hate.” “San Francisco Stands United Against Hate.” “Oakland Stands United Against Hate.” Wherever you are, stand against hate. Put up signs to that effect, hand out water bottles, masks, and hand sanitizer, particularly to your most vulnerable populations including Black people. Let your neighbors and government officials know, “All lives can’t matter unless Black Lives Matter.” Set up COVID-19 testing centers that are targetted toward testing Black people. Announce that Black people’s lives are essential. Train the police officers and sheriffs and deputies as I train future California teachers. Be committed to saving and valuing Black lives.
