After a recent interaction in an earlier post, I got to thinking exactly WHY did I become an anti-racist educator. So I wrote a (not so mini) manifesto on why I did. I’ll post it in the comments. I encourage you to reflect and post in the comments, why did YOU become an anti-racist educator? What does being anti-racist mean to you?

Strap in. This is a long ride. I’m a white, Gen X male. My father was NYPD for a spell before becoming a firefighter (very pro-union, yet conservative. I still don’t understand how that happens), my mother was a Woodstock era hippie who took us to yoga classes way, WAY before it was trendy. How those two hooked up I’ll never know. I mention this to show the wide scope of crazy messages I’d received growing up. But being the first person in my family to finish college meant I had to navigate my way on my own… the simple instruction of “you’re going to college” was the only guidance given to me by my father. No financial assistance, no “let’s go look at these colleges.” It was me, 18, figuring it out.

I got a job as a para-professional during my 10 years of pursuing my undergrad and fell in love again with school. I tell my students, “I love school so much, I got a job here.”

I received my undergrad and applied for the New York City Teaching Fellows. https://nycteachingfellows.org A GREAT program where they give you a teaching job and subsidize your grad degree. A HORRIBLE program because you are thrown into a teaching situation being unbelievably underprepared. What really clicked for me… I was started teaching at the high school that served the neighborhood I grew up in. Even though I’m white, I still saw myself in these black and brown students… because what I did have in common with them: we were both broke growing up. I also realized my color gave me privileges these young people didn’t have.

One day in maybe 2006/2007, I went into my local market and a woman handed me a flyer to support the building of a new high school in an area of the Bronx that is still predominantly white. I absentmindedly took the flyer but after thinking about it while cruising the produce aisle, I realized what was encoded within the flyer. These white parents wanted a public school FOR their white kids.

Not many people know but NYC is STILL one of the most segregated school systems, but not because of the law.

https://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/2021-press-releases/report-shows-school-segregation-in-new-york-remains-worst-in-nation

So the fact that these parents wanted their own public high school for their kids… and If I were to turn around and accuse this woman of being racist, without a doubt, she would be shocked! Appalled! Because to HER I absolutely know for sure… this was about the kids! This wasn’t racism!

THAT’S the moment I realized I needed to become an anti-racist educator, even though I wasn’t aware of the term yet. I realized my mission as an English teacher wasn’t just to teach literature, but the codes embedded in language. The verbal and linguistic twists and turns oppressors use within language to encode their message in plain sight. Sometimes the people in power don’t even realize they’re being racist.

So ever since then, whenever possible, I try to interpret and analyze any message coming down from above… and I try to get my students to do the same. I try to get them to treat it as if their lives depend on it. Because these days, it might. And if I DIDN’T do this, I would be betraying the trust of those young people who are looking at me to guide them.

My story is miles long…

Like the previous post and another I saw in a different thread, I was an Antiracist before the term was put out there.

Short version, I grew up on Chicago’s south side, in Woodlawn, next door to Hyde Park. Hyde Park is the neighborhood home of the University of Chicago. I could literally cross the street and go from being in a neighborhood wrecked by poverty to one at the other end of the economic spectrum.

My neighborhood school, James McCosh had raggedy books that we had to share, and the Hyde Park elementary school, The Ray school, had CRTs (now called computers) in the classroom.

I remember wondering if people naturally segregated themselves because the neighborhoods were each predominantly one color. Most neighborhoods in Chicago were like that - separated by race & ethnicity. I was 50 when I really learned, then understood, that it was intentional and by design, courtesy of U.S. government policies and priorities.

I became an educator late in life because I always knew schools weren’t ready for me. I wanted to create a joyful classroom that taught students to think for themselves, and ask those critical questions. I’m so happy now because I can say out loud that I am committed to unlearning and helping to create an open, inclusive, and just society by teaching my students to consider which voices are missing and what might be the reasons why.

They usually ask the hard questions themselves and I support & facilitate their examination of the issue.

I grew up in a suburban town near a major city. My high school was part of a centralized district that served for towns with five high schools. The lines were drawn so that the (Black) kids who lived across the streets from my (white) school were bussed to another school instead. Racial steering by realtors kept the towns shemales beyond what would happen naturally. When I was a junior or a senior, the state finally sued the district and the realtors, but I'm pretty sure the situation has gone back to what it was in the decades since.

I felt the unfairness of the situation as a kid, both because it didn't seem fair that those kids couldn't just walk across the street and because the school they were bussed to had a more active, academic bent than my school. (They had Model UN! And a good science fair!) As an adult, I see similar things playing out at all levels. I want to be able to help shift the divisions away from the factors we have no control over. I'd love it if we self-segregated on the basis of favorite sports team, for example, rather than race. But to get there, we have to acknowledge the ways in which race is used as a tool for division by the folks who are happy with the status quo. We'll never get universal healthcare, much less universal basic income, as long as the status quo supporters picture someone brown when they think of freeloaders rather than a CEO...

…Our Lives and “Nation” are dependent on this in a globalized world, as I understand. (A reason we seem to be plummeting).

That is such a cool story of how WS is a chameleon & supported without a second thought or even subconsciously.

My story is hella long... TL;DR: I come from a highly conservative, white supremacist family that I never fit into. I'm an out queer non-binary trans educator. I got into teaching because I saw it as the most affective place to be to create change. A free society is dependent on every individual having the skills and autonomy to make informed decisions. A democratic citizenry doesn't create itself. We need informed, risk-taking, equity-minded educators to move K-12 public education in the right direction. We need these same educators in local offices as well.

What does anti-racism teaching mean to me? I prefer social justice education. It's more than race. It's about individual identities and the intersectionality of those identities in all spheres. It's about truly welcoming the whole individual child in my classroom. It's about collaboratively creating safe learning spaces in community with my students. It's empowering my young adolescents to form and share their own thoughts and opinions in constructive ways. It's about leaning into hard history and hard conversations daily.

Anti-racism teaching is about the power of authenticity and human connection.