Frustrated with the state of liberal educators’ blindness to race and trauma - and specifically the lack of ownership of racist outcomes by white people

To begin, I’m a 31 year old cis-het. white man. I was raised working/middle class Christian in the USA. I have an undergraduate and graduate degree and all the privileges that accompany those aspects of myself. Being aware of my privileges as well as being a very sensitive and empathetic person has always made me feel a great degree of pain about the suffering in our society. As a young boy I saw the kids of color being treated differently by school staff, and I saw the impacts that poverty, trauma, and race had on the lives of the kids I grew up with.

I work in elementary education. Currently as a classroom aide, but I have also worked as a teacher. I live in the Pacific Northwest, in an outwardly “liberal/progressive” area. I have explicitly sought to teach in such areas because I simply could not survive working in a more white-washed and conservative area.

Explicit and intentional racism in our country is clearly a huge problem that requires attention. However, I want to vent today about the more subtle and (in my opinion) insidious forms of racism that come out in well-intentioned people’s biases.

Among the 1,000+ school staff I’ve known and worked with over the years, I have not encountered one who was explicitly and intentionally racist. I know those people exist, but the point I’m trying to demonstrate is that, in my area, it’s the minority. The vast majority of my education colleagues truly believe they treat their classrooms like a meritocracy and work for the success of all kids.

I had meetings the last two days to prepare for the start of the academic year next Tuesday. All staff gathered and we talked about, among other things, white supremacy and race. I’m all for this discussion amongst educators because our profession is almost entirely white women, some white men, and a handful of staff with diverse identities. However, I’m tired of having Racism 101 discussions with white people who are still arriving at the awareness that bias is an issue that we must hold ourselves accountable to.

My principal (a cis-het white man also) does all the performative anti-racist things necessary to “show” we’re broaching this “critical subject.” My main issue is the continued babying of white people in terms of being involved in the discussion. He put an article in front of us about the ways in which white supremacy is upheld in all our institutions and therefore that this bleeds over into our schools as well. Cool, I’m on board.

We read and discuss in small groups and then discuss as the whole group what we read. Before we begin the whole-group discussion my principal says “let me be clear, I don’t think anyone in this room is racist. I think our institutions are racist.”

…

Fucking come on. I’m so tired of us only defining racism as white people running around saying the N-word. Yeah this exists, and is behind a lot of the historical racism that still lives in our institutions, but the more pervasive issue in our society today is a critical mass that believes racism exists but that they have no personal responsibility in dismantling it.

I don’t really care what people’s intentions are if they can’t critically analyze how they fall short of their intentions. I get that people need opportunities to grow and evolve in their beliefs. But what I have seen over and over is a critical mass of white educators willing to talk about these issues of race and the systemic impacts it has on kids of color, but never taking any responsibility for the racial disparities that exist in THEIR classroom and THEIR schools.

We read theory about how white supremacy shows up in schools without talking about how it shows up in OUR school. We read about disproportionate disciplinary action along racial lines, but never have a hard conversation about OUR SCHOOL’S data which shows, regardless of good-intentions, we have racially-disproportionate outcomes in achievement and discipline.

I’ve spent the last 24 hours thinking about why this is so frustrating for me. I think I’ve pinpointed what it is. What bothers me so much about the state of white liberal educators, even though we’re beginning to discuss critically important issues, is that it’s all way too little way too late. I’m frustrated that just beginning to think and talk about race is considered enough and an indicator of “good faith”. My principal also said regarding white supremacy “in my 24 years in education this is the first time I’ve thought about these things.”

Really? Why is it acceptable that white people haven’t THOUGHT about racism at all? Sure, maybe they haven’t been forced to think about it as much as other identities, but come on. Have you had zero exposure to people of color? I don’t believe that. You have just not trusted the perspectives of people of color.

I’m tired of white people performatively saying “this is a top-level issue” but then dismissing it as not having been important until this moment in time. It’s a top-level issue but we aren’t treating it with the urgency it deserves. The bar to being anti-racist is so ridiculously low. You literally just have to not have racist intentions and that’s considered enough.

Going back to my principal’s comment about not having thought about this before. This really bothered me the more I thought about it. Because I just honestly do not believe that “i’Ve NeVeR hAd To ThInK aBoUt ThIs BeFoRe” is a good faith argument anymore. Even the most isolated, explicitly racist, KKK-member rural poor southern white Trumper knows that people of color generally feel racism is an issue. Now, this archetypal-racist white person may believe that the perspective of a whole class of people is wrong. However, the actions of my liberal-white colleagues also suggest they have internalized this as well.

Because if we accept that literally everyone in the US is aware of this cultural trend among people of color, then the only way you can claim “I never thought about this” is if you’ve been actively dismissing the narrative of people of color for your whole life. THAT’S RACIST.

I don’t care what your intentions are if you have no humility. If you find yourself thinking “wow this race stuff is hard and complex and I haven’t ever thought about this before” YOU ARE AS RACIST AS the KKK member. I am so fed up with the lack of humility of white educators. I don’t expect you to know everything, but you have to be able to critically assess the outcomes of your work, and when outcomes don’t align with intentions you must adjust!

Submitted September 02, 2021 at 04:39PM by kevinmn11 https://ift.tt/3DJVfmr