[Applause]
so I want you to imagine that you’re an
English teacher with a high power and
suburban high school like the one where
I’ve taught for 18 years
a place where test scores are off the
charts where most of your students are
wiping and almost all of them are to
attend to competitive college after
graduation now I want you to imagine
your interior third hour of grading
final exam that suits your family
they’ve long since gone to bed you’re on
your third cup of coffee and you’ve been
saving for last PSA from your strongest
student writer is a sort of light at the
end of the tunnel ask any teacher it’s
one of the tricks we use to survive our
graduate and so you’ll begin bleeding
only to find that your light at the end
of the tunnel is an oncoming train
because your student has written the
following Martin Luther King jr. was one
of the greatest speakers of his day his
words started massive movements and
changed the world we live in however
when the speech is reviewed by high
schoolers in rich white towns like ours
they are not effective his words no
longer inspire courage or great emotion
but instead are merely boring because
the speeches are not tailored to us they
are not effective for this audience just
as adults reading Curious George are not
entertaining for taught morals this was
a realist I received clear organization
solid grammar by all assessments
successful essay and yet here I was
trying to follow in the footsteps of
great progressive educators like Paulo
Ferreira who needed to engage students
in the study of injustice such they
could develop the tools to combat it and
here was my star student writer and the
injustice he was attempting to combat
was that I was making him read Martin
Luther King the irony can’t be like a
break between the eyes another thing
very rude about it was importance of
engaging students
as a learning tool but my students found
too many of my students weren’t so much
angry injustice as they were reading
about as having to read about them to be
Ventus now not all the white students
are rich and or white there are plenty
of ways in which gender and sexual
orientation the whole constellation of
other factors conspire to create
hierarchies of privilege even in a
school like mine and it’s not every
students in line to reacts with outrage
when I attempt to engage them in reading
the narratives of those who’ve been
poorly served by our country’s power
structure but a lot of them a lot of
them do the comments I hear or read and
some former rather regularly include
stop whining racism is a problem only
because people keep talking about race
not another book about were black people
in the South it’s tempting to dismiss
this is useful in rates but youthful
ignorance isn’t like a pair of illusions
it’s not something we inevitably out of
around and to dismiss it would also be
to dismiss a very important message that
my students are sending me which is they
don’t feel engaged because they can’t
relate to the material now I don’t want
you to think my students are heartless
but some of the most compassionate
idealistic people you’ll meet I’ve seen
them raising thousands of dollars for
disaster relief and for cancer research
it’s just that when it comes to issues
of injustice especially we’re racing and
justice on the side too many of you feel
that injustice just has nothing to do
with Jenna now this is a problem that
goes well beyond the walls of just my
school and yet every conversation that
education reform did you hear it seems
to be about how to improve learning
conditions for minority students in
urban settings often
disadvantaged but I’m coming here today
with a strange proposal and that is that
the success or failure of those efforts
may well dependent at least in some part
upon something I’ve almost never great
anyone talk about the public sphere
which is how to effectively reform the
education in affluent white students in
the suburbs and by what form I don’t
necessarily mean raising test scores I
mean amazing students were able to
escape the gravity of privilege which in
some ways is it’s difficult to escape is
the gravity of poverty and see these
holes as change agents in creating a
more just society that kind of goal
falls right through the cracks of most
of our systems assessing education if
you were just to look at the English and
math scores of my students you would see
a problem but if you were to apply some
sort of social justice metric we’d be a
failing school and this is a big problem
when they argued we need to address it
we’re going to solve problems not just
elsewhere in education but if I may be
so bold in our country and our world
because students like mine they grow up
and well it’s not inevitable that
they’ll shed their youthful ignorance it
is pretty much inevitable that they’re
going to be disproportionately
representing themselves as
decision-makers and power brokers in our
society nationwide students from
affluent schools are more than twice as
likely to go on to college especially in
tentative points the class of 2017
apartment just eleven percent of schools
where students were graduating on time
our group accounted for over a third of
Harvard’s class of 2017
in fact six percent of that class do
from just ten Isis the 150th Congress of
the most diverse what we ever had and
yet seventy-eight percent of the
membership is white and over half had a
network
at least a million dollars 90 percent of
Fortune 500 CEOs are white and so on now
I’m not saying this is a good center
that we should be working to try and
change it we’ve made incredible strides
and diversifying our country’s
leadership and we should continue to do
so and I’m not saying the only people
who want to make change in our society
are int graduates or Congress people are
CEOs but we’d be lying to ourselves if
we deny the disproportionate influence
but students like mine will go on to
have and it makes you wonder if some of
those students who grew up being so
incensed at having to read Martin Luther
King might go on to become the kind of
leaders who make real impactful policy
decisions absent empathy based on
inaccurate even offensive stereotypes
maybe you’ve heard of leaders like that
so you couldn’t see a suburban teachers
opportunity and trying to create a more
enlightening white ruling class but I
think the mission of suburban education
report should be more ambitious I’m
talking about educating the next white
ruling class to step aside and share the
reins in power because it’s in their
self-interest that’s what I want to talk
about today now as a white guy who went
to fancy schools myself I don’t have too
much in trouble getting inside the mind
set aside my privileged students but I
was also a scholarship student at those
fancy schools see I know those weird
liminal space where my parents were
highly educated but financially
to make ends meet I’m whitening with all
the privileges that entails but in most
a Jewish and at the prep school or
attended that meant getting swastikas
carbon to my locker
that meant give you the occasional
anti-semitic phone call the prank or any
of it doesn’t weighs much more subtle
which people like me were made to feel
other lesser then now it’s nothing like
the pervasive oppression that so many
Americans endure every day but I think
it was enough of pinprick maybe to help
me become an ambassador between the
world as a blind person should just send
me my privilege and I imagine many of us
could be there’s a whole industry of
courses and books designed to help white
teachers become more effective at
disadvantage terrific minority students
but I’ve never seen a book designed to
help white teachers become more
effective with masculine white students
in the suburbs that’s why I’m in the
middle of writing women there any
publishers watching this I mean I think
too often white teachers and including
some of my Mercia shameful moments me
once relying upon people of color to
take on the burden of educating white
people for social and racial justice I
think too many of us on some level
ingredient with my student who felt that
injustice has nothing to do with us
that’s why taking mcintoshes famous
essay unpacking the any usable knapsack
the white privilege was so brilliant in
what she did was construct systems of
oppression not as we have this group of
people who is disadvantaged but rather
we have this another group of people
white people white men white
heterosexual cisgender men of work we
have too much advantage see constructing
it that way makes people like me a part
of the equation and it makes it
incumbent upon us to do something about
it that’s the key
teaching to reaching any student helping
them to see that this stuff in the
textbook or on the blackboard or in the
science lab has something to do with
them that’s the only way they’ll learn
small problem ever a major thing that
injustice has to do with students it
privileges that they benefit from it
those luxurious suburban districts
they’re the product of breadline and
those other college admission statistics
Oh at least something to legacy system
you know affirmative action for rich
white people and maybe some small part
by students success academically it was
something to the fact that they can walk
with your neighborhood tonight wearing
that he could not be harassed by police
they can walk through neighborhoods at
all and not be harassed by police so the
usual approach is so-called social
justice education though it’s holding up
that sort of mirror to see you in the
spaces and I think that’s necessarily
the most pedagogically even
psychologically sound approach think of
all the research we’ve had in recent
years but how confronting people with
facts no matter how accurate that fly in
the face of the deeply held convictions
just makes them get me more encouraged
in those convictions like it or not
white fragility is something that
teachers have to understand and
recognize and work around just as
teachers in less affluent schools may
have to recognize that their students
might not have had enough to eat for
breakfast at work and teachers in
schools like that sometimes know that
they have to show up with bagels and
orange juice if they want theirs is to
be able to learn geometry that day so
here’s what I try and show up with
here’s my bagels and orange juice
yes I’m Jewish I
gave the bagel analogous sorry okay
parkland Vegas yes I teach my students
about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks
and says our shop it’s but too often we
only teach about civil rights leaders of
color again as if it were only their
responsibility to make it more just
world so I also teach about figures like
white wire David even helped out the
SCLC Birmingham or activists like Indra
Goodman Michael Shermer could give their
lives in the murdered during the freedom
riots in an attempt to make our country
more just or white anti-apartheid
activists like Donald Woods and Helen
Suzman just as research has shown us
that minority students often perform
better when presented with examples of
people who look like them who have gone
on to succeed in academic and
professional fields I’m starting to
understand that affluent white students
become more open to fighting injustice
and they’ve seen other examples of white
people who have done it we’ve had some
wonderful stories have worked their way
into the curriculum from writers of a
variety of different racial and cultural
backgrounds yet often the white
characters of those stories tend to be
unilateral villainous now I’m not saying
the problem is that that’s an
unrealistic portrayal villainy like some
of those characters perpetrated
unfortunately all too real but as too
many of those stories those characters
that privilege is uncomplicated in other
words I can’t necessarily believe my
students entirely if they were to be
magically given the chance to be
transported into one of those stories
they might choose to inhabit one of the
white characters despite their villainy
because they’re a lot in length looks so
much more comfortable so what did they
make the case that some kinds of
comforters can hurt you see if the baby
part of suburban education reform is
showing examples of white allies here’s
the other part the orange juice and that
issuing the examples of how privileged
and hurt two people who happen like many
whites I’ve been raised in a segregated
world and I’m slowly coming to see how
that has hurt me every time I find
myself bumbling and my attempts to
connect with colleagues or students of
color and how hard I have to try and
keep on working and trying to get better
and better I hope the fact that my own
children intend to compare the diversity
of public school makes the better people
but it’s also a self-interested
strategic move I want them to be better
prepared than I ever was to take
advantage of a world that’s bring more
diverse of the day
then there’s the simple self-interested
part of giving up privilege and that
holding on to it can turn you into a
jerk the kind of jerk that lets a clerk
take you ahead in line when there’s a
person of color right in front of you or
that lets me over talk with women and
get away with it usually because gender
norms allow for that holding onto
privilege and turn you into someone you
don’t want B that’s why I love working
with my students with stories like
George Orwell’s shooting elephant who’s
protagonist is a British colonial
officer in the Raj who actually eats
imperialism and yet blames himself
perpetrating acts of cruelty because he
feels a forced force that is by his need
to appear as somebody in power and by
the end of the story he can
that when the white man turns tyrant
this is own freedom he destroys and a
way in which I try and help my students
access that story is I asked them to
think of a time when being a babysitter
or a camp counselor might have turned
them into the very kind of authoritarian
figure that they hate it’s not a perfect
pepperball I understand that but it’s an
on-ramp
it’s a beginning another text I love
using is South African writer in a fall
of food guards master Herald of the
birds whose protagonist Halle is a white
teenager with whom many of my students
can easily identify how he hates the
racially at just apartheid system and
yet when his domineering father begins
to oppress him he turns around there’s
oops unforgivable beams upon the two
black men who have raised him he knows
they can’t fight back without facing
terrible consequences but the terrible
consequence that Holly brings upon
himself is that he alienates the only
two people who have loved him now I ask
my students would you want the kind of
superpower that would let you make the
people who love you
vanish at the snap of a finger not many
of them seem to want to get by the
offering sometimes he asked my students
to look around at their largely white
classmates and ask themselves what are
you missing out on by not having more
people of color in this classroom and
what can we do about that for a crowd
that’s very concerned with college
admissions the thought that having a
positive experience of diversity to talk
about it and their college applications
process might hurt them let’s give them
pause or our last what our weakness you
found on the learning what are you
missing that memory but the fact that we
have no african-american teachers on our
faculty outside
health and fitness department it doesn’t
effect that our last african-american
teacher on the academic faculty nearly
got arrested while trying to get into
his own house in this community have
something to do about that and what can
we do about this something I’ve done
with some wonderful colleagues is to
create the gloom insertion which brings
together a majority minority students
through Boston Public Schools with their
white counterparts or the suburbs not
around any explicit curriculum and
diversity work but just around the hood
standards-based education lessons in
green technology and environmental
engineering and then the students work
together to solve those environmental
engineering challenges they can’t help
but challenge some of the stereotypes
they’ve arrived with about the other
students in that class and often they go
on long after the class is over to
continue to try and push those
boundaries and get to know and work with
people from the other side but because
they’ve seen what they’ve been able to
accomplish together so here’s what I
propose what we try and accomplish is
suburban education reform engaging
students and exploration of how
privilege hurts all of us even those of
us who benefit from it
Paulo Ferreira said that true justice
liberate the oppressor as well as the
oppressed I treasure the memory of a
white student too for a project in my
class chose to attend a black lives
matter March she came back and reported
there was one moment during that March
when the police began to close basically
the public crowd and one of the
organizers
white allies to the front and dere was
my student holding hands the circle with
other well-dressed white people
protecting the marchers in the middle
now she wasn’t using her privilege to
seize the microphone she wasn’t using
her purpose to take over she was using
it to keep lines of communication open
for others to use their voice she came
back to the shy student of mine more
confident and empowered than I had ever
seen her before I have seldom been so
proud so many of my students come to
high school already possessing the
skills to write effectively or to score
well on tests that they don’t need me
for that what they even teach or more
often than not just a helpful CSUN
meaning and what they’re doing in this
building everyday beyond just I’ve got
to get good grades good to a good
college to get a good job because that’s
the script
I’ve been slogging through my entire
life looking at social justice might not
necessarily turn them into the world
changers but it just might help them see
some purpose in education but I do
believe in the power even small acts to
make the world more just because I’ve
been their beneficiary – when I first
began working at this school we didn’t
know Placido Jewish High Holidays but
eventually a faculty meeting was
convened to debate the merits of
changing that policy now I kept largely
quiet and it have it in me to be the
Jewish event near that day except to
propose that the name the motion on the
floor which was elimination of religious
holidays be renamed to reflect what it
really was elimination of Jewish
religious holidays I mean after all
nobody was pretty Christmas on the
chopping block no sooner did I say that
but a colleague of mine rose to his feet
face red
the same kind of anger I recognized all
too well for my students and said oh
come on Christmas is not American
holiday I didn’t feel like rising to the
bait
but then something remarkable happened a
Christian colleague of my students it
excuse me I find that remark offensive
what about our Greek colleagues they
celebrate Christmas in January what
about our Latino colleagues the three
kings day who are you to say those
holidays deserves to be called American
and whose dumped now I don’t remember
what the final vote tally was but I
would always remember that colleague
because he could have stayed at his
comfort zone but instead he decided to
give up that privilege and stand up and
when he spoke suddenly this became more
than just a Jewish issue it became an
issue that affected the entire community
for which everyone was responsible it’s
awful
imagine a world like that a world where
people are willing to give up comfort
and privilege because they know that
injustice affects all of us and there
are concrete things they can do about it
but that world’s not going to happen by
itself people aren’t born knowing how to
do that they have to be taught that’s
what I’m proposing for suburban
education reform without which I think
any other attempted education reform or
social reform at all is only going to be
addressing half the issue it’ll be
challenging like everything that educate
challenger but don’t give up on these kids we can’t afford thank you
so I want you to imagine that you’re an
English teacher with a high power and
suburban high school like the one where
I’ve taught for 18 years
a place where test scores are off the
charts where most of your students are
wiping and almost all of them are to
attend to competitive college after
graduation now I want you to imagine
your interior third hour of grading
final exam that suits your family
they’ve long since gone to bed you’re on
your third cup of coffee and you’ve been
saving for last PSA from your strongest
student writer is a sort of light at the
end of the tunnel ask any teacher it’s
one of the tricks we use to survive our
graduate and so you’ll begin bleeding
only to find that your light at the end
of the tunnel is an oncoming train
because your student has written the
following Martin Luther King jr. was one
of the greatest speakers of his day his
words started massive movements and
changed the world we live in however
when the speech is reviewed by high
schoolers in rich white towns like ours
they are not effective his words no
longer inspire courage or great emotion
but instead are merely boring because
the speeches are not tailored to us they
are not effective for this audience just
as adults reading Curious George are not
entertaining for taught morals this was
a realist I received clear organization
solid grammar by all assessments
successful essay and yet here I was
trying to follow in the footsteps of
great progressive educators like Paulo
Ferreira who needed to engage students
in the study of injustice such they
could develop the tools to combat it and
here was my star student writer and the
injustice he was attempting to combat
was that I was making him read Martin
Luther King the irony can’t be like a
break between the eyes another thing
very rude about it was importance of
engaging students
as a learning tool but my students found
too many of my students weren’t so much
angry injustice as they were reading
about as having to read about them to be
Ventus now not all the white students
are rich and or white there are plenty
of ways in which gender and sexual
orientation the whole constellation of
other factors conspire to create
hierarchies of privilege even in a
school like mine and it’s not every
students in line to reacts with outrage
when I attempt to engage them in reading
the narratives of those who’ve been
poorly served by our country’s power
structure but a lot of them a lot of
them do the comments I hear or read and
some former rather regularly include
stop whining racism is a problem only
because people keep talking about race
not another book about were black people
in the South it’s tempting to dismiss
this is useful in rates but youthful
ignorance isn’t like a pair of illusions
it’s not something we inevitably out of
around and to dismiss it would also be
to dismiss a very important message that
my students are sending me which is they
don’t feel engaged because they can’t
relate to the material now I don’t want
you to think my students are heartless
but some of the most compassionate
idealistic people you’ll meet I’ve seen
them raising thousands of dollars for
disaster relief and for cancer research
it’s just that when it comes to issues
of injustice especially we’re racing and
justice on the side too many of you feel
that injustice just has nothing to do
with Jenna now this is a problem that
goes well beyond the walls of just my
school and yet every conversation that
education reform did you hear it seems
to be about how to improve learning
conditions for minority students in
urban settings often
disadvantaged but I’m coming here today
with a strange proposal and that is that
the success or failure of those efforts
may well dependent at least in some part
upon something I’ve almost never great
anyone talk about the public sphere
which is how to effectively reform the
education in affluent white students in
the suburbs and by what form I don’t
necessarily mean raising test scores I
mean amazing students were able to
escape the gravity of privilege which in
some ways is it’s difficult to escape is
the gravity of poverty and see these
holes as change agents in creating a
more just society that kind of goal
falls right through the cracks of most
of our systems assessing education if
you were just to look at the English and
math scores of my students you would see
a problem but if you were to apply some
sort of social justice metric we’d be a
failing school and this is a big problem
when they argued we need to address it
we’re going to solve problems not just
elsewhere in education but if I may be
so bold in our country and our world
because students like mine they grow up
and well it’s not inevitable that
they’ll shed their youthful ignorance it
is pretty much inevitable that they’re
going to be disproportionately
representing themselves as
decision-makers and power brokers in our
society nationwide students from
affluent schools are more than twice as
likely to go on to college especially in
tentative points the class of 2017
apartment just eleven percent of schools
where students were graduating on time
our group accounted for over a third of
Harvard’s class of 2017
in fact six percent of that class do
from just ten Isis the 150th Congress of
the most diverse what we ever had and
yet seventy-eight percent of the
membership is white and over half had a
network
at least a million dollars 90 percent of
Fortune 500 CEOs are white and so on now
I’m not saying this is a good center
that we should be working to try and
change it we’ve made incredible strides
and diversifying our country’s
leadership and we should continue to do
so and I’m not saying the only people
who want to make change in our society
are int graduates or Congress people are
CEOs but we’d be lying to ourselves if
we deny the disproportionate influence
but students like mine will go on to
have and it makes you wonder if some of
those students who grew up being so
incensed at having to read Martin Luther
King might go on to become the kind of
leaders who make real impactful policy
decisions absent empathy based on
inaccurate even offensive stereotypes
maybe you’ve heard of leaders like that
so you couldn’t see a suburban teachers
opportunity and trying to create a more
enlightening white ruling class but I
think the mission of suburban education
report should be more ambitious I’m
talking about educating the next white
ruling class to step aside and share the
reins in power because it’s in their
self-interest that’s what I want to talk
about today now as a white guy who went
to fancy schools myself I don’t have too
much in trouble getting inside the mind
set aside my privileged students but I
was also a scholarship student at those
fancy schools see I know those weird
liminal space where my parents were
highly educated but financially
to make ends meet I’m whitening with all
the privileges that entails but in most
a Jewish and at the prep school or
attended that meant getting swastikas
carbon to my locker
that meant give you the occasional
anti-semitic phone call the prank or any
of it doesn’t weighs much more subtle
which people like me were made to feel
other lesser then now it’s nothing like
the pervasive oppression that so many
Americans endure every day but I think
it was enough of pinprick maybe to help
me become an ambassador between the
world as a blind person should just send
me my privilege and I imagine many of us
could be there’s a whole industry of
courses and books designed to help white
teachers become more effective at
disadvantage terrific minority students
but I’ve never seen a book designed to
help white teachers become more
effective with masculine white students
in the suburbs that’s why I’m in the
middle of writing women there any
publishers watching this I mean I think
too often white teachers and including
some of my Mercia shameful moments me
once relying upon people of color to
take on the burden of educating white
people for social and racial justice I
think too many of us on some level
ingredient with my student who felt that
injustice has nothing to do with us
that’s why taking mcintoshes famous
essay unpacking the any usable knapsack
the white privilege was so brilliant in
what she did was construct systems of
oppression not as we have this group of
people who is disadvantaged but rather
we have this another group of people
white people white men white
heterosexual cisgender men of work we
have too much advantage see constructing
it that way makes people like me a part
of the equation and it makes it
incumbent upon us to do something about
it that’s the key
teaching to reaching any student helping
them to see that this stuff in the
textbook or on the blackboard or in the
science lab has something to do with
them that’s the only way they’ll learn
small problem ever a major thing that
injustice has to do with students it
privileges that they benefit from it
those luxurious suburban districts
they’re the product of breadline and
those other college admission statistics
Oh at least something to legacy system
you know affirmative action for rich
white people and maybe some small part
by students success academically it was
something to the fact that they can walk
with your neighborhood tonight wearing
that he could not be harassed by police
they can walk through neighborhoods at
all and not be harassed by police so the
usual approach is so-called social
justice education though it’s holding up
that sort of mirror to see you in the
spaces and I think that’s necessarily
the most pedagogically even
psychologically sound approach think of
all the research we’ve had in recent
years but how confronting people with
facts no matter how accurate that fly in
the face of the deeply held convictions
just makes them get me more encouraged
in those convictions like it or not
white fragility is something that
teachers have to understand and
recognize and work around just as
teachers in less affluent schools may
have to recognize that their students
might not have had enough to eat for
breakfast at work and teachers in
schools like that sometimes know that
they have to show up with bagels and
orange juice if they want theirs is to
be able to learn geometry that day so
here’s what I try and show up with
here’s my bagels and orange juice
yes I’m Jewish I
gave the bagel analogous sorry okay
parkland Vegas yes I teach my students
about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks
and says our shop it’s but too often we
only teach about civil rights leaders of
color again as if it were only their
responsibility to make it more just
world so I also teach about figures like
white wire David even helped out the
SCLC Birmingham or activists like Indra
Goodman Michael Shermer could give their
lives in the murdered during the freedom
riots in an attempt to make our country
more just or white anti-apartheid
activists like Donald Woods and Helen
Suzman just as research has shown us
that minority students often perform
better when presented with examples of
people who look like them who have gone
on to succeed in academic and
professional fields I’m starting to
understand that affluent white students
become more open to fighting injustice
and they’ve seen other examples of white
people who have done it we’ve had some
wonderful stories have worked their way
into the curriculum from writers of a
variety of different racial and cultural
backgrounds yet often the white
characters of those stories tend to be
unilateral villainous now I’m not saying
the problem is that that’s an
unrealistic portrayal villainy like some
of those characters perpetrated
unfortunately all too real but as too
many of those stories those characters
that privilege is uncomplicated in other
words I can’t necessarily believe my
students entirely if they were to be
magically given the chance to be
transported into one of those stories
they might choose to inhabit one of the
white characters despite their villainy
because they’re a lot in length looks so
much more comfortable so what did they
make the case that some kinds of
comforters can hurt you see if the baby
part of suburban education reform is
showing examples of white allies here’s
the other part the orange juice and that
issuing the examples of how privileged
and hurt two people who happen like many
whites I’ve been raised in a segregated
world and I’m slowly coming to see how
that has hurt me every time I find
myself bumbling and my attempts to
connect with colleagues or students of
color and how hard I have to try and
keep on working and trying to get better
and better I hope the fact that my own
children intend to compare the diversity
of public school makes the better people
but it’s also a self-interested
strategic move I want them to be better
prepared than I ever was to take
advantage of a world that’s bring more
diverse of the day
then there’s the simple self-interested
part of giving up privilege and that
holding on to it can turn you into a
jerk the kind of jerk that lets a clerk
take you ahead in line when there’s a
person of color right in front of you or
that lets me over talk with women and
get away with it usually because gender
norms allow for that holding onto
privilege and turn you into someone you
don’t want B that’s why I love working
with my students with stories like
George Orwell’s shooting elephant who’s
protagonist is a British colonial
officer in the Raj who actually eats
imperialism and yet blames himself
perpetrating acts of cruelty because he
feels a forced force that is by his need
to appear as somebody in power and by
the end of the story he can
that when the white man turns tyrant
this is own freedom he destroys and a
way in which I try and help my students
access that story is I asked them to
think of a time when being a babysitter
or a camp counselor might have turned
them into the very kind of authoritarian
figure that they hate it’s not a perfect
pepperball I understand that but it’s an
on-ramp
it’s a beginning another text I love
using is South African writer in a fall
of food guards master Herald of the
birds whose protagonist Halle is a white
teenager with whom many of my students
can easily identify how he hates the
racially at just apartheid system and
yet when his domineering father begins
to oppress him he turns around there’s
oops unforgivable beams upon the two
black men who have raised him he knows
they can’t fight back without facing
terrible consequences but the terrible
consequence that Holly brings upon
himself is that he alienates the only
two people who have loved him now I ask
my students would you want the kind of
superpower that would let you make the
people who love you
vanish at the snap of a finger not many
of them seem to want to get by the
offering sometimes he asked my students
to look around at their largely white
classmates and ask themselves what are
you missing out on by not having more
people of color in this classroom and
what can we do about that for a crowd
that’s very concerned with college
admissions the thought that having a
positive experience of diversity to talk
about it and their college applications
process might hurt them let’s give them
pause or our last what our weakness you
found on the learning what are you
missing that memory but the fact that we
have no african-american teachers on our
faculty outside
health and fitness department it doesn’t
effect that our last african-american
teacher on the academic faculty nearly
got arrested while trying to get into
his own house in this community have
something to do about that and what can
we do about this something I’ve done
with some wonderful colleagues is to
create the gloom insertion which brings
together a majority minority students
through Boston Public Schools with their
white counterparts or the suburbs not
around any explicit curriculum and
diversity work but just around the hood
standards-based education lessons in
green technology and environmental
engineering and then the students work
together to solve those environmental
engineering challenges they can’t help
but challenge some of the stereotypes
they’ve arrived with about the other
students in that class and often they go
on long after the class is over to
continue to try and push those
boundaries and get to know and work with
people from the other side but because
they’ve seen what they’ve been able to
accomplish together so here’s what I
propose what we try and accomplish is
suburban education reform engaging
students and exploration of how
privilege hurts all of us even those of
us who benefit from it
Paulo Ferreira said that true justice
liberate the oppressor as well as the
oppressed I treasure the memory of a
white student too for a project in my
class chose to attend a black lives
matter March she came back and reported
there was one moment during that March
when the police began to close basically
the public crowd and one of the
organizers
white allies to the front and dere was
my student holding hands the circle with
other well-dressed white people
protecting the marchers in the middle
now she wasn’t using her privilege to
seize the microphone she wasn’t using
her purpose to take over she was using
it to keep lines of communication open
for others to use their voice she came
back to the shy student of mine more
confident and empowered than I had ever
seen her before I have seldom been so
proud so many of my students come to
high school already possessing the
skills to write effectively or to score
well on tests that they don’t need me
for that what they even teach or more
often than not just a helpful CSUN
meaning and what they’re doing in this
building everyday beyond just I’ve got
to get good grades good to a good
college to get a good job because that’s
the script
I’ve been slogging through my entire
life looking at social justice might not
necessarily turn them into the world
changers but it just might help them see
some purpose in education but I do
believe in the power even small acts to
make the world more just because I’ve
been their beneficiary – when I first
began working at this school we didn’t
know Placido Jewish High Holidays but
eventually a faculty meeting was
convened to debate the merits of
changing that policy now I kept largely
quiet and it have it in me to be the
Jewish event near that day except to
propose that the name the motion on the
floor which was elimination of religious
holidays be renamed to reflect what it
really was elimination of Jewish
religious holidays I mean after all
nobody was pretty Christmas on the
chopping block no sooner did I say that
but a colleague of mine rose to his feet
face red
the same kind of anger I recognized all
too well for my students and said oh
come on Christmas is not American
holiday I didn’t feel like rising to the
bait
but then something remarkable happened a
Christian colleague of my students it
excuse me I find that remark offensive
what about our Greek colleagues they
celebrate Christmas in January what
about our Latino colleagues the three
kings day who are you to say those
holidays deserves to be called American
and whose dumped now I don’t remember
what the final vote tally was but I
would always remember that colleague
because he could have stayed at his
comfort zone but instead he decided to
give up that privilege and stand up and
when he spoke suddenly this became more
than just a Jewish issue it became an
issue that affected the entire community
for which everyone was responsible it’s
awful
imagine a world like that a world where
people are willing to give up comfort
and privilege because they know that
injustice affects all of us and there
are concrete things they can do about it
but that world’s not going to happen by
itself people aren’t born knowing how to
do that they have to be taught that’s
what I’m proposing for suburban
education reform without which I think
any other attempted education reform or
social reform at all is only going to be
addressing half the issue it’ll be
challenging like everything that educate
challenger but don’t give up on these kids we can’t afford thank you
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