The biggest challenge right now in addressing racial and social justice in schools is people not being aware whose voices are dominant and whose are silent. Because of that lack of awareness, we have a lot of children feeling like they’re not part of the school community because they can’t see themselves in the curriculum, on the walls and in the classrooms, in the type of activities that are taken up, or the discussions in the room.
I became aware of the need for justice in schools when I had an incident early on in my career. Basically, throughout my whole career I have been the only person of color on staff, even though there were students of color and students with different language backgrounds and belief systems. It wasn’t until I had a student say to me, ‘Can we talk? This is how I’m feeling,’ and looking at me, saying, ‘Because you have brown skin too.’ From that point on I started to realize what school felt like for me as a child. I remembered what I had suppressed. I grew up in areas where we were one of the only families of color. I started to realize what school felt like for students like the one who approached me who looked at the walls and really didn’t see people or kids who looked like them. The books that they read didn’t reflect their families, their backgrounds. It just really was more striking to me than I guess I wanted to pay attention to, I kind of suppressed it. And then I couldn’t stop. It was a child who brought me out, who woke me. I was asleep.
To those teachers who say they can’t take on racial and social justice in their classrooms because they don’t have time to take on one more thing, I would say this isn’t one more thing. This is life for our children. We can’t do our job, we can’t teach unless we acknowledge them as humans. And to acknowledge them as humans, we have to know that there is injustice.
There’s a small group of us in my district and a group of teachers that belongs to NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) and NEA, and we do come together, and we’re vocal, and we do speak out in our schools. And the group includes white teachers, which is awesome. When you have allies that talk with you, share ideas and speak out, you get more movement.
