I attached this Bitmoji to a recent email I sent, more as a reminder for me than the recipient.
I can feel my stress increasing, as I try to complete report card marks/comments, finish reading Forest of Reading books so I can chat with students, and handle the many loose ends associated with co-managing the OSLA strand of the Ontario Library Association's Super Conference which occurs in less than two weeks. (Thank you again to my wonderful co-chair, Alanna King, for forgiving me for my thoughtless words as well as your patience and guidance.) Another reason why my cortisol level was higher than normal was due to an event I read about on Twitter that upset me greatly - and made me realize how very important the new book club I joined is to me and my own development as an educator and as a human being.
I guess I should back up. Let me talk about my book club first, since our first meeting was on Friday, January 18, before all this stuff happened on the weekend. A fellow educator, Dr. Ken MacKinnon, put a call out on Twitter inviting people to join a book club. The book is called White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin Diangelo.
I need this book. My own journey to being an anti-bias educator is a long one. As I told the other members of the book club, my pre-service teacher education program at York University had a strong anti-bias foundation. However, what good is a strong foundation if you don't build something stable on it? I've debated for years about sharing on this blog one of the worst teaching mistakes of my career so that I could bring my shame out in the open so I could learn more from the experience. However, decades later, it's still hard for me to discuss. My Mentor AQ course, led by Karen Murray and Jennifer Watt, has been another helpful guide on the journey.
I'm making a concentrated effort to have these uncomfortable conversations more frequently with my students as part of their units of study. (Don't congratulate me on my "bravery"; really, I'm not doing enough [my 2019 One Word focus] in this area.) This time last year I examined the racist background of the term monkey. During our fashion show inquiry in 2017, I had to push students to even be willing to mention race at all in their observations. Term one's inquiry for the junior division students this school year was about power and we examined aspects of social identity to help us understand how power intersects with these identities. That was challenging to complete because the students hadn't had many opportunities to discuss these topics in this way before. Even I was at a loss for words at times. My friend Jen Apgar helped me immensely by pointing me in the direction of the Genderbread website (www.genderbread.org) and I found other resources to help me explain some terms, but I couldn't find and had a hard time explaining why in our society at this time, we use the words "white" and "black" but not "red" or "yellow" to describe certain races.
Our next media unit of study is about hair and we'll be combining our understanding of power and identity with our examination of hair. When we recently watched a disturbing video clip of the teen wrestler getting his hair unceremoniously and brutally chopped off because a referee said his hair was against the rules (even though he had competed earlier in the tournament), during the class discussion, one student got quite agitated and said, "We aren't black and I don't like it when people use that word. We are brown! We are caramel! We are not black!"
Our next media unit of study is about hair and we'll be combining our understanding of power and identity with our examination of hair. When we recently watched a disturbing video clip of the teen wrestler getting his hair unceremoniously and brutally chopped off because a referee said his hair was against the rules (even though he had competed earlier in the tournament), during the class discussion, one student got quite agitated and said, "We aren't black and I don't like it when people use that word. We are brown! We are caramel! We are not black!"
I want to respect her wishes, but I'm also worried, because a lot of the materials we'll be accessing use the term "black". Just because it won't be easy doesn't mean we should shy away from discussing things. That's why I'm really grateful for this supportive book club. I have to confess that I was a little intimidated at first - there are a lot of principals in this group and I'm "just" a teacher. However, Ken made it clear that these distinctions mean nothing in our book club and that we are all learners. We discussed the first two chapters over breakfast. Here's a photo of the group as well as some key quotes from the first part of the book.People share the importance of their hair after teen is forced to cut his dreads https://t.co/ouOyHFPkLs— Kory Graham (@korytellers) December 22, 2018
I was not taught to see myself in racial terms and certainly not to draw attention to my race or the behave as if it mattered in any way. Of course, I was made aware that somebody's race mattered, and if race was discussed, it would be theirs, not mine. ... the first challenge: naming our race. (page 7)
When we try to talk openly and honestly about race, white fragility quickly emerges as we are so often met with silence, defensiveness, argumentation, certitude and other forms of pushback. ... These [social forces that stop us from discussing race] include the ideologies of individualism and meritocracy, narrow and repetitive media representations of people of color, segregation in schools and neighborhoods, depiction of whiteness as the human ideal, truncated history, jokes an warning, taboos on opening talking about race, and white solidarity. (page 8)
If your definition of a racist is someone who holds conscious dislike of people because of race, then I agree that it is offensive for me to suggest that you are racist when I don't know you. ... I am not using this definition of racism, and I am not saying that you are immoral. (page 13)There are some great reflection questions on pages 14 and 35, and I'm going to need to explore them further (and not necessarily as publicly as on this blog).
The reason why I found our book club meeting so timely was because of some video footage shared on Twitter of some young, white, high school students who were mocking and intimidating a man, Nathan Phillips, an Omaha elder, who was in Washington DC as part of a protest. (Search terms like #NathanPhillips or #CovingtonCatholic if you need more details. Be aware though that many of the mainstream news media's headlines minimize the race aspect of the incident.) I won't share the video or images here, because I find them quite unsettling to watch. There are a lot of contradictory messages that come out at a time like this, especially with regards to "how we should react".
- Say something to condemn the action (immediately), otherwise it appears like you don't care, don't notice, or worry it will "hurt your brand"
- Don't shoot your mouth off, talking about stuff you don't know much about
- Let native people take the lead on the next steps
- Take the lead on next steps, don't leave it to those who are mocked
- Call for punishment, or forgiveness, or education, or next steps for those involved
I needed time to think, so I used some of Robin DiAngelo's book to help shape my thoughts. I won't share what it is I'll be doing on a local level, because I don't want to center myself or my experiences in this discussion. It's not about me, it's about so much more. Others, like Shana White, have been working at and thinking about this much longer than I have. Her blog post can be found at https://shanavwhite.com/2017/07/09/why-do-i-cause-you-discomfort/
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