By Adam Bessie.

1.      In terms of a response to the Michael Brown shooting, what is our responsibility as educators and citizens who care about social justice? 

Without doubt, there is a cone of silence around race in the education dialogue from white teachers – and I include myself in this.   Part of this is because there are very real institutional and political pressures keeping all teachers from breaking this cone – see, for example, the Illinois district which forbade teachers from talking about Michael Brown’s killing, and insisted teachers change the subject if students bring it up. More broadly, as Paul Thomas (a white educator) observed in an elegant essay on Brown’s death and the subsequent censorship at Edwardsville school, this silencing is part of the essential structure of the education reform movement, one that seeks to pretend schools are “objective” places, where somehow society stops at the door: “Schools have long been driven by a workplace model honoring ‘time on task’ over relevance to students’ lives, but the current ‘accountability’ era has rendered schools places where nothing is relevant unless it is tested—including tragedies.”[1]

But the reform forces work to silence all teachers, not just white ones.   For white teachers in particular, I think there other specific barriers to talking openly about race – even for those teachers, like myself, who work with populations that have a lot in common with Ferguson.  Indeed, almost every semester teaching community college near Oakland, I have a young African American or Latino male who knows somebody who was recently shot and killed. And while I work with these students daily, and I see the pain and struggle, I am adjacent to their pains, rather than within them.  I care deeply, but I haven’t lived in the communities that these students have, nor have I walked in my own community as them, as a minority on campus.   I can see how they feel; we can (and do) talk about it – but I’m not in their shoes.    Thus, it’s challenging to feel that I have the authority or ability to accurately, appropriately, or effectively speak to the challenges I see these students face.

Thus, for me as a white educator, to break this cone of silence, the first step in response to the tragic killing of Michael Brown is not in speaking, but in listening – which is what great educators do.  Listening carefully is the only way to educate: then, with listening, comes questions, dialogue, and hopefully understanding; and from this place, a truly-student centered place, can a human-centric curriculum be built (as opposed to a standardized, automated, one).  Beyond this, it’s about creating space for conversation – spiritual space, intellectual space, empathic space, pedagogical space.     And creating space for an honest, messy dialogue around race is a truly revolutionary act, given the “status-quo” of the NCLB era, where there is no space by design.

2. What are some productive ways to initiate and engage in dialogue with others on issues of racism

Time – yes, as mundane as this sounds, I think educators of all levels simply need time built into the day to talk.  Much of the “prep time” is just about survival – getting the final touches on a lesson complete, making photocopies, remembering to finish roll.  And much of the time when departments or schools are given the time to talk, it’s consumed not by real talk about the classroom, by collaboration, but about test prep, adhering to new policies, and paperwork.  It’s being talked at, instead of talked with – a critical distinction. Without time, there isn’t physical space to talk.  Thus, the school needs to prioritize time to authentically talk and collaborate – to institutionalize dialogue between all involved.

But time to talk isn’t enough – there needs to be a will to prioritize difficult discussion about race and culture.  And if one is teaching at a school which serves a diverse population, and if the school cares about a student-centered pedagogy, then race is a natural and critical part of this dialogue.

An excellent example of providing both the space to talk, coupled with an effective focus for the conversation, came from my community college a few years back.  Our campus’ professional development committee designed a Book of the Year project focused on  Claude Steele’s powerful Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us (and What We Can Do).  The book – which reports Steele’s decades long research on the phenomenon of “stereotype threat,” a theory which vividly explains the very real consequences of negative stereotypes, especially in a classroom setting. The book is research-driven, clearly written, provocative, but compassion – perfect, in short, for inviting questions, exploration, and fruitful dialogue. Everyone – faculty, management, classified, students – was invited to pick up a copy of the book (for free) if they committed to attend one or more of the discussions.    Faculty could earn their mandatory professional development hours for attending.  Thus, by investing in professional development (the “free books”), and giving instructors credit for attend, the institution supported the dialogue.

Not surprisingly, the conversations about Whistling Vivaldi didn’t stay in the official discussion sessions: they floated into department meetings, conversations between classes, and ultimately, into the classrooms themselves.   These conversations turned not just into practice, but programs (such as a new mentoring program, and thoughtfully designed learning communities) to reduce the barriers our underrepresented students face.

But this is just the start.  We, like most schools and college, have a lot of work to do.

Ultimately, it’s not enough to say – let’s talk about race! If it’s going to be a sustainable and productive discussion, as we’ve started to have at my college, there needs to be a real institutional commitment – in terms of time and money – to create the space to dialogue (between teachers, students, admin.. classified, and the community), and use this dialogue to improve the institution from the ground up.

3. What are some pitfalls to avoid? 

My step-father in law is Afro-Caribbean, and works as a contractor – he can fix about anything I can break; one of my best friends and colleagues is African-American, Harvard educated, and read War and Peace over the summer, for pleasure (and can’t fix much for the life of him).  They have common skin color, but otherwise, are profoundly different people, with profoundly different personal, professional, and to a large degree, cultural histories.   Someone who glanced at them would say they are both “black” –  true, but there is significantly more complexity in their experiences, which are tied up in race (and not).   And if I didn’t know either of them, and they walked into my class as students, I might notice that they are “black” first – but this wouldn’t be enough information to educate, not by a long shot.

Even defining what “black” is, distinguishing the “black experience” (or any race’s experience, for that matter), is incredibly complex – and the pitfall here is cognitive shorthand, the desire to simplify, to express the problem in easily comprehendible and easily accessible terms, and especially, feel-good sloganeering.  This pitfall – of reducing race and racism to easily consumable, bit-sized, morsel statement – is easy to find on Twitter, where the forum can encourage this kind of engagement.    It’s also easy to find in hallways at your local school or college, which will be filled with polished posters and district-mandated mission statements that sound a lot like Twitter hashtags, proclaiming the value of “Diversity” and the school being a “Hate Free Zone.”  Noble sentiments, and ones I believe.  The pitfall, though, is that they can be just statements, and not realities which are understood in any deep or significant way.

Most of all, when educators find themselves in a system which is time-starved, in a system where there isn’t space to speak, it is more tempting to avoid complexity, to avoid the messy, and revert to heart-warming, but fundamentally shallow aphorisms about being “Colorblind.”

4. Where can these dialogues lead us?

Inevitably, our conversations about race and racism must lead us into direct conflict with the status quo – No Child Left Behind, which places standards first, and children last.   Standardized testing is a pedagogy of sameness, of placing diverse students into identical standards; this cannot co-exist with an anti-racist pedagogy, which to my mind is student-centered, beginning with the human being, and working towards growth – academically, emotionally, physically, socially, and democratically.  This is not to say that objectives shouldn’t exist, nor that students shouldn’t be challenged, as is often the straw-man critique of student-centered pedagogy – no, it is the basic acknowledgement that for students to achieve goals, for students to learn, we must first know where they are starting, so we can move forward together.

Further, to dialogue about race – to really, deeply, truly talk about it, beyond the progressive sloganeering used to sell these fundamentally regressive education policies – we need to slow down.  These conversations are complex – intellectually, emotionally, socially – and thus, can’t be done on the quick and cheap.  In the era of “Race to the Top,” where acceleration reigns, there isn’t time to for this kind of talk, just to follow directions (and hopefully get your copies done).

A real “disruptive change” in education is not a newer, faster iPad – no, in my mind, it’s giving educators the space and support needed to develop an authentically “personalized” educational experience, via these meaningful conversations with each other, with students, with the communities they serve.

But reforming the schools isn’t enough.

At the same time, our dialogues must lead us beyond the classroom, to working with the Ferguson in our backyard, in our own neighborhood, which may well be ravaged by poverty, racism and violence; our dialogues must lead us to towards democratic and economic opportunities that have been long deprived to too many.

[1] Mark Naison also has a wonderful discussion of reform as a means to avoid discussion race and class in “Elite Attackers of Public Schools Don’t Admit the Impact of Economic Inequality, Racism on Education.”

Adam Bessie is a professor of English at a Northern California community college and an essayist, in comics and words.  Bessie is a regular Truthout contributor, and his writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, AlterNet, and in the Project Censored book series, among others. Follow him on Twitter: @adambessie.