Race, class, poverty, representation, should not be checkboxes in lessons and practice, only during certain months and days but the foundation.
But before THAT important work can happen, teachers must first do an inventory of themselves.*
Growing up in Connecticut, the people of difference I knew were Lebanese (early 1980s) and Jewish. When we moved to North Carolina, they were African-Americans (1990s). When we lived outside of D.C in Maryland, it was Asian-Americans, mostly Korean, and the Black people who lived with us in government housing.
My grandmother's first husband was an Army chaplain, and they were stationed in Japan for a while, later Germany, so growing up when we lived with her, the house was a museum of things from these postings. Name Day dolls from Japan. Hummels. Japanese lacquer furniture, tea sets, fans, prints, a koto, a full kimono.
On International Day in elementary school, I dressed up in the full kimono. These artifacts were never presented as the colonial/imperial appropriation, the "right" of armed forces to take cultural artifacts for their own, for display in homes, but as relics of my grandmother's travels.
Yet in my house, when we moved frequently, throwing clothes in big black garbage bags, my mom called this "Puerto Rican luggage" and the phrase "gypped" out of something was common.
These lessons were learned along with first-hand accounts of the Holocaust, the grand piano in my grandmother's house was full of black and white pictures. The story she told was that half the pictures were the American family who fought, and dies and in World War II and the other half were the German Jews of the family who died in the camps.
When I lived in North Carolina and heard the n-word I knew it was wrong an racist, as were the Confederate flags that flew everywhere but as a student, and later a teacher, in that same school, I rarely spoke out against these things, in fear of my job, and just cowardice.
As a student in high school, when I was bullied by Black girls, I fell into the racist trap I'd been taught, that they were racist against white people. It would be decades before I unlearned that awful lie.
I grew up with people who were gay, from different cultures, races, and everything I was taught at home taught me that these people were the same as me, I was the same as them.
I never interrogated the problems, the contradictions of these lessons against my social-justice, hippie mother, and Civil Rights marching grandmother.
I certainly never saw myself as racist, but an honest look at growing up, I was repeating racist behaviors and phrases, which IS the definition of racist.
When I started working on my Masters in education, I was introduced to Diane Ravitch's history of NYC schools, and I loved it. I ashamed to say my love continued until last year when I learned from Twitter (I learn everything from Twitter) how damaging and incomplete her work was. The damage that forwarding the "factory model" of schools does.
In the early 2000s, I first encountered Lies My Teacher Told Me. It changed my practice. I actively taught chapters in my AP classes, I reoriented my American Literature classes to start with the narrative of Indigenous, the Taino, and challenged my students to ask why American History and Literature erased them, ignored their narrative.
In schools where was Columbus Day was celebrated, I pushed back, I taught primary documents and historical texts and op-eds about the real story.
I did the same for Thanksgiving. I would show this clip was Addams Family. I thought I was shaking things up. Being subversive.
But I wasn't.
I was replicating the same crap in different ways.
Wednesday Addams is an uber-white girl, surrounded by uber-white, privileged children, in brown face, performing Native narratives. She has taken revenge/retribution away from the people wronged, appropriated it all as badly as the Thanksgiving narrative does.
I did harm teaching this.
I still start my American Lit classes with Native voices, but I let them speak for themselves, providing context, but much more aware of whose voices I'm elevating and privileging. I start classes with land acknowledgements, point out Native authors in our classroom library, point the students towards action.
I show the students that we are on Pueblo lands.
I ask them why they do not learn about Hispanic, Chican@, Native history in their classes in Albuquerque. How many Black, Women, CHican@, Native historians, mathematicians, scientists, writers they study.
This year I actively worked to include these writers and voices in my classroom library of books the students read independently and in the mentor texts I use.
But I've been teaching 18 years. And I just made these changes this year.
It was only last year that I started actively teaching my students not to use ableist language.
I still struggle not the think phrases like "crazy as a bag of cats" or "bat-sh*t crazy." I'm rewiring my brain and mouth after a lifetime.
That I was explicit about the ways language and the words you use matter.
How much harm did I do in the 16, 17 years before that? I would have told you that I was a well-intentioned, anti-racist, not-bigoted teacher. My honest reflection shows otherwise.
I am ashamed of the teacher I used to be. For me, these last few years, it was as though I finally realized just how high the stakes were. What happened when I stood by silent. When I did not call out or name racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic behavior and language. That my fear of losing my job or facing consequences should not be a greater concern that the safety and life of others.
It is also my privilege that allowed me to live my white, cis, life like this, to ignore for literally decades, these truths that others live so brutally with every day.
I mistakenly believed that growing up poor, with a single mother, meant that I was aware of these issues, and acted accordingly. I was wrong. That was a lie.
Even if teachers do not think they are doing harm, even if they see no harm in their use of curriculum, resources, phrases, if they are not listening to others, they, I, am actively harming students.
I am pretty horrified at the damage I did to my students over the years.
It doesn't matter if I intended it or not.
It doesn't matter if I am sorry.
It does not matter that I have radically changed my practice.
I say all this not to excuse my past behavior. There is no excuse. It's important to see that combination of environment and ignorance influenced me, and was systematic. That I was not actively taught otherwise. That my education, my learning, has occurred late in life, in recent years, and is due to the work done by disability scholars, educators of color, who should not be bearing the brunt of my education.
Do I think I am different from white supremacist Nazis? Racist, bigots who fly the Confederate flag? Yes.
But I would not be honest, and would be doing a disservice if I did not acknowledge the white privilege and supremacy I forwarded and participated in by replicating these systems, particularly as a teacher.
I've written before that I am not the teacher I used to be. In part, because my teaching models for toxic models of masculinity, and I did harm too in emulating and modeling their behaviors and practices. It was only once I identified these things, honestly looked at them, that I was able to see how toxic and harmful they were, and change.
I see a lot of (mostly white, sometimes men, but often white women) educators actively performing their anti-racism online, as though we (and I do use the we here purposely) should get credit for the retweets, the links, the statements. And I DO think this is our job, but it can go wrong. It can become the online equivalent of "But I have a black friend."
I put off writing this because I did not want this to read like that- "look at me, I'm so cool for my anti-racist work." As others have written, there are pitfalls to being open about the work white people need to do. We should be privileging others' voices, not putting ourselves in front, using our power, privilege, and voices to grant access and platforms to others.
On the other hand, one thing I've learned, especially from the #ClearTheAir work and conversations and readings, is that until I do this reflection, this work, until I catalog all that informed me (growing up, family, educational lessons learned and not), until I stop and ask myself what harm I have done, and honestly think about that, I cannot possible be better. Be active. Be anti-racist in my work.
I cannot be the educator I want to be and that my students need me to be.
This is scary work. There are repercussions, in the classroom, in schools, with parents, with the Internet at large. There are consequences, and hate. But what I have come to realize (late, oh too late) is how severe the consequences are of not doing this work. Of not speaking out. Not changing my practice, my behaviors, my language.
I am grateful for the communities of Twitter that I have learned from.
I encourage people who are not in schools where there are like minded people to both do your own homework and listen to those giving of their valuable time and knowledge when they do not have to.
Because of them I NOW actively think about the texts I teach, how I teach them. I am explicit with my students about WHY we read them. I call racism racism, sexism sexism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, by their names. And then I call them wrong.
I want my students to feel seen. Heard. Represented. I want them to see themselves in the works we read. I want them to see, no, DEMAND their place in the world. To shout from the rooftops that they belong, and claim their place. To fight tooth and nail to be seen, heard, listened to.
That is the work I do now. Those are my goals.
It's a work in progress. I'm only sorry I started so late.
*I'm trying really hard to avoid using "we" and "our" as I write about these issues because who is the "we"? It almost always centers white folx, and assumes because WE'RE not doing the work, it's not being done, which is a lie. I still slip. I'm a work in progress.
No comments:
Post a Comment