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Resources

Christy Clark-Pujara

Transcript

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: My people are from Kelly, Georgia, which is a little more than an hour's drive east of Atlanta. There they experienced the horror of enslavement and the joy of emancipation. My great-grandfather was born there around 1870. He was the first in my family born free on American soil, and I was born a century later, a world away in Brooklyn, New York.

Growing up in Brooklyn, all of the family members I knew lived in and around New York. And while I did think about the enslavement of my ancestors, I didn't dwell on slavery itself. Just about everything I had been taught in school about the peculiar institution focused on the cotton-producing South. And every time I checked, there weren't any cotton fields in New York City. But I began to think differently when I enrolled at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

At Morehouse, my dorm room could have easily been mistaken for a shrine to New York. Together with my roommate, who also hailed from the city, every inch of every wall was plastered with reminders of the Big Apple. There was a poster for Mo' Better Blues, a Spike Lee joint, pennants for the Mets and the Yankees. I was a Mets fan, of course, and he was the Yankees fan. And even a New York City street sign, but don't ask us how we got that.

And much to the chagrin of my professors, I didn't confine my New York nationalism to my dorm room. I freely shared it in the classroom including during discussions about slavery in America. I don't remember exactly what I said in my freshman history class about American slavery that day, but it was some wisecrack about slavery being basically a Southern thing. I do remember exactly how Dr. Windham responded. "Brother," he said, "you got a lot to learn." And he was right.

So I did what many people believe is impossible for New Yorkers to do. I shut up, I listened and I learned. I learned about the practice of slavery in the North, about the critical role that the region played in maintaining the institution, first by financing the transatlantic slave trade and then by fueling demand for products produced by enslaved people. I learned that slavery was anything but a Southern thing.

At the end of my freshman year, I drove with my uncle out to Kelly, Georgia, and visited the gravesite of my great-grandfather for the first time. As my uncle and I stood quietly by ourselves in a dense thicket of underbrush, he began to tell me about our family's post-slavery history, from Georgia to Ohio to New Jersey and to New York. It was an extension of the lessons on slavery that Dr. Windham had taught me all year, that colonies and states like Georgia and New York were interconnected and interdependent from slavery onward. Thinking back on it, I find it more than a little ironic that I had to go south to learn about the North.

I'm Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and this is Teaching Hard History: American Slavery. It's a special series from Teaching Tolerance, a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This podcast provides an in-depth look at how to teach important aspects of the history of American slavery. In each episode, we explore a different topic, walking you through historical concepts, raising questions for discussion, suggesting useful source material and offering practical classroom exercises.

Talking with students about slavery can be emotional and complex. This podcast is a resource for navigating those challenges so teachers and students can develop a deeper understanding of the history and legacy of American slavery. In this episode, we're going to confront and challenge the notion that slavery was simply a Southern institution. Historian Christy Clark-Pujara will explain how commerce in the North was integral to perpetuating slavery, and how the Northern economy was in many ways built on its active participation in the institution. She'll share a framework for exploring these connections in the classroom, along with several rich examples.

And understanding the role of slavery in the Northern economy ultimately raises important questions for students about how to understand America and its economy today. I'll see you on the other side. Enjoy.

Christy Clark-Pujara: We misunderstand the institution of slavery when we only locate it on the plantation. We misunderstand the history of the United States as a whole when we do not acknowledge that the institution of slavery was national, rather than regional. Moreover, when we don't acknowledge the role that Northern colonist and citizens played in the maintenance of the institution of slavery, we misunderstand the institution.

Slave plantations did not exist in isolation. It's the people outside the plantation that bring the captives, that bring food, clothing, wood and other basic necessity. It's the people outside of the plantation that transport the goods produced by captive workers. They were dependent upon the activities of people outside of the plantation for those places to thrive and exist.

When we think of slavery as simply a Southern institution, rather than a national one, the erasure or marginalization of the Northern black experience and the centrality of the business of slavery to the Northern economy allows for a dangerous fiction: that the North has no history of racism to overcome. It also feeds into a false narrative that black people were not part of the founding of the Northern colonies, and they were.

We think that the North has no need to redress institutional racism or work toward reconciliation. In other words, that contemporary racial disparities are not grounded in history, but are rather a reflection of poor personal choices or even worse, innate inferiority. So understanding, fully understanding, how and why the institution of slavery is central to understanding American history shapes how we see ourselves today.

The business of slavery, as all economic activity that was directly related to the maintenance of slaveholding in the Americas, specifically the buying and selling of people, foods and goods that made plantations possible. How did enslaved people get brought to the plantation? How were they fed? How were they clothed? Where did the seeds come from? Where did the money come from to invest in those places? Where do the products leave from and how do they leave?

Understanding that the plantation didn't exist in isolation; the business of slavery was essential to the institution of slavery. Our understanding of slavery has grown tremendously in the last several decades, but our understanding has been dominated by a few particular visions of enslaved people, particularly the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade, and people toiling under the threat of the lash in the hot sun.

These depictions are accurate. However, they are not solitary. Enslaved people labored in small households throughout the Northeast. Enslaved people labored on docks. Enslaved people labored on slave ships. Examining the business of slavery allows for a fuller picture of the economic systems that sustained and maintained race-based slavery throughout the Americas. It was the business of slavery that allowed New England to become an economic powerhouse without ever producing a single staple or cash crop.

Furthermore, enslaved and free black people called the Northern colonies and states home, and the history of those places remain incomplete without a full accounting of the experiences of black people in those places. Without a full accounting of the role that enslaved and free black people played and the centrality of the business of slavery in the founding, the maintenance and the economic ascent of the United States, objections to righting the wrongs of the nation's past will remain.

Whether it is Affirmative Action at our institutions of higher education or addressing racial disparities in mass incarceration, we must remember that our interpretations of the past shape who we think of as worthy, contributing members of our nation. In many ways, slavery, the stalled emancipation process and circumscribed black freedom cast people of African descent as apart from the nation, even though their labors were central to its creation. A lack of understanding of how race-based slavery and its legacies marginalized an entire race of people for centuries serves to further ostracize people of African descent today.

So I'm going to give three examples of the business of slavery in the North. The first is the West Indian trade, the second is the Atlantic slave trade. And the final example is going to be about the modern economy in the 19th century and the textile industry, particularly around the commodity of cotton.

First, the West Indian trade. Sugar production forever changed the Western diet and waistline. The first plantations in the Americas began operating in the 17th century. And in the Americas, sugar was cultivated in the Caribbean. As the demand for sugar grew and becomes insatiable, just as it is now, these plantations would become increasingly dependent on Northern American colonists.

Most of the land in the Caribbean is going to be used for sugar production, so they imported all of their food and their necessities. And New England farmers and merchants acted as the grocers and the big box stores for the West Indian sugar plantations. There's this constant demand for sugar, and so all the arable land is being used for sugar. That means you need to import all of your food. It means you need to import wood because you have to boil sugar at the end of the production process. It means that you import candles because these sugar mills are running 24 hours a day, and you also need candles to light your home. It means that you are importing clothing. It means you're importing all the basic necessities of life.

And New Englanders provided those necessities. New Englanders supplied enslavers in the West Indies, "the West Indies" and "the Caribbean" are used interchangeably, with captive laborers, with livestock, with dairy products, with fish, with candles and lumber. The plantations cannot run without these imports from the outside because plantations do not exist in isolation.

In return, New Englanders received molasses, which is a byproduct of sugar production, it's the runoff, which they distilled into rum. Rum becomes a major export out of New England. In Rhode Island, it's the number one export. In the city of Newport alone, there were 16 distilleries. And in the 18th century, rum becomes its own form of currency. Then and now, liquor always has a market. But in a place like Rhode Island, the connections were even more salient. And I'll just give you an example of what I mean.

Local slave labor played a key role in the growth of commerce. Moreover, the abundant plantations of the West Indies provided farmers and merchants with a market for their slave-produced products. And so, farmers in the Narragansett country, this is the southern half of Rhode Island, put thousands of enslaved men, women and children to work producing foodstuffs and raising livestock for the West Indian trade. You have enslaved people in southern Rhode Island growing foodstuffs for enslaved people in the West Indies.

Merchants in Newport and Providence transported local agriculture, especially livestock and cheese, to the sugar plantations in the West Indies in exchange for molasses. The same merchants then brought back molasses to Rhode Island and sold it to local distillers, who then used it to make rum, the colony's number one export. And so, this bilateral trade was the cornerstone of the economy in Rhode Island.

Now, I'd like to move on to the Atlantic slave trade, which complemented the West Indian trade. I'll start with the story of a slave ship. In 1773, the sloop sailed out of Newport, Rhode Island. The ship was owned by Christopher and George Champlin. In addition to the captain and officers, there were 11 sailors aboard the ship. The bulk of the departing cargo consisted of local products.

The Adventure was outfitted with handcuffs and shackles made by local blacksmiths, 26 gallons of vinegar, pork, beef, sugar, molasses, wine, beans, tobacco, butter, bread and flour. This food was to feed the crew and enslaved people on the return voyage. But the vast majority of the cargo space was reserved for locally distilled rum-24,380 gallons of rum-which was enough to purchase several dozen enslaved captives. Enslaved women cost an average of 190 gallons, and men averaged 220 gallons.

The Adventure reached Africa in five weeks. It took the captain four months of cruising along the coast to acquire 62 slaves, along with rice, pepper, palm oil and gold dust. Fifty-eight captives survived, and they were sold in Granada for between 35 and 39 pounds. The ship's owners received a 5 percent return on their investment. Such voyages were common in Rhode Island. Slave-trading voyages produced profits from 2 to 10 percent. Most voyages yielded returns of 5 or 6 percent. And while these profit margins may seem low by contemporary investment standards, investments in the Atlantic slave trade were less risky and more liquid and needed less time to garner returns than all other forms of possible investment in the 18th century.

But it isn't just the transfer of captives from Point A to Point B. The Atlantic slave trade creates a whole other economy within itself, and especially in relation to the bilateral trade between the Northern colonies and the West Indies. It's important that we think about the wider implications of the West Indian and Atlantic slave trades.

Shipbuilders, sailors, corkers, sailmakers, carpenters, blacksmiths, painters, stevedores were all employed by the West Indian and Atlantic slave trades. Coopers made barrels that stored the rum which was exchanged for enslaved people, who were sold throughout the Americas. Clerks, scribes and warehouse overseers conducted the business of the trade. Outfitting even the smallest ship required a small army of tradesmen.

African slave-trading voyages also required additional crew to control and manage the human captives, usually twice as many than a commodity's trade. Merchants, many of whom were slave traders, paid significant taxes to the cities for public works. For example, the duties collected on the purchase and sale of enslaved people in Rhode Island were used to pave the streets of Newport. So whether or not you owned a slave, you benefited from the business of slavery.

In the classroom, I've given my students the bare-bones information about the sloop Adventure. And then I ask them, "What else can we learn about how the economy and society functioned in order for this transaction to have taken place?" And for the most part, students get it almost immediately. They say, "Well, somebody had to build the ship." Okay, so we've got shipbuilders and carpenters and they're like, "Well, someone had to load the ship." And where did they get the stuff from that was on the ship? So that's local farmers.

And then they think about, "Well, where did we get the rum from?" Well, the rum came from local distilleries. And then, they begin to start to understand that an entire economy was caught up on that ship, from tradesmen to distillers, to merchants, to farmers. And then, they start thinking about, "Okay, who's on that ship and what kind of food are they eating, and is this a food they're familiar with?"

"And then, they get sold to a place that they know nothing about, to do work they've never done before. And then that ship comes back home to Rhode Island to do it all over again." Something that a student pointed out to me once was that he tended to think about a profession like a blacksmith in a rather benign way. These ships are outfitted with dozens and dozens of shackles. And when you examine how the sloop Adventure made its money, shackles become incredibly important. That's how you kept the people bound who were later sold.

So I give them the bare bones and then ask them, "What does it tell us about our society? What does this tell us about our economy?" And they also get the social component of it; that this is a place where holding certain people as property is normative, acknowledged and respected. Slave traders were not maligned. They were elites, and so it tells us a lot about how a society functioned.

There was slave labor in the North from the colonial period through the American Revolution. Slaveholding was socially acceptable, legally sanctioned and widely practiced in the North. But after the American Revolution, slavery, as an institution, slaveholding as a practice, begins to fall apart in the North. Slavery dies out in these places. The primary reason is the business of slavery was always more important in the North than slave labor itself, and most Northerners are opposed to slavery's expansion, not its existence.

Moving on to the modern economy, and cotton in the 19th century and how it transforms the U.S. economy really is the engine behind the U.S. economic ascent in the 19th century, making the U.S. an economic powerhouse in the world. The history of slavery isn't something that we cannot connect with. In fact, I'm willing to bet that every person listening has a direct connection to slavery that they just don't know about.

Just to give you an example, if you own a pair of jeans, if you've ever worn a pair of jeans, if you've ever bought a pair of jeans, you are intimately connected to the history of slavery in this country. Levi Strauss buys its patent from a textile mill in Rhode Island after the American Civil War. The mill was no longer manufacturing slave clothing, but the patent that was bought was a patent that had manufactured slave clothing. It was called " Negro cloth." It was a coarse cotton wool material made especially to minimize the cost of clothing enslaved people in the American South. It was tough. It was durable, it washed well and it was designed for enslaved people on America's plantations.

Enslaved African Americans in the Southern United States produced the bulk of the world's cotton and almost all of the cotton consumed by the U.S. textile industry during the antebellum era. Northerners, especially New Yorkers, were buying, selling and shipping it. By 1860, cotton represented more than half of all of U.S. exports, and lower Manhattan was populated with cotton brokers, bankers, merchants, shippers, auctioneers and insurers who profited from that export. Only New York banks were big enough to extend a massive lines of credit to plantation owners so they could buy seed, farming equipment and people. New York was also home to the water- and rail- transportation companies that shipped cotton from the South to the North.

When we think about the Industrial Revolution, when we think about public investment in rail lines and shipping industry, we often don't think about it in conjunction with the institution of slavery. But it was the institution of slavery and cotton that was the impetus for it all. Over the 19th century, the textile industry transformed Northern towns. By 1852, the industry employed 14 percent of the labor force, and by 1860, New England was home to 472 cotton mills.

These textile factories were often the sole employers in towns throughout the region. And they were a direct link between Northern advancement and wealth, and Southern slavery. Textile mills are just one example. Manufacturing plants throughout the North, and in New England in particular, that produced farming implements, who are they selling those farming implements to? Southern plantation owners to be used by enslaved people.

Factories that produced shoes were often making shoes for enslaved people who wore them out in the fields. So the manufacturing industry, as it existed in the 19th century, was directly connected to the American plantation. Rhode Island, again, provides a salient example of the connection between Northern investment and Southern slaveholding.

Between 1800 and 1860, more than 80 Negro cloth mills opened in Rhode Island. Twenty-two Rhode Island towns and cities manufactured Negro cloth for over 60 years. More than 80 Rhode Island families owned part of a Negro cloth mill at some point in the 19th century. By mid-century, 79 percent of all Rhode Island textile mills manufactured slave clothing. In the famed Lowell Mills, about a third of all textiles produced were destined for Southern markets, plantations in particular.

The look and feel of a city like New York was transformed by those who were invested in cotton, invested in the business of slavery. The now-infamous Lehman Brothers began as cotton brokers. The first Morgan fortune was made by Charles Morgan, who was a steamship captain and merchant whose shipping line dominated the Gulf coastline, transporting enslaved captives from the upper South to the deep South. So enslaved people were sold by the tens of thousands and then the hundreds of thousands, the estimate is over a million enslaved people were sold from the upper South, the Chesapeake, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware to the new South or the deep South to grow cotton in places like Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

Some of them walked through forced migrations, others went by water. Charles Morgan transported people by water from the upper South to New Orleans to Galveston, Texas. That's how the Morgan fortune was first built. You also have people like Alexander Stewart who was a cotton merchant who opened the United States' first department store in New York City in 1848. New York remains a fashion capital of the world and its first department store was opened with investments in slave-picked cotton.

When I teach these connections and the bright line starts showing up for students, what most really begin to grapple with is the understanding that the sin of slavery is national. That whether or not you ever owned a slave, you benefited from slavery if you live and function in this country. And that is a difficult pill for many of my students to swallow: that we all have benefited from slavery because the United States became what it was through the exploitation of millions of people of African descent. To understand that when people say slavery built the United States, that it's not hyperbole or just something you say to be sensational, but just a reflection of the truth and what that means for racial disparities today.

But then the next thing I see is a realization that people of African descent are an essential part of this place, that it's not an add-on. I teach African-American history classes and what I am most trying to do is to get students to understand that African-American history isn't an additive. It's central to understanding American history. You don't know who you are as an American unless you know the story of slavery.

History at its best is not about the past. It's about the present and how we function in the present. And when students begin to understand that slavery is central to the history of the United States, current conflicts and debates about race in this country will have real meaning to them because they'll understand that the stakes are not about what's happening right now, but what's been happening since 1607, and why we have such racial disparities and divides. These are not a function of the last 50 years or hundred years. They're a function of hundreds of years.

And if we're going to really understand who we are as a nation-who contributed, who built, who belongs, who's a part of-we have to reckon with this history. The most common response I get from students is, "Why didn't I know this? Why don't we talk about these things?" And the fact of the matter is our students are going to have to exist and function in an increasingly multiracial, multi-country and global world, and we do them a grave disservice when we let our discomfort in talking about race shape how we teach and what we teach. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to our students and we owe it to our nation to tell the most complete, honest picture of how we got to where we are.

They turn on the news, they see the headlines. We have an opportunity to provide them with the proper context to understand that. And more importantly, we can provide them with the proper contacts to act differently, to speak differently, to get involved in local, to get involved with local initiatives and community service. A lot is at stake. This is not academic. It's not just about changing what's in a history book. It's about how we function in the world, how we talk to each other, how we interact with people we work with, how we include or exclude groups of people in our neighborhood. It's about our very humanity.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries: Christy Clark-Pujara is an associate professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the department of Afro-Americans Studies. She's the author of Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island, and is currently working on a book about black people in the Wisconsin territory from the French colonial period through the American Civil War. Teaching Hard History is a podcast from Teaching Tolerance with special thanks to the University of Wisconsin Press. They're the publishers of a valuable collection of essays called Understanding and Teaching American Slavery.

In each episode, we're featuring a different scholar to talk about material from a chapter they authored in that collection. We've also adapted their recommendations into a set of teaching materials available at tolerance.org. These materials include over 100 primary sources, sample units and a detailed framework for teaching about the history of American slavery. Teaching Tolerance is a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center, providing free resources to educators who work with children from kindergarten through high school. You can find those resources online at tolerance.org.

Thanks to Dr. Clark-Pujara for sharing her insights with us. This podcast was produced by Shea Shackleford with production assistance from Tori Marlin and David Macasaet at L & S Learning Support Services at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Our theme song is "Kerr's Negro Jig" by the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who graciously let us use it for this series.

And if you like what we're doing, please share it with your friends and colleagues, and consider taking a minute to review and rate us on iTunes. We appreciate the feedback and it helps us get more visibility among potential listeners. I'm Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, associate professor of history at The Ohio State University and your host. You've been listening to Teaching Hard History: American Slavery.

References

Robert Champlin, A Rhode Island slaver; trade book of the sloop Adventure, 1773-1774

Rhode Island Historical Society, Christopher Champlin Papers

History Channel, Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis receive patent for blue jeans

Washington Post, In search of slave clothes: A museum director's hunt for a painful symbol ("Negro cloth")

Library of Congress, The African American Odyssey: Free Blacks in the Antebellum Period

National Park Service, Lowell's (Mass.) Southern Connection

Harvard Business School, Lehman Brothers

Bethany Jay and Cynthia Lynn Lyerly, Understanding and Teaching American Slavery

Learning for Justice, What Learning About Slavery Can Teach Us About Ourselves

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In the spring of 2020, with Maryland's stay-at-home order lifted, a new ritual was born on a cul-de-sac in North Baltimore's affluent Homeland neighborhood. A group of moms gathered on Friday evenings to commiserate about the sudden pivot to remote learning. Seated in physically distanced chairs under a maple tree, Annette Anderson and her friends talked about the stresses of managing their own jobs while overseeing their children's schoolwork. As summer arrived, the weekly conversations turned to speculation over the Baltimore City Public Schools plan for reopening in the fall. Other moms were clearly ready to turn their children back over to full-time teachers. But Anderson was a firm no.

The Black mother of three had watched her children blossom during the spring semester. Freed from transporting three teens-a sophomore, an eighth grader, and a seventh grader-to athletic games and extracurriculars, Anderson (no relation to me) was more engaged in their lives, and her children were thriving academically, more attuned to their online classes and more self-directed in their learning. She was also skeptical that Baltimore schools had figured out how to do in-person instruction safely. As the deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, she spends her days giving policymakers the tools they need to make evidence-based decisions. Conflicting research on safely reopening schools, coupled with a lack of direction from the federal level, told her it was better to sit this one out.

"At the same time that people were talking about reopening, we were seeing [COVID-19] case numbers go up astronomically," she recalled. "There was no clear guidance. It was just, 'Trust us, send the kids back, and it'll be okay.'" When Anderson queried other Black families to see how they were feeling, she discovered she was not alone.

"If they didn't keep my children safe before COVID, why would I think that they would now?"

Few issues this year have been as rife with division and drama as the on-again, off-again efforts of school districts to restart in-person learning. President Biden vowed to open most public schools in his first 100 days-but his pledge was quickly scaled back to only a majority of elementary schools. Both Republican and Democratic governors have directed schools to open; teachers unions have balked at returning until staff is vaccinated; and parents across the political spectrum have protested and petitioned to resume in-person learning. Citing the need to reduce COVID-related learning gaps and provide working parents some relief, education systems sought to bring at least some younger students back to classrooms.

Amid the fierce debate, Black parents across the country have largely resisted the push to return to public schools. According to a December report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 62 percent of white parents strongly or somewhat agreed that school should reopen this fall, while less than half of Black parents agreed. In a Pew Research survey conducted in mid-February, Black adults were the most likely of all racial groups to worry about the health risks of reopening-80 percent of Black adults wanted kids to stay remote until teachers were vaccinated, for example, while only 51 percent of white adults felt the same.

And no wonder: The pandemic has dealt a disproportionately heavy blow to Black Americans. According to CDC data published in September, Black youth accounted for 29 percent of COVID-19 deaths among people under 21, twice the percentage for white youth. The federal agency also found Black children under 18 at a significantly higher risk of hospitalization-almost four times higher than white children and teens.

Families across racial and ethnic groups are worried about the risks of returning to classrooms. But what sets so many Black parents apart is the acute distrust underlying their doubts-doubts shaped by generations of racial discrimination and institutional inequality. The long history of racism in public schooling-from de facto segregation and funding inequities to the overpolicing of Black bodies-as well as the systemic racism that impedes access to and delivery of quality health care for Black people, permeates their thinking and actions. As districts try to salvage this school year and reset for the next one with ramped-up testing, reconfigured classrooms, and refurbished ventilation systems, the overarching and unanswered question remains: Will Black parents return?

In Central Harlem, community activist Tanesha Grant said the track record of the city's Department of Education is abysmal, leaving her unconvinced that its schools are safe. "It's very hard to trust anything that DOE says because, dealing with them as an education advocate, they lie a lot," she said. Her 13-year-old son attends school in Manhattan's predominantly Black and Latinx District 5, which has been marked by decades of neglect. Grant was not persuaded by the district's pitch for in-person learning. After years of battling for equitable resources in one of the country's most segregated school systems, the promises rang hollow.

"If they didn't keep my children safe before COVID, why would I think that they would now?" she said. "All the pandemic has done is made a situation that was already horrible almost unbearable...These buildings are old and don't have proper ventilation. They don't have the supplies they need, and they don't even have nurses."

A noticeable race and class divide-between mostly white, affluent families and low-income communities of color-has surfaced in the discourse over opening schools. Yet Grant dismissed the argument made by some that schools should reopen for the sake of lower-income Black children whose academic progress is hindered by keeping them home. "There are single mothers out here teaching their children by themselves," she said, noting the suddenness of white parents' interest in equity. Grant knew that her son could work remotely; he just needed adequate technology. Well into November, some 60,000 New York City students were still waiting for devices to participate in remote learning. With many students in Harlem affected, Grant founded Parents Supporting Parents NY to supply laptops to Black families left unserved. The nonprofit has distributed more than 100 laptops this school year.

According to Pew's findings, a majority of white adults say the prospect of students falling behind academically and the negative impact of school closures on students' emotional well-being should weigh heavily in reopening decisions. But Black children's parents, grandparents, and extended family members are dying from COVID, Grant said, and "no one's even thinking about that. We're all talking about learning. How is a child going to learn anything when they're in constant grief?" She also rejected the notion- offered by the New York Times' David Brooks and others-that Black parents choosing to stay remote are victims of fearmongering. "I know too many people that have died. I saw the bodies piled up in the back of the trucks," Grant said, recalling the peak of the pandemic in April of last year when mobile morgues lined the city's streets. "They're insinuating that we're ignorant...That's just gaslighting." The COVID risk to Black families is real, she stated, noting that many live in multigenerational households and get very different care when they go to the hospital. "We know our child could bring this home to us."

Confronting the distrust of parents like Grant starts with acknowledging their lived experience. "You are coming up against the weight of 400 years of anti-Blackness and racialized caste-making in the United States," said historian Dan Royles, an assistant professor at Florida International University who has studied and written on the intersection of race, science, and medicine. The historical roots of Black parents' distrust can be traced to centuries of structural racism in the institution of public schooling. Educational apartheid has relegated Black children to underfunded and inferior schools from the emancipation of formerly enslaved people through today. Volumes of research reveal biased assumptions and beliefs about Black students' intellect and potential. And the overwhelming dissatisfaction with the quality of schooling Black children receive is a matter of record: A 2017 survey found that 74 percent of Black parents and family members believe the education Black students receive is worse than the education delivered to white students. Entrenched racism is a longstanding and persistent feature of American public education.

Black parents want to be heard, and beyond COVID protocols, they are now saying, "Fix the buildings, fix the school culture, fix the curriculum," Anderson said.

It's understandable that Black families would be wary of sending their children back to school, he said, when public policy decisions "at every level are made in ways that devalue Black life of all ages"-and, what's more, when "science has been used to justify your oppression."

Well-known stories of racist medical abuse, such as the Tuskegee Experiment-in which government researchers deliberately withheld penicillin from Black men to track the progression of untreated syphilis-and the case of Henrietta Lacks-in which a Black woman's cells were taken without her consent and used in biomedical research-resonate in Black communities because medical mistreatment is an everyday phenomenon, Royles explained. "Sending your kids back to school might lead to someone in your household getting infected, and you also know that if they do, they're likely to receive substandard care," he said. Underpinning Black parents' distrust is the fact that they won't get "the same quality of treatment that white folks with COVID get," he added. Schools should take the concerns of Black parents seriously rather than approaching them in a patronizing or transactional way-"'What can I do to signal that I understand for this moment, so that you'll do the thing that I want you to do?'" as Royles put it.

School districts have experienced a huge breakdown of trust with Black families and will need to put in a lot of energy and effort to coax them back, said Kayla Patrick, a senior policy analyst for the Education Trust, a national advocacy group focused on historically underserved students. This will involve more than delivering COVID-safe buildings. "'Safely' means making sure that there's a positive environment, that Black students feel welcome, and that they are treated with respect," she said, referring to recent incidents of school resource officers assaulting Black children on reopened school campuses.

Particularly in school systems where Black students make up a sizable portion of the enrollment, the fervor to reopen schools despite Black families' reluctance sends the unspoken message that schools aren't listening to the needs of many parents and children. As a case in point, Grant cited parents' unmet demands to improve remote learning in New York City with higher-quality devices and more mental health services. "Black children are not a monolith," Patrick said. She emphasized that there are Black children who may need in-person learning support, "but there are many Black children who are doing just fine" in this moment. "We need to make sure that we are giving each group of Black children exactly what they need."

Yolanda P. Corbett, a Black mother in Washington, DC, has watched the city's reopening preparations, and she worries that she and her three sons-ages 6, 13, and 14-will be penalized for her choice not to participate in in-person schooling. Will DCPS make adjustments for families like hers? "Where will the staff come from to give us that individual attention when our children are not understanding the work?" she asked. "Will the message be that in-person is the norm, we gave you an option, and you could've gotten better service if you came into the building?"

The apprehensions are justified. Corbett lives in Ward 7, a high-poverty, majority-Black section of DC that is routinely overlooked and underserved-what she described as "a discarded population." The single mom's decision to stay remote-despite the demands of work and educating her youngest-was informed by a yearslong struggle to revamp the neighborhood's aging schools. Black parents organized and complained about the lack of air conditioning in the schools, lobbying every budget cycle for more funding to improve HVAC units and other facilities. They were continually thwarted by other budgetary demands.

Given that her two youngest children are severely asthmatic, Corbett was unpersuaded by the arguments for returning. Parents "have a clear understanding that you couldn't have possibly fixed all of these issues," she said. "There's not enough solid evidence to see why, as an organizer, I should tell parents to really consider the in-person model."

At the same time, she wrestles with virtual schooling for her oldest son, who is autistic, and for whom remote instruction is difficult. "I don't want him to fail," she said, but "I do have just as much concern for his experience of being in-person as I do for my other two children." Conflicted about his going back to a school building once a week, she admits, "I just don't know where I fall."

In the Anderson household, the children are on the fence about returning in September-while they miss their friends, they've enjoyed the flexibility and safety of being home. School districts must reckon with how the pandemic has shifted what Black families expect and will accept from their public education systems.

Black parents want to be heard, and beyond COVID protocols, they are now saying, "Fix the buildings, fix the school culture, fix the curriculum," Anderson said. "That Fannie Lou Hamer spirit of 'I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired' is what's starting to rear its head."

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Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2021 demands.
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The real reason Black parents aren't joining the push to reopen schools

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Let our journalists help you make sense of the noise: Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily newsletter and get a recap of news that matters. In the spring of 2020, with Maryland's stay-at-home order lifted, a new ritual was born on a cul-de-sac in North Baltimore's affluent Homeland neighborhood.

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Forms of Fanonism_ Frantz Fanon's Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Decolonization ( PDFDrive ).pdf

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Culturally Responsive Pedagogy_ Working towards Decolonization, Indigeneity and Interculturalism ( PDFDrive ).pdf

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Decolonization _ A very short introduction ( PDFDrive ).pdf

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Three Women Who Helped Their Sons Become Civil Rights Icons (Published 2021)

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In “The Three Mothers,” Anna Malaika Tubbs considers the seismic impact of the women who raised Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin.

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"For Black girls, to be "ghetto" represents a certain resilience to how poverty has shaped racial and gender oppression. To be "loud" it to demand to be heard. To have an "attitude" is to reject a doctrine of invisibility and maltreatment. To be flamboyant--or "fabulous"--is to revise the idea that socioeconomic isolation is equated with not having access to materially desirable things. To be a ghetto Black girl, then, is to reinvent what it means to be Black, poor, and female."

"Without intentional efforts to combat old ways and norms, ... institutions ... reproduce dominant social ideas, hierarchies, and systems of oppression."

More quotes...

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"For Black girls, to be "ghetto" represents a certain resilience to how poverty has shaped racial and gender oppression. To be "loud" it to demand to be heard. To have an "attitude" is to reject a doctrine of invisibility and maltreatment.

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We lead with the heart and courageously work to address racial injustice in education, embodying Black joy, confronting anti-Blackness, and building authentic partnerships with all who support creating equitable school communities across the nation.

​In September 2016, DeShawn Jackson, along with Black Men Uniting to Change The Narrative, planned a day of encouragement. The previous school year, another local elementary school had more than 200 Black men show up to greet students as they arrived at school. The men wore their uniforms, regalia, and Sunday best in hopes of disrupting the inaccurate imagery students have of Black men. Black men make up only 3% of teachers in k-12 education.​

DeShawn had taught at the school for six years and even attended the elementary school as a child. He wanted students to see Black men in a positive light, not like they often are portrayed in media. A bomb threat was called into the school on the day of the event, so school leadership officially canceled it. Yet, after the threat was investigated, nothing was found, and the school remained open. So, DeShawn personally greeted students and about fifty others joined him.

When students arrived at John Muir Elementary School, they were greeted with cheers and high-fives while drums played in the background. Black men showed up because they wanted to counter the perception students have about education and race. Inside the school, staff wore shirts that said "Black Lives Matter We Stand Together."Julie Trout, the art teacher, designed the shirts. Teachers' lessons for the day were focused on racial justice.

​Social Equality Educators (SEE), a group within the Seattle teachers union, decided October 19th would be "Black Lives Matter At School Day." They'd wear Black Lives Matter shirts to school, created a second design with "#Say Her Name," and educators picked from several options. Parent Teacher Associations made buttons and stickers for teachers and students to wear. This attracted national news, which spread to Philadelphia, where the Racial Justice & Organizing Committee of the Caucus of Working Educators was inspired to plan a similar action.

We envision a nation in which we live in authentic and conscious relationship with ourselves, each other, and the lands we occupy with the least amount of harm and violence, in which we are unapologetically Black and collectively love and care for one another as extended intergenerational families. To achieve safety, equity, and liberation for all Black lives, we attend to systems and networks of care to make the domination, erasure, and dehumanization of Black life obsolete. ​

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National coalition organizing for racial justice in education.

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"We need people to get ditch the lens, and get equity lasik. We want folks looking through an equity framework all the time, not just when it’s convenient or popular or political."

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Are you using an equity lens or equity lasik?

"Equity lens" has become the avocado toast of nonprofit-speak: it's everywhere, it looks good, but it's surprisingly unrevolutionary. We'd argue that using and promoting an "equity lens" centers whiteness and the white experience, while perpetuating the othering of folks of color.

Don't get us wrong: evaluating your work, policy, and the world through an equity framework is an amazing thing and we need more of it.Our problem is with "equity lens" specifically.

This "lens" business bolsters the temporary application of fundamental anti-racist concepts. It allows white folks to take anti-racist frameworks on and off like a pair of glasses. It's the epitome of Seattle nonprofits; it's well intentioned but steeped in privilege.

Looking at things through an "equity lens" has a short-term, optional, one-of-many quality about it. It advocates the practice of employing a new value system rooted in social justice, but only for a short time, and only when it's useful.

When you clock out at 5pm, or your funder doesn't require a racial impact analysis, then the "equity lens" gets tossed to the side, and racism and white supremacy are permitted to continue uninterrupted.

The fact that the "equity lens" can be used or neglected, turned on or turned off, misses the point completely. Looking at who's in the room, who's making decisions, who's getting left out of the conversation doesn't stop being important when you're not paying attention to them. They actually become more important the less you're looking at them.

The people who can choose when to use an "equity lens" also tend to be the people who choose when to think about and act against racism. They tend to be the people who work for racial justice, but don't have to worry about being pulled over or deported.

We need people to get ditch the lens, and get equity lasik. We want folks looking through an equity framework all the time, not just when it's convenient or popular or political.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Equity lens" has become the avocado toast of nonprofit-speak: it's everywhere, it looks good, but it's surprisingly unrevolutionary. We'd argue that using and promoting an "equity lens" centers whiteness and the white experience, while perpetuating the othering of folks of color.

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NPR's Sarah McCammon speaks to ProPublica reporter Lizzie Presser about heirs property, a form of land ownership that has cost black Americans billions of dollars in land loss.

SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:

The issue of reparations is back in the news. Democratic presidential hopefuls are talking about it. Senator Cory Booker and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee proposed legislation this year that would create a commission to study reparations. And this week, Senator Chuck Schumer said he'd support that bill. Proponents of the concept argue that reparations are not just about slavery but also injustices black Americans have endured since the Jim Crow era and beyond. One of those injustices includes the losses of enormous amounts of property to a form of land ownership called heirs property, which some economists say has cost black Americans hundreds of billions of dollars in lost land over the past century.

Joining us now to talk about this is reporter Lizzie Presser, who investigated heirs property in a collaboration between ProPublica and The New Yorker. She followed the case of Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, who spent eight years in jail fighting for the land they call home. And she joins us now from our New York bureau. Hi, Lizzie. Welcome.

LIZZIE PRESSER: Hi, Sarah. Thanks for having me.

MCCAMMON: One of the people you spoke to in your reporting called heirs property the worst problem you never heard of. Can you tell us more about what it is?

PRESSER: So heirs property is a form of ownership. And essentially what happens is that someone dies without a will, and their descendants inherit an interest in the land. So instead of owning a physical piece of it, they're owning a share, kind of like holding stock in a company. And as that land is passed down through generations, that can mean that dozens or hundreds of family members co-own a piece of land. And it creates a very unstable form of ownership.

MCCAMMON: And why is it structured that way?

PRESSER: Intestate succession is what it's called legally, and essentially that's just what will happen if you die without a will. And so families often believed, actually, that if they owned land in this way, they were protecting it from being taken from them. But in reality, it made their ownership very vulnerable to takings.

MCCAMMON: In the heart of your investigation is the case of the Reels family, two brothers - Licurtis Reels and Melvin Davis in Carteret County, N.C. Tell us a little bit about how their story starts and then how it starts to unravel.

PRESSER: So Melvin and Licurtis's great-grandfather bought 65 acres in 1911. And in 1970, their grandfather Mitchell Reels died without a will. What ended up happening was a distant uncle who hadn't lived on the property in two decades used an arcane law called the Torrens law to carve out the most valuable slice of the property right on the river. And this is a family of shrimpers and crabbers and fishers. And so that's - that wasn't just the most valuable property in terms of its value to sell, it was also the way in which these men made their money and fed their community. Once he was able to take that land, he very quickly sold it off to developers. And that's really when the trouble started for the Reels family.

MCCAMMON: And so the two brothers get their day in court in 2011. What happens next?

PRESSER: The brothers had been occupying the waterfront. They didn't really understand that their uncle had taken it. And, in fact, they lived with the belief that the land was theirs, and they weren't going to let go. So even when there were court orders that required the brothers to remove their homes, they refused. In 2011, they went to court thinking that they were just going to argue their case again. But the judge found them guilty of civil contempt, and he ordered them sent to jail.

MCCAMMON: You document multiple ways, both judicial and extrajudicial, in which black Americans have had property taken from them. I want to turn to another legal mechanism you describe that really seems to allow developers to take advantage of heirs property landowners. It's called partition action. Can you explain that?

PRESSER: So in a partition action, any single heir to the property or a speculator who buys the interest of a single heir can go to the court and ask for a sale of the entire property. So imagine if you have 15 relatives, and one person says, I want to sell. And then they get to go to the court and say, I want to sell, and the court says, sure, you can. And everyone then is dispossessed. This is what was happening and continues to happen across the South. But in many cases, what you see are speculators, companies, developers who buy off interests of individual heirs and then bring it to the court.

MCCAMMON: And if I could just ask one last sort of bigger-picture question - as you hear candidates in the 2020 campaign talking about issues of racial justice and reparations, do you think this issue of heirs property, though it's less understood, do you think it helps to make that case?

PRESSER: Absolutely. I think what I was hoping to convey with this piece is that black families had very good reason to be suspicious of white southern courts under Jim Crow. And as a result, we have seen this unstable form of land ownership take hold across the South. And it's a very significant example of how racial discrimination and segregation has fueled a legal system that is stacked against African American landowners.

MCCAMMON: That's ProPublica Lizzie Presser. Lizzie, thanks so much for joining us.

PRESSER: Thanks for having me.

Copyright © 2019 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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ProPublica Report: Black Americans Lose Big Under Longtime Property Provision

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NPR's Sarah McCammon speaks to ProPublica reporter Lizzie Presser about heirs property, a form of land ownership that has cost black Americans billions of dollars in land loss. SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST: The issue of reparations is back in the news. Democratic presidential hopefuls are talking about it.

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DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross, who's off this week. In 1957, three years after the Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional, nine black students were chosen by the NAACP to try and integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. Enrolling was one thing. Attending was something else.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: We just got a report here on this end that the students are in.

UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: (Yelling, unintelligible).

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: (Unintelligible). Turn it that way. (Unintelligible). You can see...

DAVIES: The students were met by an angry white mob. And it took the presence of federal troops to get them into classes for more than one day. Our guest today is Melba Pattillo Beals, one of those students who came to be known as the Little Rock Nine. She wrote in her book "Warriors Don't Cry," that every day, she got up, polished her saddle shoes and went off to war. After that school year, Pattillo Beals went to California, where she got an education and pursued careers as a TV journalist, magazine writer, communications executive and university professor.

But as you'll hear, her year at Central High left emotional scars that were long-lasting. Melba Pattillo Beals has a doctorate in international multicultural education and was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 1999. She's written a new memoir called "I Will Not Fear" and a book about her childhood for younger readers - it's called "March Forward, Girl."

Well, Dr. Melba Pattillo Beals, welcome to FRESH AIR. It's good to have you. You say, in your new book, that you became aware of discrimination at the age of 3 growing up in Little Rock. Boy, that's...

MELBA PATTILLO BEALS: Absolutely.

DAVIES: That's young. How did you become aware?

BEALS: Essentially by watching my parents and by seeing them freeze up when we go places, by seeing the difference in their behavior in my presence in the home, in church and around each other, versus their behavior when we went to the grocery store, which was around the corner. That would be my first little glimpse of a world beyond my home - the grocery store.

It would also be when the insurance man visited my house, and I would see how my father went into the back room and armed himself. And this is what he'd choose - to take this brush and this cloth. And he cleaned off his shotgun because he was steamed at the way that the insurance man and the milkman and all these white delivery men treated my mother. My mother was very beautiful. She looked perhaps Hawaiian or - she's partially American-Indian, so she had sort of wavy hair to her waist and really beautiful skin and all of this. She did not look as though she were particularly black.

And they would come to the house. And as they were trying to collect or deliver whatever, they would, like, flirt with her. And I could watch my father's response, which was that he was helpless, powerless. But oh, was he (unintelligible) steamingly angry. I watched my mother's response, which was to walk a very thin line - to push them away, to get rid of them but, at the same time, not to really annoy them. Do you know what I mean?

DAVIES: You write that you grew up with a lot of fear. What were you afraid of?

BEALS: Every single time day turned to night, I was frightened that the Klan would ride. From a very early age, again, I watched the parents around me pull the shades, quiet us all down to make our house look as though we were being very good Negroes, pull us in, pull anything from the outside that looked as though we were engaged in any activities they would object to. I watched this routine go on for all of my early life.

And I watched how it was when we went into stores - how my grandmother grabbed my hand and squeezed it so tight it hurt, how we were not allowed to touch things. When I was 5 and 4 and 3, if I went down town shopping, I couldn't touch anything - not the clothing, not the groceries, not anything. And in some of the grocery stores - we only had a couple that we could go to, first of all. And secondly, when you got there, Grandma couldn't, like, reach for things. She would tell a clerk what he wanted, and he would touch it because they didn't want black people touching all the merchandise, say, along a certain line, OK?

So he would give her what she needed, and then they would form a line to pay for it. And the line in which you stood to pay for it - at any moment, a white person can walk up and get in front of you in line...

DAVIES: Yeah.

BEALS: ...And you can't say a thing.

DAVIES: And they wouldn't want you to touch things because an item that you had touched would not be acceptable to a white customer.

BEALS: Would not be salable, would not be - yeah, right.

DAVIES: Right. Let's move to 1957, when the Supreme Court had ruled that the separate but equal doctrine for public education did not hold, that - and integration was called for. And there was this move to integrate Central High School in Little Rock. First of all, just describe what the differences were between that high school, which was all white, and the high school that you attended?

BEALS: The high school I attended was called Horace Mann. It had been built recently. The white populace decided, in order to appease black people so that we wouldn't even want integration, they would build a new high school called Horace Mann. Now, unfortunately for us, Horace Mann was built like a school - it was actually copied, I understand, off of a school in Florida, meaning for me to go from my classroom to the bathroom or from my classroom to the next classroom, I had to go outdoors in this hallway which was exposed to the weather. Do you know what I mean?

And so - but it got freezing cold in Arkansas. And so why would you build a school like this for Little Rock school kids? But anyway, and my school was one story, limited in its size, with a fairly OK library but very, very minimal kinds of equipment. What would happen would be every September, we would get a couple of truckloads of stuff that was used by the kids in the white high school. So that could be, you know, a three-legged table, slimy typewriter, used books. And the teacher would dig into these things with great gratitude, and we would move ahead. I wanted to wonder what the other high school was like.

Well, it was seven stories in height - Central High School was. It was four blocks - let's see, eight blocks in diameter, in terms of its measurements. It was, I think, ranked eighth in the nation in terms of its physical building. One of its top floors was completely contributed to music and bands. It had a floor which was nothing but apartments to teach you home economics. It's everything a girl could have. And to boot, many of its students went on to the top eight universities in the country, showing you, thus, the caliber of instructors it had. So it was highly ranked, Central High School.

DAVIES: So nine students - nine African-American students were selected for the - to try and integrate Central High School. How did you get to be one of them?

BEALS: Really, there were 116 students, and then it sort of whittled down to nine by people being frightened and people being threatened because by this time, the White Citizens' Council had nominated a committee of white people to go door to door, contact you through your doctor, contact you through whomever to get to you to tell you, oh, now, you know, you don't want to integrate. But eventually, to qualify - in the beginning, to qualify, you had to have good grades, and you had to have a record of not fighting, not talking back, a record of being a good student behavior-wise and academically.

DAVIES: And you had to volunteer. You stepped up to do this.

BEALS: Oh, amen.

DAVIES: So this was a rocky start to the integration of Central High School. You want to just tell us about the first day when you and your mom went, thinking you were going to get into the high school?

BEALS: When we walked up behind this big crowd, we realized ah, ha, ha, ha, we have really done something that we shouldn't have done. We anticipated that the people were all on tippy-toe, looking across the street - for what? - we didn't know. Let's us go look. So we walked up behind this crowd that was probably six people deep. There were thousands of people there. And we tried to go through because we were going to go across the street and go to the school.

And right away, these guys started - hey, you know, we got us a nigger right here to hang, right here. No need looking across the street to get that one. We got one here. And it went downhill from there. They started chasing us. We started running. We had parked the car at the end of that block, and we had to make our way to this car. And I thought for sure we wouldn't make it.

They got close to my mother - close enough to my mother that they grabbed her jacket off of her. At one point, they made her drop her valise, and she picked it back up because she was dressed to go to school. She was a schoolteacher. And we get to the car just by - you know, my grandmother said, look, if you're ever in a really tight place, understand that at every moment of your life, God is as close to you as your skin. You have but to pray, and he will show you that he's there, and he will help you. So I'd never tested that. And so I'm 15, and I think to myself, aha, it appears to me that this is the time - you know what I'm saying? - because these guys have ropes, and they're directly behind me, and they're chasing, they're calling me all sorts of names. And they're saying what they're going to do with us before they hang us, right?

And so I - you know, I started to pray. And I prayed out loud, as loud as I possibly could, hoping that this would facilitate God's hearing me. And I thought, how is he going to, you know, fix this? Because we couldn't call the police - we knew that. What would the police do? They would help the other people. And so I thought, well, how will we get past this? And it was that - this was an unpaved sidewalk, and there were all sorts of bushes and branches and things across the walkway.

And whereas we saw these two things, I suppose the gentlemen behind us, who were so angry, with their ropes in the air and their - you know, they didn't. And so they fell. And just for an instant, that gave us one instant to get to the car.

We got to the corner, and my mother had earlier said, go, drive; here are the keys because she'd been teaching me to drive. And I got into the car, and we backed down that hill. I mean, just as she was getting in, this guy caught hold of the car door. They were banging on the front glass of the car. And we - I backed down that hill faster than I had ever driven forward.

DAVIES: And you...

BEALS: ...And turned around...

DAVIES: Yeah.

BEALS: ...And got away and got home, you know. And my grandmother said, you know, have you said thank you to God yet or, you know, what are you doing?

DAVIES: Wow. So your first attempt, you don't even get in the building. You barely escape with your life from this mob that was there.

BEALS: Right. And then the second attempt, we do get in.

DAVIES: Right, this - the second - it was a couple weeks later, right? And the Little Rock police escort (unintelligible).

BEALS: Well, yes, because we had - you had to give the courts time to say, look, here - to Governor Faubus - you know, we're going to do this, and no matter what you think, we're going to do it. Because he kept erecting troops in front of the school, and he was going through all sorts of machinations to stop it. And so this court order...

DAVIES: Maybe we should just mention here that governor, Orval Faubus, had the National Guard troops in front of the high school that day. And you might think they were there to protect the students. In fact, they were there to keep them out, right?

BEALS: Well, but we had to learn that because Elizabeth Eckford approached these guardsmen, thinking, you know, OK, well, they - they're going to escort us, say, this, you know, 150, 200 steps up to the stairs. No, no, no, no, no. They closed rank to keep her out. And she was the one who got spat upon until you could ring her clothing out, as she walked this, you know, block length from where they were in the middle to the corner and where - was eventually rescued by the Lorches, who were a couple.

DAVIES: So the second time you go back, some time has passed. There has been a court hearing, and the Little Rock police escort you into the building, but there's still a big mob outside, right?

BEALS: Huge mob. As we're being let out of this car on the side - I think it's 14th Street side - I hear all this noise again. I haven't been to many really big events in my life. But what I remember is, like, going to the rodeo or going to a parade or - you know, the rodeo, black folks would be segregated, but they'd be - we'd be present and be as thousands and thousands - we will - what I have very little to compare this noise to - would be like going to a huge football game.

And I'm hearing this crowd and their sawhorses. I see sawhorses holding them back, and I think, oh, boy. And, you know, if you've never been in a situation like this, you don't - how you're going to feel is odd. So I got out of the side of the car, and the police were escorting us up the side steps and everything like that.

And the thing is that once you step inside of Central High School, it's so huge. And it was so dark in there, you know. And we were greeted by this sort of middle-aged, dark-haired woman, who was quite, I would say, unwelcoming and said she was going to take us to where we needed to go, which, at that point, was to the office. And so we were marched down this hall of screaming, yelling, spitting young people - young white people, who didn't want us there - to the principal's office. And there we gathered, and they were going to assign us classrooms.

Now, understand, if you've got seven floors of classrooms, but you've only got nine people, and you've got all those hundreds of students, I think you would've put them in close proximity to each other so you could guard them. But no, no, no, no, no. They said, hey, you want integration, you going to get integration. And they sent us nine different ways. And that was really - as we said goodbye to each other, that was really horrible. And among us was Thelma Jean Mothershed, who had a very bad heart. At this point, she turns kind of a purpley (ph) blue, and she's sitting down on her haunches, and we're waiting for her to turn the right color again. So that was a little unsettling.

DAVIES: Our guest is Melba Pattillo Beals. She was one of nine African-American kids who, in 1957, participated in the hard-fought integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. She has a new memoir called "I Will Not Fear: My Story Of A Lifetime Of Building Faith Under Fire" and another memoir aimed at younger readers called "March Forward, Girl." We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF CHARLIE HADEN AND HANK JONES' "NOBODY KNOWS THE TROUBLE I'VE SEEN")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Dr. Melba Pattillo Beals. She was one of nine kids who integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 - one of the early battles of the civil rights movement. She has a new memoir called "I Will Not Fear" and another memoir aimed at younger readers about her life. It's called "March Forward, Girl."

I want to talk about your experiences in classrooms in a moment. But you didn't make it all the way through this day, right? Tell us how this day was cut short.

BEALS: About - let see. I think it was in shorthand - Mrs. Pickwick.

DAVIES: Shorthand class.

BEALS: I remember her because she was a teacher who I felt safe in her room. She didn't say anything to me like, it's OK, but she conducted herself in a way which made me respect her sense of my humanness. And so - like, I suppose shortly after 11 - between 11, 11:30, something like that - this woman who had escorted us in came back to get us again and said, follow me, get up, follow me now, collect your books.

Now, all the while, I'd been in almost any classroom. Now, I was, one, exposed to the outside. I could hear this crowd, this mob that had gathered outside. And there was no doubt, there had to be hundreds of people out there. And so this woman collects us and takes us all to the office. And we get to the office, and they say that, look, we're going to have to somehow get you out of here. We have a problem. Mobs are beginning to burst into the school, and you're not safe, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know. And at the same time, they stick us into this side room while they confer with added policeman - some, I think, from North Little Rock. And, you know, you had lawmakers - I mean, law officers in there from all sorts of places, right?

And so they start to consult with each other. And I, Ms. Nosypot (ph) - that's why I grew up to be a news reporter - I put my ear in there because I want to know. Don't be consulting without me. And one guy says, well, look, you know, maybe what we're going to have to do is to put one out there, and we're going to have to let them hang that kid while we get the other eight out. At least we'll save eight. So by this, I know right away that, you know, we got a big problem here.

And then another white gentleman - tall - I believe to be assistant chief of police of North Little Rock, stood up and said, no, look, I'm a parent, I'm not doing this. I'm getting them all out. We're going. We're going to do it. And so he's the one who led us down the stairs of this huge castle-like building - Central High School - round, and round, and round and down into a basement. And I thought to myself, well, if you're ever going to be killed, this is where you're going to get it. And who were these white men with us, and what did they really want? Truth was, they were policemen - Little Rock and North Little Rock - truth was that they saved our lives.

DAVIES: So your first two attempts - you and these fellow students to get into Little Rock - into Central High School at Little Rock - actually didn't - you didn't even complete full days. You barely escaped with your lives from the mob. And President Eisenhower sent federal troops, the 101st Airborne, to make sure that you were escorted into the classes and kept safe. They got you in, but they couldn't follow you into classrooms. And I want you to tell us what it was like when you actually got into a classroom, and the soldiers were outside. How were you treated by the students? How did the teachers respond?

BEALS: Some of the teachers were, shall we say, OK. Or they were cordial. They were civil. Others were not. They let you know right away what they thought. And here I had to begin thinking about, how can I save my life during this class? Do I need to sit in the back or the front? Shall I sit where I can look at the soldier? Although, I could look at my soldier sometimes. He couldn't come through. He might signal me to move over here, do this, do that. But the fact of the matter was that I was, you know, completely open to whatever happened. And many of the classrooms that teach - not many - but some of the classes - the teachers were strong and they said, sit down. Don't touch her. Don't hit her. Others - they didn't care what happened, you know?

DAVIES: What kinds of things would students do in class?

BEALS: Light paper and take a match, light a piece of paper and then throw it on you. Particularly in study hall, they loved that trick. Hit you, throw things at you. A favorite thing was to do something to your back, smear peanut butter. And one of the most heinous crimes was to smear peanut butter and glumpy (ph) stuff under your seat, so that you didn't notice, really. When I was walking in class, I was sort of looking around my back when I would sit down in it.

And what they'd do is put glass in it. And the whole thing I'm discovering that you've done that. The whole thing of, you know, if you don't pull your dress down, then it's going to get into your thighs or wherever it gets - because it penetrates your clothes. It can penetrate your clothing. However you sit, unless you're wearing some heavy-duty jeans, you're going to be in trouble with that one - because they did that one several times.

DAVIES: Melba Pattillo Beals has a new memoir, "I Will Not Fear," and a book about her childhood aimed at younger readers called "March Forward, Girl." After a break, we'll hear more about her days at Central High School and how leaving Little Rock changed her life. I'm Dave Davies, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF ORRIN EVANS' "A FREE MAN")

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross, who's off this week. We're speaking with Melba Pattillo Beals, one of nine black students who were chosen to try and integrate Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. Beals has a new memoir called "I Will Not Fear" and a book for younger readers called "March Forward, Girl." When we left off, she was describing the harassment and physical assaults she faced from white students at Central High.

There were insults and racial epithets and verbal assaults constantly, I guess, and it -

BEALS: Constantly name calling, which, after a while, I have to say to you, becomes in some ways as painful or more than the physicality of the incident because you begin to question in your mind as a child, who am I? Who am I really?

DAVIES: But as you move through the halls and through gym class and around pep rallies, I mean, these weren't just verbal assaults. You were physically assaulted. In what ways were you harmed?

BEALS: Tripped - tripped up so you fall. The most dangerous way was, a gentleman passes you with a plastic toy gun, and you think, OK, I'm going to get wet. But you're not. You're going to get acid in your eyes. And that's what happened to me. And my bodyguard, who I don't name - I think I call him Johnny Black. Anyway, he caught my ponytail - I have really long hair - and he grabbed my ponytail and ran, forcing me to run, and jammed my face beneath the water fountain and ran water all over my eyes. And that's what saved my sight.

DAVIES: You mention you were assigned, actually, a member of the 101st Airborne, who was with you all the time in the hallway, as you write.

BEALS: Several members.

DAVIES: Right. Right. But they weren't able - like, in a case like that or when someone assaulted you - to intervene, to grab the offender or...

BEALS: Right. They couldn't do any of that. But, like, I had what are called primary, secondary and tertiary guards. Your primary guard was one nearest to you. Your secondary were two people who were out so many feet. And your tertiary were - they could be as many as six people, depending on what your day had been like. But they could never touch those other children. In some ways, they were just kind of like, you know, bullies that were, like, you know threatening them. They didn't - they were admonished that they couldn't touch other kids.

So, for example, when I went to the bathroom, one of the things I learned to do then, which I'm having to get out of doing now, which the doctor just lectured me about last Friday, was drink water - drink enough water - because my whole thing in Central High School was, if you don't drink water, you don't have to go to the bathroom. And so I really worked at that hard.

DAVIES: You didn't want to go to the bathroom because you weren't safe there.

BEALS: No, no because in the bathroom, like, I would be in my little concern, you know. And these ladies would come by, and then once again, we have the old let's light the papers - and at this point, they would get on either side of me and in front, and they would light notebook paper with matches, and then they would throw it in on you.

DAVIES: These would be showering down on you in the stall you're while somebody else...

BEALS: That's right.

DAVIES: Somebody else held the door so you couldn't get out.

BEALS: Exactly. And so I thought one day, well, OK, am I going to die here? What am I going to do? And a little voice said, throw them back, you idiot. Just throw them back. And that's what I did. I said, all righty, then, let's go girls. And I threw them back, and I said, hey, you know what? Get out of here. So, I mean, I really had to make a transition in my head. Do you want to live? And what are you willing to do to live? And you're going to have to defend your life every day. Those days of childhood, of sweetness, of being protected by the will of God - well, OK, that - there's been a transition here, my darling.

DAVIES: You know, I don't want to belabor this, but I just want people to understand how - what this was like. And I made a quick list of some of the ways that you were assaulted. I'm just going to read them here - knocked downstairs, spit upon, kicked on the shins, raw eggs poured over your head, acid thrown in your eyes, locker trashed, you were pushed against a wall and choked, hit across the back with a tennis racket so hard you spit up blood, pelted with snowballs that had large rocks in the middle. And this is just a partial list of the things that you and the other eight kids suffered. Did you report these things to anybody, to the school administrators? Did anybody do anything?

BEALS: In the beginning. In the beginning, we did report these kinds of attacks, but we learned quickly that nothing was ever going to be done about them. And I remember once watching this guy kick Terry, and we told the principal, and he said, you know, unless I see it myself personally or some teacher sees it, it's not valid. And so they weren't going to do anything to us because, you know, you had the white citizens' club. You had all these white parents who were on their case. And they wanted to get us out, and they figured if they were violent enough over a long enough period of time, that, you know, it would be OK.

DAVIES: You know, this was decades ago, of course, and I have to believe that many of those students who perpetrated this stuff feel pretty bad about it. Did you ever hear from any of them or the adults who should've put a stop to it?

BEALS: You know, Oprah had a bunch of us on, and one guy said - who - I wanted to go out with him afterwards - and there was a guy called John Sandhay (ph). I can't remember (unintelligible). He walked on my heels and did horrifying things. And there were several people there. Some of them apologized. Some of them said that they would never teach their children to be that way. And, you know, others said that we had ruined their high school for them, and we had ruined their senior year. And I imagine for many of those kids, we did ruin their senior year.

So there were sort of mixed feelings. But yes, later on, some did - some went on the Internet and said, oh, you know, Melba Beals could never have written her book because she such an - you know, she's so stupid, like most black people are stupid. And some have done very detrimental things. But the best thing for me to do is to ignore that. And I've always known, thanks to grandma and mother and God, who I really am. So that's all I need.

DAVIES: Melba Pattillo Beals was one of nine African-American students who participated in the hard-fought integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957. She has two new memoirs. One is called "I Will Not Fear: My Story Of A Lifetime, Building Faith Under Fire" (ph). Another, aimed at younger readers, is called "March Forward, Girl." We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and we're speaking with Dr. Melba Pattillo Beals. She was one of nine African-American students who participated in the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. - one of the early battles of the civil rights movement. She has two new memoirs. One is, "I Will Not Fear: My Story Of A Lifetime Building Faith Under Fire" (ph). Another, which is oriented at younger readers, is called "March Forward, Girl."

I want to come back to Central High School for a bit. This became a day-to-day struggle. You say - you write at one point, you got up, and you went to war. Other the kids go to school. You went to school, but you went to war. How did it affect your life at home?

BEALS: Well, you know, I didn't feel - I felt unwarm, and my tummy hurt a lot. And my grandmother and mother tried their best. My father, by then, had - was gone, and my parents got divorced. And that was a hard thing to go through at the same time. But my grandmother and mother tried the best to bake ginger men, and take us downtown and to do the things that could make me feel like everything's going to be OK, normal. But most of the time at home, I worried.

Like, I would just have, like, Friday night free, and then Saturday, I'd start to worry again that Sunday's going to come, I'm going to have church, and then I have to go back to that place again. And so my life at home was not as sweet as it had been. Always, my mother and grandmother did the best to provide a loving home that they - as loving as they could possibly provide, you know?

DAVIES: But it followed you home, too, right? I mean, the phone would ring with insults and threats and...

BEALS: Consistently. Calling...

DAVIES: ...And there were two guys parked outside your house all the time.

BEALS: Two guys parked outside my house who threatened to do bad things. My grandmother was a shooter because she grew up partially in a reservation, and her relatives, her uncles and her father were Indians - American Indians. She knew she could shoot a gnat at a hundred yards. Do you know what I'm saying? And so she kept a shotgun, Mr. Higgenbottom, on her windowsill because people would come. And at one point, they did shoot into the house, as you'll remember early in the Little Rock incident. And they took away her green vase - her flower vase that was on the TV, shattered it.

And so it was fear. What occupied me was fear. I wasn't allowed to be an open teenager, to go where I wanted to go. I could no longer go to community center to hang. There was no hanging now because get it and do understand it - as one of the Little Rock Nine, some of my own people were not quite happy with me because they were losing their jobs. They were losing their salvation contributions at Christmastime. They lost...

DAVIES: Why were they losing their jobs? Why were they losing jobs and money?

BEALS: Because they worked for the same white people that my grandmother worked for. My grandmother was a maid - a dollar a day in white lady's kitchens. And she was careful never, ever to connect herself to me, one of the Little Rock Nine. She just would say, oh, my goodness. That's news. I wonder whose child that is - because she had a different last name than we did. She never told any of her white employers that that's who she was. And the black people were losing jobs consistently. I mean, Gloria Ray Karlmark's husband - sorry - father lost his job.

DAVIES: Your mom was fired - right? - from her teaching job...

BEALS: My mom lost her job. (Laughter) Her story's great because we had a black bishop in North Little Rock who'd been very powerful among the blacks and said to be powerful among whites. And my mother went to him and told him that her job had been taken away. And he told her, prepare to go back to work, just to simply mention his name. And she did. And he was correct.

DAVIES: Did any white students try and help or just extend a hand of friendship?

BEALS: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. First of all, I want to say something clearly so that everybody doesn't get the wrong impression. There were sane, God-fearing white people in Little Rock, Ark., who honestly gave us help, some of them by giving jobs to the black people who'd been fired, by giving money to the black people who'd been fired, by giving them jobs, like, in their yards - mow here, mow there, mow everywhere. Go work for Uncle and Daddy in Chicago. Carlotta LaNier's father, for example, left Little Rock and went to work in Chicago. He went away to work. And he'd send money back and come back, sometimes, on the weekends. And so some of the white people were very generous in their attempts - in their efforts to help us. And that should really be clear.

DAVIES: You made it through that year. But in the end, you didn't go back to Central next year. What happened?

BEALS: The governor, Governor Faubus, closed all schools to keep us from returning in the school year of 1958. And that was difficult because he closed black schools. And those black children called us - they called me - and at church, treated us terribly because we'd taken away from them now their Christmas donations, their jobs, their homes and now their schools. And they were unhappy. Black kids were almost as unhappy as the white kids. Not as many of them were, but certainly, some of them were. They called us and said, you know, you guys let go.

DAVIES: So the governor closed the public schools in Little Rock as a gambit to somehow avoid integration. And you sat out most of that year because the ACLU wanted you to not enroll in another school because that would jeopardize the standing for the legal fight.

BEALS: Well, I sat out that year of 1958 because the NAACP, National Association...

DAVIES: Yeah.

BEALS: ...For the Advancement of Colored People, wanted us to sit out because they had a court case in process. But beginning in 1959, some of the kids would go back. By that time, some of us had been taken away. I was one of them who went to California.

DAVIES: Yeah. How did that have - a number of the Little Rock Nine felt they had to leave Little Rock. Why did you and others feel like you had to leave?

BEALS: Well, because in my case, they were specifically showing pictures and offering 10,000 dead, 5,000 alive.

DAVIES: Like a wanted poster - a wanted poster.

BEALS: Wanted posters spread all over the city because I was taller, bigger. Minnijean Brown and I were both taller, 5-feet-8, more speculative, more, you know, out front than some of the other kids were. And so I had, at this time, relatives in Georgia - I've always had relatives who pass for white. They come to town. They visit undercover on a holiday. And this I thought every family had, you know? And now I had relatives with red hair, blue eyes, freckles.

And so one of these relatives is actually - was actually in the Klan in another city and called my grandmother and my mother and said, look right here. You get her out of there now because we have a group coming up just to look for her. And you just need to know. You need to get her - they're serious about this. And so at this point, my grandmother and mother listened to the NAACP. The NAACP had always said some of us may have to leave. They sent out inquiries to different NAACPs across the country, saying, look. We need a home for these kids. We need some protection. Who's going to give it? In this case, out of Northern California came Dr. and Mrs. George McCabe, who would, until this moment of this day, be my parents and my family.

DAVIES: Now, this was a family that you moved to. They lived in a small town in California, right?

BEALS: They lived in a small town in California.

DAVIES: And you thought you were heading out to live with a black family.

BEALS: Oh, I was so thrilled when I got on that plane. I thought they're going to be a rich, black family. They're going to have Ebony magazines every month, unlike me, who can't afford them. They're going to have, you know, phones. And, oh, it's going to be wonderful. Well, I got off the plane, and this great group of white people chased me. They came running towards me, and I thought, oh, Lord, they're going to get me. And they came up, and they gave me a cross and a Bible. And they said they're with the Santa Rosa NAACP. I tell you I could not stop laughing inside. But outside, I was frightened to death because I thought, there are no white people in the NAACP. But they turned out to be.

And sure enough, they put me in this car, and they rode me across the Golden Gate Bridge. And I thought, you know, what's going to happen - I am always as a writer, I think, since childhood, imagining stories in my head. Are they going to take me across the bridge and hang me? But in fact, they took me to a farm. First, they took me to the city. And the neighbors didn't want me to stay in that house. So then I was taken to a second house, 6064 Melita Road. I shall never forget that address. And it was like a mini farm.

And that were - there was Dr. Mrs. George. Kay McCabe was petite with bangs. And she was mom, my mom, whom I think of every single day in my life. And my dad was George McCabe. Dr. George McCabe helped to found Sonoma State University. And my face - he and his friends were drawing pictures of it on butcher paper when I was with them. And he showed me what was possible. They were very poor. They didn't have a lot of money. But they were free. And it was that father, connected to my grandmother's lectures, that gave me a sense of equality.

DAVIES: You know, we don't have time to cover the story that the book tells. But, I mean, you got an education. And you were a mom and then adopted two sons and were a journalist and eventually a communications specialist. And you describe, you know, the discrimination you experienced in employment and housing. And I just have to ask you - given that you were - you know, you were played a path-breaking role in civil rights in this country. How much progress have we made as a nation towards overcoming this terrible legacy of racism?

BEALS: I thought by this time, when I'm 76, which, if you look back, is how many years? Fifty-six. I thought that it would be over. I thought that equality would be here. But I was wrong. I was really wrong. But how is life different now? I have a voice. And so we have indeed, my dear, come a very, very long way. You may hit me now on the way out of the studio, but I have a voice. I can report that.

And of the policemen who come to take that report, one of them's going to be OK. He's going to say, no, this shouldn't have happened. And he's going to do something about it. And so I'll take that for now. People beyond where I am will have to keep struggling, as those who came before me struggled. That's cool. I see progress. It certainly is not happening at the speed I want it to happen.

But there is incredible progress that I sit here before this camera, this microphone, that I was a news reporter, that you're interested in interviewing me regarding books which are on that topic, that people with white faces welcomed me here. And so yeah, we've made some progress from where I was. Baby, don't you ever forget that I rode in the back of the bus near the fussy, gassy engine. I drank from a water fountain marked color. Uh-uh. Don't forget it. And I never, ever forget it. So I've come a long, long way.

DAVIES: Melba Pattillo Beals, thank you so much for speaking with us.

BEALS: You're quite welcome. Thank you for having me.

DAVIES: Melba Pattillo Beals is one of nine black students who were chosen to integrate Central High School in Little Rock in 1957. Beals has a new memoir called "I Will Not Fear" and a book about her childhood for younger readers called "March Forward, Girl." Coming up, David Edelstein reviews the new German film "In The Fade." This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF GERALD CLAYTON'S "SOUL STOMP")

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'They Didn't Want Me There': Remembering The Terror Of School Integration

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DAVE DAVIES, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross, who's off this week. In 1957, three years after the Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional, nine black students were chosen by the NAACP to try and integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark.

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The Worst Thing We've Ever Done | On the Media | WNYC Studios

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How do you fix a case of national amnesia? A case study in Berlin, and in Montgomery.

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LOIS BECKETT: This is On the Media. I'm Lois Beckett, a reporter with Guardian US, sitting in for Bob and Brooke on a special hour exploring the debates over media coverage of white supremacists.

Underlying so much of this debate is the assumption about where racism thrives, namely among the uneducated, the hateful, the poor. Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the founding director of the Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center at American University and the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. He says this prevailing narrative is centuries old and completely wrong.

DR. IBRAM X. KENDI: The false narrative is that those who have produced and espoused racist ideas have done so because they were ignorant or they were hateful about a particular racial group; racist ideas caused them to institute discriminatory policies from slavery to mass incarceration. The reality is, actually, quite the opposite. Those who were producing racist ideas were doing so to justify existing policies that typically benefitted them. So, in other words, instead of ignorance and hate leading to racist ideas and racist ideas leading to racist policies, racist policies have been leading to racist ideas and racist ideas have been leading to ignorance and hate.

LOIS BECKETT: You start with such a striking example of this dynamic. In the mid-15th century as Portugal is trying to get into the slave trade, why was Portugal interested in doing exclusively African slave trading?

DR. IBRAM X. KENDI: In Western European slave markets at the time, sub-Sahara Africans were typically more valuable, primarily because their skin color made it more difficult for them to run away, in contrast to the more plentiful slaves in the slave market of Eastern European Slavs. And so, then they had to create a justification that defended why they were exclusively slave trading in African people. The pioneer of this slave trade was Prince Henry, and in 1453 Gomez Azurara penned this biography of Prince Henry's exploits into Africa and made the case that he was slave trading not to make money but to save the beastly souls of these people.

LOIS BECKETT: Why was it valuable for Prince Henry to explain a motive other than profit?

DR. IBRAM X. KENDI: Well, of course, he had to get the clearance of the Pope [LAUGHS]. And in order to get the clearance of the Pope, he, of course, had to make this missionary sort of expedition. It would continue as the British and the Dutch and the French justified their slavery by claiming that the people they were enslaving were beasts and that their expeditions and their commerce was noble. Spanish planters decided to start acquiring more enslaved Africans to work their plantations. And it would, of course, continue as slavery expanded across the Americas.

LOIS BECKETT: This narrative that we've been talking about, that racism comes from hatred and ignorance and then that sort of builds up into racist policies, is that a new one? When did that narrative began?

DR. IBRAM X. KENDI: It appears to me that that narrative was largely created by abolitionists who believed that it was their job to show particularly Northerners how brutal, how violent, how unnecessary the evil of slavery really is. It was important for abolitionists to have upstanding black people defying stereotypes so they can teach that black people are not inferior. These abolitionists believed in persuasion and education as their primary strategy, based on this idea that the fundamental problem was ignorance.

LOIS BECKETT: Whose interests does it serve to make the argument that racism is fundamentally about ignorance?

DR. IBRAM X. KENDI: When you make it about ignorance, you're not making it about power and policy and structures and systems, that the problem centrally is not America's institutions, is not the American story, is not American capitalism, that the problem is ignorant individuals. So it allows people to deny how fundamental racism has historically been to America.

It also allows people to believe that I as an activist can go out and educate people. I know the path in which that can be done. It's a lot harder though as an activist to say, okay, you know what, the fundamental problem is power and policy. So it allows for some people to go the easier route as it relates to anti-racist reform.

LOIS BECKETT: One of the things that I found so helpful about your book is that you explained that to understand the dynamics of debates over racism in America, you can't just assume there are two categories, racist ideas and anti-racist ideas, that, in fact, there are three categories. Can you talk me through that?

DR. IBRAM X. KENDI: The fundamental question has been why do racial disparities exist and persist? One side have stated that black people are twice as likely to be unemployed in this country and have been so for the last 50 years because black workers are inferior; they're less qualified, they don't want to work, they're lazy.

The other side of the debate has stated that it's because of discrimination. And then you've had some who've made the case of both. They've stated that it is the case that black people are being discriminated against but it's also the case that they're suffering from a cycle of poverty that has created inferior behavioral traits. In other words, black people are not inferior by nature, black people are inferior by nurture.

So that first perspective, which states that the reason why inequality exists is because of black inferiority, is what I call the segregationist perspective. The second perspective that states that the reason why inequality exists is because of discrimination is the anti-racist perspective. The third position that states both is the assimilationist position.

LOIS BECKETT: When you think about Americans, how many fall into each of these three categories? What's your sense?

DR. IBRAM X. KENDI: [LAUGHS] In lieu of a survey, I, I would suspect that the vast majority of Americans, no matter their race, fall into the assimilationist category.

LOIS BECKETT: When you were researching this book and examining your own ideas about black Americans, about white Americans, about yourself, how many of your ideas were assimilationist?

DR. IBRAM X. KENDI: Oh, I realize that I had quite a few assimilationist ideas. I, I think probably the most obvious was the idea that black people in black neighborhoods are more dangerous because of the poverty, because of the discrimination and because of these environmental factors.

Of course, through researching and writing this book, I came to realize that those two ideas are simply not true. There's actually more violence occurring in impoverished black neighborhoods than there are richer black neighborhoods. It's the same among all the other racial groups. [LAUGHS] In other words, there's an actual correlation between violence and unemployment rates. The problem is not people, the problem is actually unemployment. And then it changes the calculus of how we, of course, fight violent crime.

LOIS BECKETT: Why have so many black Americans, yourself included, accepted these ideas, blaming black Americans for their own situation?

DR. IBRAM X. KENDI: It's extremely difficult to grow up in a country where racist ideas are, are being rained on your head and never get wet. Unless we're sort of scholars and scientists and are people who have taken a macro view of communities and nations, people are only really understanding their own interpersonal relations. It's a lot easier to put the blame on those people who harm you than on those distant people and those distant policies that you don't even know about.

LOIS BECKETT: As you're writing this book, which was published in 2016, you are seeing the rise of these emboldened white nationalist leaders and groups who are tremendously excited about Trump's candidacy and then his presidency. What did you make of this and what have you made of the media coverage of this phenomenon?

DR. IBRAM X. KENDI: These white nationalist groups were already organizing and accelerating in numbers in reaction to Obama's election. Their surfacing in the public was not surprising to me. What has been disturbing has been those Americans who have tried to make Trump, just like they tried to make these white nationalists, into people who were espousing ideas that are, quote, "not American." To me, that's a reflection of America's denial of racism, which is the heartbeat of racism.

LOIS BECKETT: Do racist policies in America serve the interests of the majority of white Americans? I mean, is this an issue of white Americans have to actually go against their own self-interests to do what is right?

DR. IBRAM X. KENDI: So I think that's one of the more critical fallacies of racism, that even people who are very well-meaning have put forth this idea that racist policies benefit white people. They call on white people to be altruistic in ending racism. It was a fallacy during slavery when there were five million impoverished white people in 1860 directly related to the riches of a very small group of families that were the richest group of families in the world.

You know, it's a fallacy that the white middle class has actually been helped by the Republican Party that has shifted money away from public schooling of their children and into prisons and have led to a growing divide between the white middle class and the white upper class, which is what they've been seeking to do ever since the New Deal. It's certainly not in the interest of the vast majority of Americans to support racist policies.

LOIS BECKETT: How do we actually have this debate in America because it seems like most of us -- are racist? So what should this conversation even look like?

DR. IBRAM X. KENDI: We, I think, have failed, and when I say "we" people who are truly interested in eliminating racism have failed in providing language and concepts that clarifies this complex truth. And that's really personally what I'm attempting to do. Over 500 years, people have made the case that the problem is people and that all of these ideas have proved themselves to not be true. And so, if the problem is not people, the problem must be policies, and that's what we need to focus on.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

LOIS BECKETT: Dr. Kendi, thank you so much for talking with us.

DR. IBRAM X. KENDI: Thank you for having me on.

LOIS BECKETT: Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the founding director of the Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center at American University and author of Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

AL LETSON: People may say that they don't believe that most of America is like Richard Spencer but when you dig deeper into the truth of what America is, most people are okay with a lot of the things that Richard Spencer says.

LOIS BECKETT: Reveal's Al Letson.

AL LETSON: Richard Spencer doesn't want to live with black people. Neither do most white Americans in America. Look at the statistics. America is segregated. Listen, when I first started on NPR, I got more racist hate mail from [LAUGHS] white people that listened to NPR than I've experienced at any other time of my life. Let me tell you this story.

LOIS BECKETT: I have to warn you that the following features an all-too-well-known racial slur.

AL LETSON: True story. In New York City, I went out to dinner with a couple that was really well-to-do, and a friend of mine had introduced me to them, and so we went out and had dinner. And, and it was, it was a nice dinner. I really liked these people. At the end of the dinner, the woman who I was sitting next to asked us if we wanted to go back to her house for tea. And I said, sure, of course. And she turns to me and smiles and laughs and says, oh, Al, you know, I've never had a nigger in my house before. This is in New York City, maybe five years ago. She and her husband give to Democratic causes. They are extremely liberal. They loved my show, "State of the Reunion." And she looked me in the face and said that. So -- it's everywhere.

[MUSIC UP & UNDER]

BOB GARFIELD: This week's special hour was conceived and reported by Lois Beckett, generously loaned to us by Guardian US, and produced by Jesse Brenneman. On the Media is produced by Alana Casanova-Burgess, Micah Loewinger, Leah Feder and Jon Hanrahan. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer was Sam Bair. And the show was edited -- by Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Katya Rogers is our executive producer. Special thanks to Andy Lancet and the WNYC Archives Department. Jim Schachter is WNYC's vice president for news. And this week, especially, we hope you'll visit our website where we have more reading and even activities focused on the sticky issues we examined this hour. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield.

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Getting Racist Ideas Backwards | On the Media | WNYC Studios

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LOIS BECKETT: This is On the Media. I'm Lois Beckett, a reporter with Guardian US, sitting in for Bob and Brooke on a special hour exploring the debates over media coverage of white supremacists. Underlying so much of this debate is the assumption about where racism thrives, namely among the uneducated, the hateful, the poor.

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On the Media | Busted: America's Poverty Myths | WNYC Studios

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WNYC's weekly investigation into how the media shapes our worldview.

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The Scarlet E: Unmasking America's Eviction Crisis

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The Scarlet E: Unmasking America's Eviction Crisis

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On the Media: Scarlet E | WNYC Studios | Podcasts

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WNYC's weekly investigation into how the media shapes our worldview.

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Read 18.2k reviews from the world's largest community for readers. The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the ...

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White Tears/Brown Scars book. Read 130 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. For readers of White Fragility, White Tears/Brown Scars is...

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SDSU Professor Challenges Concept Widely Embraced By Educators
GUEST:
J. Luke Wood, Ph.D., professor of community college leadership, San Diego State University
Transcript

The concept of "growth mindset" has been widely embraced by educators, but San Diego State University Professor J. Luke Wood, Ph.D., said the concept is incomplete.

The growth mindset concept encourages educators to praise a student's effort, as opposed to the student's ability. It contends that acknowledging perseverance and improvement fosters hardy and resilient students.

But in the SDSU course, "Black Minds Matter: A Focus on Black Boys and Men in Education," Wood developed and is currently teaching, he argued that the concept is incomplete when it comes to underserved students, particularly boys and men of color.

"I welcome Dr. Wood's input and his deeply informed perspective," Carol Dweck a proponent of the growth mindset concept said in an email to KPBS. "I had this very discussion with my undergraduate class. We agreed that for some students, especially those laboring under negative stereotypes about their ability, reassurance about ability can be important. "I believe in your ability to do this" can be an important message."

Wood joins Midday Edition Monday to discuss why he believes the growth mindset concept is incomplete.

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SDSU Professor Challenges Concept Widely Embraced By Educators

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SDSU Professor Challenges Concept Widely Embraced By Educators GUEST: J. Luke Wood, Ph.D., professor of community college leadership, San Diego State University Transcript The concept of "growth mindset" has been widely embraced by educators, but San Diego State University Professor J. Luke Wood, Ph.D., said the concept is incomplete.

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Black Homeowners Face Discrimination in Appraisals (Published 2020)

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Companies that value homes for sale or refinancing are bound by law not to discriminate. Black homeowners say it happens anyway.

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By Michelle Molitor, with Nicole Young

The conversation about race is really a conversation about love. It often makes people uncomfortable to use the word "love" because the word "race" often conjures up images of struggle and inequity; but that's exactly what it is. This is not a romantic kind of love; instead, it's a love of self, a love of others, and a love of the kinds of relationships necessary to honor all humanity. In order to engage in conversations with ourselves and with others about race, we have to be willing to open up - first to ourselves, and then to others. We must be willing to excavate what we think we know about ourselves, and then we must allow ourselves to heal, have the humility to ask forgiveness, and develop the strength to offer grace.

At The Equity Lab, there is a reason we start all of the conversations we lead with what we call REDI (Race, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Agreements. These Agreements shape the conversation and form the backbone of racial literacy and personal transformation. All of us live in a country that actively refuses to discuss the construct of race and its myriad consequences with any fidelity to the lived experiences of Black, Indiginous, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander, and other people of color. But in order to disassemble the harmful structures around us, we must start talking.

Talking about race is challenging. Talking about race is arduous. Talking about race requires bravery. Talking about race necessitates preparation. And we start each of these hard conversations with an invitation to each person. We invite them to examine how they are showing up with love.

The Equity Lab believes in equity across all lines of difference and variation. However, we recognize the special distinction that race has had historically around the world and especially in the United States of America. And because we recognize the potential for that history to repeat itself, we choose to address race first and to keep race at the center of our work. We believe that if race is allowed to be ignored, avoided, or referenced with false equivalencies - it will be.

We did not invent the concept of Agreements, but at The Equity Lab, we understand their power. REDI Agreements are about you. How do you want to hold yourself accountable? How do you want to show up for yourself and others? How are you working to navigate your relationships in meaningful, authentic and powerful ways? How are you showing up in love?

When I first started leading work around racial equity and social justice, I knew that the REDI Agreements were an important tool in this work. They gave me language and served as guideposts to help others on their own journeys. Over time, however, I've learned that these Agreements are so much more than simply a structural tool. I've come to understand that they actually represent who I want to be in the world when I'm my best and fullest self. They help me think about what it means when I don't show up as my full self in any situation - how that not only undermines my relationships with others, but also deeply undermines my relationship with myself. Only showing up partially when I have the ability to be so whole serves no one. When I show up in love - completely - I support others to feel free do the same.

The Agreements are simple: Stay engaged. Speak your truth. Experience discomfort. Grace with others, grace with ourselves. Observe the 24- to 48-hour rule. Notice patterns of participation. Respect confidentiality. Recognize intent vs. impact. Consider power dynamics. Recognize the danger of a single story.

When we first share the Agreements, people sometimes think that they're more like what we're familiar with in workplaces: norms. Norms are an accountability system that can be used to call people out when your perception is that they are doing something outside of expectations. But what is powerful about Agreements is that they are a pact you make with yourself.

What are the ways you want to call yourself to more truth and love? How can that truth revitalize relationships with yourself and others? When we show up in that loving way, we remain curious about how we can grow and change and come to understand that our relationships - through love - are our most incredible and impactful tool to create lasting change.

Love is about believing in the power of transformation. And for us, it is important that we distinguish love from comfort. We are socialized to believe that being loving means being gentle in a way that often prioritizes the feelings of the most powerful in our society and leaves the most vulnerable without the support that they need. Love requires a deep shift in that dynamic, and that shift is not comfortable for any of us. Listening to the most impacted is a loving act. Listening and changing behavior requires love, sometimes alongside discomfort and sacrifice.

Throughout America's history, we've centered the comfort of the white, the wealthy, the able-bodied, and those deeply invested in the status quo in conversations about systemic inequality. So much so that sometimes centering the stories and voices of Black people, Indigenous people, disabled people, people of color, and poor people is jarring. Allowing oppressed people to own and share their experiences in a society designed, in many ways, to destroy their identities, feels uncomfortable. However, Agreements help ground us in the reality that unearthing inequality and exposing our complicity in the harm of those around us is not an attack, but in fact the first step in healing.

Take, for instance, our Agreement of "Recognize intent vs. impact." White dominant culture tells us that intent is what matters most in our interactions with other human beings. If we meant no harm, then none was given. But all of us, in our bones, know that not to be true. When someone does something hurtful or offensive to another person, we should prioritize the feelings and story of those most affected by that action. This Agreement helps us center those harmed, support them in healing first, and in so doing, encourage the person who perpetrated the harm to consider a different set of actions in the future.

Therefore, our Agreements help guide us to a place where all of us - especially those least practiced in conversations about race - have the skills and patterns to navigate racial conflict with increasing ease and reflection. These skills help to remove shame around concepts and language that are new or challenging to previously-held ideas of the world. Particularly for white people, who often don't believe they need to have these conversations, our Agreements provide scaffolding until those skills begin to take shape.

Our work is only a beginning. There is no way that a single article, an eight-hour training, or a six-month organizational focus on racial equity will undo the centuries of oppression embedded in so many layers of our society. The work we are doing, personally and collectively, to upend the very systems that form the backbone of our societal understanding is ongoing and never truly finished.

However, the Agreements, and the conversations they foster, help lay the groundwork for more robust life- and systems-changing work. Agreements don't just have a place in our more formal conversations about race; they can be taken to the dinner table, to a church meeting, to the boardrooms you sit in, and to the buses you ride. They are a guide to build not only your individual skill, but also the community will to engage differently on difficult and crucially important topics like race, class, gender, privilege, and power.

By Michelle Molitor, with Nicole Young

The conversation about race is really a conversation about love. It often makes people uncomfortable to use the word "love" because the word "race" often conjures up images of struggle and inequity; but that's exactly what it is. This is not a romantic kind of love; instead, it's a love of self, a love of others, and a love of the kinds of relationships necessary to honor all humanity. In order to engage in conversations with ourselves and with others about race, we have to be willing to open up - first to ourselves, and then to others. We must be willing to excavate what we think we know about ourselves, and then we must allow ourselves to heal, have the humility to ask forgiveness, and develop the strength to offer grace.

At The Equity Lab, there is a reason we start all of the conversations we lead with what we call REDI (Race, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Agreements. These Agreements shape the conversation and form the backbone of racial literacy and personal transformation. All of us live in a country that actively refuses to discuss the construct of race and its myriad consequences with any fidelity to the lived experiences of Black, Indiginous, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander, and other people of color. But in order to disassemble the harmful structures around us, we must start talking.

Talking about race is challenging. Talking about race is arduous. Talking about race requires bravery. Talking about race necessitates preparation. And we start each of these hard conversations with an invitation to each person. We invite them to examine how they are showing up with love.

The Equity Lab believes in equity across all lines of difference and variation. However, we recognize the special distinction that race has had historically around the world and especially in the United States of America. And because we recognize the potential for that history to repeat itself, we choose to address race first and to keep race at the center of our work. We believe that if race is allowed to be ignored, avoided, or referenced with false equivalencies - it will be.

We did not invent the concept of Agreements, but at The Equity Lab, we understand their power. REDI Agreements are about you. How do you want to hold yourself accountable? How do you want to show up for yourself and others? How are you working to navigate your relationships in meaningful, authentic and powerful ways? How are you showing up in love?

When I first started leading work around racial equity and social justice, I knew that the REDI Agreements were an important tool in this work. They gave me language and served as guideposts to help others on their own journeys. Over time, however, I've learned that these Agreements are so much more than simply a structural tool. I've come to understand that they actually represent who I want to be in the world when I'm my best and fullest self. They help me think about what it means when I don't show up as my full self in any situation - how that not only undermines my relationships with others, but also deeply undermines my relationship with myself. Only showing up partially when I have the ability to be so whole serves no one. When I show up in love - completely - I support others to feel free do the same.

The Agreements are simple: Stay engaged. Speak your truth. Experience discomfort. Grace with others, grace with ourselves. Observe the 24- to 48-hour rule. Notice patterns of participation. Respect confidentiality. Recognize intent vs. impact. Consider power dynamics. Recognize the danger of a single story.

When we first share the Agreements, people sometimes think that they're more like what we're familiar with in workplaces: norms. Norms are an accountability system that can be used to call people out when your perception is that they are doing something outside of expectations. But what is powerful about Agreements is that they are a pact you make with yourself.

What are the ways you want to call yourself to more truth and love? How can that truth revitalize relationships with yourself and others? When we show up in that loving way, we remain curious about how we can grow and change and come to understand that our relationships - through love - are our most incredible and impactful tool to create lasting change.

Love is about believing in the power of transformation. And for us, it is important that we distinguish love from comfort. We are socialized to believe that being loving means being gentle in a way that often prioritizes the feelings of the most powerful in our society and leaves the most vulnerable without the support that they need. Love requires a deep shift in that dynamic, and that shift is not comfortable for any of us. Listening to the most impacted is a loving act. Listening and changing behavior requires love, sometimes alongside discomfort and sacrifice.

Throughout America's history, we've centered the comfort of the white, the wealthy, the able-bodied, and those deeply invested in the status quo in conversations about systemic inequality. So much so that sometimes centering the stories and voices of Black people, Indigenous people, disabled people, people of color, and poor people is jarring. Allowing oppressed people to own and share their experiences in a society designed, in many ways, to destroy their identities, feels uncomfortable. However, Agreements help ground us in the reality that unearthing inequality and exposing our complicity in the harm of those around us is not an attack, but in fact the first step in healing.

Take, for instance, our Agreement of "Recognize intent vs. impact." White dominant culture tells us that intent is what matters most in our interactions with other human beings. If we meant no harm, then none was given. But all of us, in our bones, know that not to be true. When someone does something hurtful or offensive to another person, we should prioritize the feelings and story of those most affected by that action. This Agreement helps us center those harmed, support them in healing first, and in so doing, encourage the person who perpetrated the harm to consider a different set of actions in the future.

Therefore, our Agreements help guide us to a place where all of us - especially those least practiced in conversations about race - have the skills and patterns to navigate racial conflict with increasing ease and reflection. These skills help to remove shame around concepts and language that are new or challenging to previously-held ideas of the world. Particularly for white people, who often don't believe they need to have these conversations, our Agreements provide scaffolding until those skills begin to take shape.

Our work is only a beginning. There is no way that a single article, an eight-hour training, or a six-month organizational focus on racial equity will undo the centuries of oppression embedded in so many layers of our society. The work we are doing, personally and collectively, to upend the very systems that form the backbone of our societal understanding is ongoing and never truly finished.

However, the Agreements, and the conversations they foster, help lay the groundwork for more robust life- and systems-changing work. Agreements don't just have a place in our more formal conversations about race; they can be taken to the dinner table, to a church meeting, to the boardrooms you sit in, and to the buses you ride. They are a guide to build not only your individual skill, but also the community will to engage differently on difficult and crucially important topics like race, class, gender, privilege, and power.

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Why Start With Agreements? - The Equity Lab

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Talking about race is challenging. Talking about race is arduous. Talking about race requires bravery. Talking about race necessitates preparation. And we start each of these hard conversations with an invitation to each person. We invite them to examine how they are showing up with love.

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In 1999, I started researching sundown towns. These are overwhelmingly white communities that for decades stayed that way on purpose. The term derives from the signs that some towns posted at their corporate limits with warnings such as, "Nigger, Don't Let the Sun Go Down On You in Hawthorne," to quote the anti-greeting at the edge of Hawthorne, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles. Although the term is not widely known east of Ohio, municipalities that were white on purpose are found, in abundance, from Maine to Florida.

I first learned of such towns as a college student in Minnesota in the 1960s. Classmates from the Twin Cities told me that Edina, the wealthiest suburb of Minneapolis, had an informal saying, "Not one Negro and not one Jew." Then I learned of Darien, Conn., one of the richest suburbs of New York City. Darien was made famous briefly for the practice by the Academy Award-winning movie of 1947, Gentleman's Agreement, about the method by which it kept out Jews. Later I learned of the motto that residents of Anna, Ill., applied to their town: "Ain't No Niggers Allowed."

Not By Accident

The notion that entire communities had abrogated unto themselves the right to keep out a racial or religious group seemed outrageous to me, so in 1999 I resolved to write a book about it. I imagined I would find maybe 10 of these communities in Illinois (my home state, where I planned more research than in any other single state) and 50 across the country. To my astonishment, I found probably 500 in Illinois alone, or 70 percent of all incorporated places in that state. I found hundreds more across the United States and now estimate that as many as 10,000 such towns existed at their peak, in about 1970. They ranged from hamlets such as Mize, Miss., population 300, to cities like Appleton, Wis., with 57,000 residents in 1970. "Sundown suburbs" often were even larger: Levittown on Long Island, population more than 80,000, and Warren, a Detroit suburb of 80,000.

African Americans and Jews were not the only targets of exclusion. Scores of communities in the West - from rural counties in Wyoming to cities as large as Tacoma, Wash. - drove out their Chinese Americans in the 1880s and 1890s. Some locales maintained anti-Chinese policies at least until the 1960s. Two towns in Nevada sounded a whistle at 6 p.m. to tell Native Americans to be gone. Like Darien, many suburbs across the U.S., as well as beach communities and resort towns, banned Jews. A handful of towns kept out Mexican Americans, Catholics, Greek Americans, or other groups. The main targets, were, and remain, African Americans.

These days, many former sundown towns have moved beyond outright prohibition. Unfortunately, they rarely have taken any formal action to rectify, undo, come to terms with, or at least admit their past policies, even when these were formal. A few black families moved in, despite the town's reputation, or white residents at least claim they could do so if they wanted. But that neither addresses nor remedies the historical record.

Counteracting Misleading Information

For teachers, the emergence of "recovering" sundown towns poses the possibility of distorted understanding of racial demographics among students. In the old days, when a town or school explicitly excluded, it was easy to pinpoint the excluded group - often enough by reading the sign at the city limits. Today, complicity is more subtle. Teachers and students in overwhelmingly white towns like Ironwood, Mich., say, or Kenilworth, Ill., may imagine that they have no issues of exclusionary race relations, at least locally. After all, Ironwood had just one black household in the 2000 census, and Kenilworth none at all. "Logical" explanations rush in to fill the vacuum created by not talking or thinking about race. The absence of statistically proportional minority populations is explained as voluntary, accidental, or "natural." Ironwood, for example, is just too cold for African Americans. Or too far from the South. Kenilworth, one of the wealthiest towns in the U.S., is doubtless too expensive for black folks. "I couldn't live in Grosse Pointe either," a white professor told me, referring to a similarly elite sundown suburb of Detroit. More generally, whites often rationalize that blacks don't want to live in white neighborhoods.

To be sure, it is possible that no black family ever chanced to move into a given white community or neighborhood with a sundown past. Originally, I thought that most white communities were places no African Americans had happened to settle. Seven years of research taught me otherwise. It turns out that very few overwhelmingly white towns or suburbs are that way by accident.

Of the 502 overwhelmingly white communities in Illinois, for instance, I confirmed the racial policies, formal or informal, for 219. Of that number, only one had no history of keeping out blacks. Since 218 of the 219 suspected Illinois sundown towns on which we have information have been confirmed, what can we predict about the remaining 283, on which we have no historical information beyond census data? Our best estimate would be that 99.5% - the same proportion as among the towns we have checked out, or 500 of 502 suspected towns, kept out African Americans. Several sundown suburbs of Chicago also barred Jews. In Indiana, of 231 suspected towns, I have identified the racial policies of 95; all 95 barred African-American residents.

It turns out that Ironwood is hardly "too cold." Other factors better account for its whiteness. According to the daughter of a track inspector for the Chicago & Northwestern Railroad (C&NW), "as recently as the early 1960s anyone black on train crews would be told they couldn't stay overnight." Porters on C&NW passenger trains "experienced enough harassment from local law enforcement that they wouldn't step onto the depot platform while the train was in the station." Similarly, Kenilworth is hardly "too rich." Rather, its founder, Joseph Sears, built into its founding ordinances "sales to Caucasians only," initially interpreted to bar Jews as well as African Americans. One black family lived in the town from 1964 to the mid-1970s. A cross was burned on their lawn after they moved in, and Kenilworth never got past its anti-black and anti-Jewish reputation.

Not only towns but also many schools kept out African Americans, formally or informally. As with communities, some still do. Before Brown v. Board of Education, this was true across the South, of course. De jure school segregation also held in Maryland, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, most of Kansas, New Mexico, most of Arizona, and some other parts of the United States. But even in those places where schools served neighborhoods rather than racial groups, overwhelmingly white schools were usually that way on purpose. Builders in Lathrup Township, for instance, a suburb of Detroit, openly advertised, "as to a school for your child consider this: ... the entire school district is reserved exclusively for Caucasians." Private schools from Jackson Preparatory Academy in Mississippi to Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam, Wis., flatly excluded blacks. Most now admit a handful of African Americans, but their past lingers as a self-fulfilling prophecy, keeping their student bodies and their applicant pools overwhelmingly white. Continuing problems - ranging from a white curriculum to outright harassment - can make their few black students feel alienated and uncomfortable.

Within this web of disinformation lies a rich opportunity for teachers. The study of sundown towns across the nation can lead classes into exploration of the often unexamined role of race in their daily lives. It likewise opens the door to more general discussions of questions of racism in society. Using the examples of racial exclusion and denial in sundown towns, teachers can challenge students to do history - to investigate the racial past of their own communities, neighborhoods, or schools. Towns didn't stay white by accident. They left paper trails of discrimination by which students can ferret out information. Likely sources include restrictive covenants, city ordinances, realtor steering and incidents of police harassment. If a locale or institution did keep out African Americans - documents will confirm it. In the process, students will find themselves doing research - checking census tables, reading local histories, skimming old newspapers, interviewing senior citizens, and using land records and city council minutes.

Census Research

The first step is to help students locate population numbers by race and decade. The Web site readily provides these data for 1990 and 2000 for every town with more than a few hundred inhabitants. Included is information as to age and sex in the black population and number of households with black adult householders. These numbers help students avoid misattributing residential status to African Americans in institutions such as colleges or prisons or within white households as employees. Any sharp drop in the black population is, of course, suspicious. So are low numbers of African Americans for decade after decade, especially if blacks are hardly absent from nearby towns or if the town's total population is increasing.

For most earlier decades the racial composition of towns is also available online from the Census Bureau, but it takes some poking around to find it. These data can also be found in the bound volumes of the census at the local library or nearest university library. For towns smaller than 2,500, the census often does not give population by race, but students can amass it from the "manuscript census," the raw data of the census. It is on the web at various sites, usually by state. Large libraries and genealogical collections also have it on microfilm.

Bear in mind that the exclusion need not have been total. Some towns drove out their African Americans, even posted the traditional sundown town signs, yet allowed one family to remain. In 1899 when residents of Pana, in central Illinois, expelled their black community, killing five in the process, they didn't throw out the barber. No one had anything against the barber, who served only white customers. Pana went on to put up the traditional sundown town signs at each highway entrance to town, but the 1900 and 1910 censuses show a handful of African Americans - the barber and his family. In 1986, when residents of Cicero, a suburb of Chicago, burned out a black would-be resident, Cicero had more than 90 African Americans. They served in white households, lived in such institutions as jails, hospitals, and colleges, or rented in large apartment houses not in residential neighborhoods.

Local Histories, Newspapers

Students can then go to their local libraries and divide up various tasks. Some can skim local history books, such as centennial histories and county histories. Probably they will find nothing about race, but these can surprise. Others can learn where notes are on file from the WPA Federal Writers Project - maybe in the county seat or the state historical library - and skim those. Another can check the vertical files (newspaper clippings) for "blacks," "Negroes," "segregation," "Ku Klux Klan," etc. A team can scan the local newspaper for the decade between two censuses that showed a sharp decline in black population, looking for stories that might explain the decline. Sometimes the nearest newspaper outside the town in question will be more forthcoming, since the local paper may not want to publish anything that might reflect badly on its community.

Oral Histories

At the same time, students can begin learning how to interview, take notes, and write them up. They can start by interviewing their teacher, seeking what he or she knows while honing their questioning, note-taking, and interactive skills. Then they should interview the oldest members of their own families, or elders in the communities. Teach students to begin gently, maybe by asking what the town's major employers used to be. After the respondent has begun to open up, the student can ask, "Have you ever heard that [name of town] used to keep out blacks?" They might mention that some nearby town once kept out African Americans; did this community have the same policy? What about other targets of bias, such as Jews, Latinos, Asians? If interviewees say yes, then ask how they heard it, from whom, when, etc. Students should ask the librarian in charge of the local history collection if he or she knows anything about the absence of blacks. Might it have been on purpose? Was there any intimidation of black families that tried to move into the town?

Students (working in pairs to enhance accuracy) should also ask the librarian, "Who knows the most about the history of the town?" Every town has its expert. They always should end by asking, "Who else should I talk with?" Other students can interview the city clerk, long-time realtors, and retired city officials. Still others can go to the local nursing home or senior center. If there is a genealogical society, two students should attend its next meeting after talking with its leader.

Oral history sometimes requires extra digging to ensure validity. Persons who respond, "Blacks were not allowed..." should be asked, "How do you know that?" Students can press for added details: "Did your friends ever talk about it?" "Did you ever hear of a black family that moved in, then left?"

Triangulate

After students have some information, they may be able to triangulate with confirmation from different sets of data. For example, the manuscript census or written or oral sources may show that the town once had a black or interracial neighborhood. Students can then learn from a lawyer, real estate agent, or city official where land records and deeds of sale are kept. These can be with the town clerk, at the nearest county courthouse, or perhaps in the tax assessor's office. Tracing backward from the present reveals when a property changed hands and sometimes its selling price. If several properties changed hands at about the same time, that may be when the black community was ousted. If this happened before 1930, the 1930 manuscript census for nearby interracial towns may contain some of the names of people who were expelled. Their children may still be alive to share family lore of the expulsion, if that is what it was.

Another way to triangulate involves sources from a different population. For example, African-American senior citizens in the nearest biracial town may know something about your students' town, at least by reputation.

Products

Challenge students to do excellent work, because they are actually doing important history that has not been written before. It makes for wonderful entries in the "exhibit" contest of National History Day. Teachers should also photocopy and bind the class results as a book, with interview transcripts (names removed) and other notes as appendices. Deposit a copy - with appropriate fanfare - in the community library. Ages hence, it will become a valuable resource for other researchers. Its existence also confirms to your students that they have accomplished something - "I helped write a book."

Teachers have found that the process of discussing their community's or school's racial past can itself markedly lessen racial prejudice. As students share what adults have told them, stories of racist actions emerge freely because they are not about or by the speaker. Hearing these accounts, other students are likely to respond by making use of the material to reveal a more complete history of the town. In this classroom at least, the town's past exclusivity has become a force for liberation.

Opening up the topic can also become a force for change. If the town or school is still overwhelmingly white, knowledge of its past can help undermine the conflation of whiteness and prestige that still haunts most metropolitan areas. If the town is indeed "recovering," then knowledge of its past can help other teachers and students understand the background of the racial tensions that remain. Not least, if you confirm a town that has not previously been confirmed as a sundown town, please send that information to me for my sundown towns website, so everyone can learn from it.

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Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

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by Ibram X. Kendi

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[This list is a work in progress. You can assess the information provided to form your own determination as to whether the town is a confirmed sundown town. If you have additional information, pro or con, please email it to Stephen Berrey. Also note: some towns are *'d. They are not suspected sundown towns but are listed for other reasons. If your research (or ours) convinces you that a town was a sundown town, consider helping it transcend its white supremacist past. Goshen, IN, and La Crosse, WI, discussed on this website, provide examples of places that have done so. Also, make sure that descriptions of the town in state encyclopedias, Wikipedia, etc., acknowledge that it was a sundown town.]

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This list is a work in progress. You can assess the information provided to form your own determination as to whether the town is a confirmed sundown town. If you have additional information, pro or con, please email it to Stephen Berrey. Also note: some towns are *'d.

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The Brown Bookshelf is designed to push awareness of the myriad Black voices writing for young readers. Our flagship initiative is 28 Days Later, a month-long showcase of the best in Picture Books, Middle Grade, and Young Adult novels written and illustrated by Black creators. You can read more abou…

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Praise from Educators and Authors:

"Another glorious package of encouragement and challenge from the most enlightened and most fervent group of teachers and their allies in our nation. Indispensable for elementary teachers-and a feisty provocation to all educators to stand up and fight for our beliefs."

- Jonathan Kozol, author, Savage Inequalities and Letters to a Young Teacher

"The authors of Rethinking Elementary Education see curriculum as a metaphor for the lives they want to live, a metaphor for the world they want their students to inhabit with them. They believe schools in a democracy - even elementary schools - ought to be focused on equity and justice. Chapter after chapter, teachers take your breath away with the power of their teaching, demonstrating practices that help the children in their care 'live the curriculum.' This is a much needed look at how, despite mandates to the contrary, teachers might make curriculum relevant to children, connecting it to their lives by addressing the big issues that surround them - from the commercialization of childhood to the xenophobia our society holds toward immigrants."

- Jerome C. Harste, Martha Lea and Bill Armstrong Chair Emeritus of Teacher Education, Indiana University

"This is an essential book that will transform how we see Elementary Education. Both clear and profound, this honest book provides inspiration, invites reflection, and through engaging real life examples of classrooms across the nation, shows that in spite of all the external restriction placed upon our schools, we can be the teachers we want to be and give all children the true education they deserve."

- Alma Flor Ada, professor emerita. University of San Francisco, and author of numerous books for children and educators, including A Magical Encounter: Latino Children's Literature in the Classroom.

" Rethinking Elementary Education is both powerful and practical. The stories are direct from the classroom and offer testimony to the opportunities for creating real-world curriculum, based on the lives of our children and their families, and in the service of encouraging children to use their agency in support of the values of justice and empathy. I truly loved the collection and will use it with both pre-service and inservice teachers I work with. Highly recommended!"

- Ruth Shagoury, Mary Stuart Rogers Professor of Education, Lewis & Clark College, and author of Raising Writers: Understanding and Nurturing Young Children's Writing Development

Rethinking Elementary Education: Introduction

In the best of times elementary teachers are thoughtful surrogate parents, nurses, counselors, social workers, listeners, disciplinarians, teachers and preachers. In the worst of times we are all those things too, but perhaps not so thoughtful, more quick tempered, and overwhelmed with the demands of our jobs and the problems of those who we teach and care for.

We believe that teaching elementary school children is one of the most challenging occupations in the world - among the most rewarding under good conditions, and one of the most frustrating under poor ones. What amazes us is even with massive budgets cuts, rising class sizes, the gutting of the arts, physical education and libraries and all the mandated testing and scripted curriculum, staff at elementary schools still welcome each new school year with fresh anticipation. There's an almost na*ve hopefulness that despite the many problems, the upcoming school year will somehow bring new opportunities to teach creatively and help our students to grow and mature.

Why do most elementary teachers have such hopeful notions at the beginning of each school year? What gives elementary school teaching such powerful potential?

The stories, lessons and testimonies in this book, Rethinking Elementary Education, answer those questions and many others with such vitality that readers should be left with no doubt that teaching elementary school children is a venerable occupation.

All teaching matters. And all levels of teaching offer unique challenges and opportunities. But the stories in this book reveal that there is something especially powerful and essential about elementary teaching.

First, it's the children. Their curiosity. Their energy. Their sense of fairness. And the fact they've not yet been conditioned to all of the habits and prejudices of adulthood.

Their inquisitiveness is amazing. Questions are endless.

And elementary teaching offers especially rich opportunities to integrate the curriculum. Teaching all subjects with a single class of students lends itself to weaving together math and writing, science and reading, social studies and drama. By doing so, disciplines are not imprisoned in segregated silos, but blended as they are in the real world. Of course, there stills needs to be explicit and sequential instruction in core subjects, but those same subjects are most engaging, most motivating, to students when they are integrated together-as so many of the articles in this volume explore.

Another feature that makes elementary school teaching so compelling is that young children tend to wear their lives on their sleeves, being only too willing to tell their teacher or educational assistant the burdens - perceived or real - that they carry in the classroom. This makes the important task of connecting to students' lives relatively easier than with older, more self-conscious students. And connecting children's lives, with those of their families and their families' heritages in turn motivates students, and deepens educators' relationship with students and families.

And young children's minds are like sponges, soaking up the most obscure, profound, (and sometimes erroneous!) things imaginable. The challenge for teachers is to engender the disposition and the skills required to critically look at all that bombards our students daily - from the endless stream of advertising, to their dull textbooks, to one-sided news reports, to the video games and TV shows, to racist and prejudicial jokes and comments they might hear.

Moreover such critical dispositions and questioning can set the stage to encourage children to act on what they've learned - to have "civic courage," to act as if we live in a democracy. We are not talking about telling students how a teacher thinks their parents should vote, but rather to create a learning community in the classroom that models and thinks hard about values of justice and empathy.

The powerful potential of teaching in elementary school, in fact the very craft of teaching, has never been as endangered as it is now. If there ever has been a time when we need to rethink what is going on in elementary education it is now.

Federal and state mandates, often developed by people decades away from the classroom, and enforced by scared administrators who have either forgotten or compromised what they know is right for children, are directly assaulting the profession of teaching. Whether it's absurdly rigid pacing guides or lifeless, scripted curriculum, or an unnatural obsession with testing, our craft is under attack. These policies discourage curriculum integration, problem-posing curriculum, linking teaching to students' needs and interests, creative projects and performances, and the acknowledgement that "teachable moments" arrive at the most unexpected times.

Just as public space in our society shrinks as the forces of privatization seek to destroy the public sector, so too does the pedagogical space shrivel as policy makers attach their futures to flawed quick fixes and scapegoating of teachers, our unions, and our students.

We need "child-driven" teaching - not "data-driven" instruction. We need to create the spaces in our classrooms and our schools for engaging projects, role-plays, dramas, and experiments. We need to help children talk back to textbooks, examine what's going on in their community and talk together about what role they can play to make their classroom, their community, and the world a more just and democratic place. The articles in this book are powerful examples of how to do just that.

But as we create those spaces - and hopefully entire schools - that rethink elementary education, a huge challenge for us teachers is to remain hopeful in these turbulent times. Too often, elementary teachers comply with unsound mandates and do not defend the craft of teaching, fearful of being isolated from colleagues or being called out by an administrator. This is particularly a problem for new teachers who have experienced little else than the yoke of scripted curriculum and data-itis. This yoke not only inhibits more creative and critical approaches to teaching, but it also warps new teachers' perception of what good teaching is all about. In too many cases, the stress of such unsound practices pushes them out of the teaching profession.

We know that the only way to sustain hope over a long teaching career is to recognize that we cannot do it alone. Part of "rethinking elementary education" entails rethinking how we nurture ourselves as thoughtful, critical, and committed educators. We've done this through involvement in book circles, union caucuses, teacher social justice groups, Writing Projects, parent-teacher collaboratives, and broader movements for social justice. Some of us have been involved in starting innovative public schools, like La Escuela Fratney in Milwaukee- a two-way bilingual, social justice school - where the learning community of caring staff, parents, and students, has sustained committed teaching for years.

And we also stay positive through reveling and celebrating the amazing things the children do-the role plays, the projects, the poetry readings, the thinking, and ultimately their excitement in learning and trying to change the world. Every time a child's curiosity and sense of justice blossoms in the classroom we are reassured that the current regime of data-drenched, scripted, narrow curriculum will eventually fall.

Human sensibility will prevail and we will once again strive to educate the whole child, engaging students in meaningful education, treating young children as they deserve to be treated.

As we rethink the ways of teaching that are currently being pushed by educational corporations, policymakers, and many administrators, we must rehearse our craft in all the spaces we can secure. We need to show what is good, what motivates students, and what helps all students, especially those who in the past have been too quickly abandoned. We need to demand that our unions and professional associations fight so that schools can be more than just places to train students to "compete in the global economy," but rather engaging, caring classrooms where children acquire the love of learning, the habit of carrying a book (paper or digital) at all times, the "skill" of being able to name what is just-to dig deeply to see behind the statements of government officials and corporate apologists. We want children to come to stand with their friends, their neighbors and those around the planet who they may never meet, in our common quest to realign our human societies with the natural world, and seek justice for all.

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Rethinking Elementary Education - Rethinking Schools

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"Another glorious package of encouragement and challenge from the most enlightened and most fervent group of teachers and their allies in our nation. Indispensable for elementary teachers-and a feisty provocation to all educators to stand up and fight for our beliefs."

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"If you are an educator who upholds the principle of early childhood education's attention to the whole child, then R ethinking Early Childhood Education is for you. The diverse articles give insightful, practical and moving voice to teachers' experiences with children and families and make diversity, equity, inclusion, and preserving the environment integral to a quality early childhood education program."
, Faculty emeritus of Pacific Oaks College and author of Anti-Bias Curriculum: Tools for Empowering Young Children.

"Beautifully weaves together key components for transforming early childhood educators into a leadership force for progressive thinking and teaching. With its range of teacher stories Rethinking Early Childhood Education provokes critical thinking and imaginative classroom practices. There's nothing else quite like this book to fortify early educators for the work before us."
, Early childhood instructor and co-author of Learning Together with Young Children: A Curriculum Framework for Reflective Teachers.

"Ann Pelo and contributing authors provide deep focus on the complexities of social justice issues in early childhood education settings, offering an overview of critical content, dispositions, and actions in support of authentic, equitable education experiences for all children, families and educators. This book can open a dialogue among ECE professionals and parents, leading to understanding the vital connection between anti-bias, culturally and linguistically appropriate curriculum and practices and children's social/emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development. With this foundation, our children will not only be able to cope with but to shape their lives and their future society in powerful ways."
, Faculty, George Mason University and Director, Early Childhood Equity Initiative
Additional praise for Rethinking Early Childhood Education
"This book is a real page-turner. I just couldn't put it down! It's a treasure store of short, interesting pieces by famous and not so famous authors, all of whom write from their hearts and experiences. The subject is so important equity and social justice and the writing brings it all down to earth. Everybody should read this book!"
, Early childhood consultant and author of Diversity in Early Care and Education: Honoring Differences

"This volume is a beacon of progressive early childhood teaching practices. I was constantly impressed with the intimate understanding of young children that shone through teachers' descriptions of how they engage young children and their families in inclusive practices, critical thinking, and social activism to address biases and inequities and to foster connections to the natural world and critical appraisals of consumerism. When I started reading this book, I could not put it down!"
, Professor of Psychology and Education, Mount Holyoke College, and co-author of Teaching and Learning in a Diverse World: Multicultural Education for Young Children.

" Rethinking Early Childhood Education places understanding of 'what is mine,' 'what is yours,' and 'what is ours' at the center of the development of values in childhood and therefore emphasizes the importance of teaching for social justice and cultural sensitivity during the early years of life. The book discusses culturally sensitive anti-bias teaching and the importance of play; it is also full of ideas about engaging parents and communities in children's development, teaching ideas and suggestions about how teachers can become children's advocates. It is an invaluable, useful addition to the literature of early childhood education."
, Author and educator. His most recent book is Painting Chinese: A Lifelong Teacher Gains the Wisdom of Youth.

Introduction
Embracing Social Justice in Early Childhood Education
by Ann Pelo

There's a small town in Italy with an international reputation for its early childhood programs. The teaching and learning that happens in their schools is certainly compellingbut more compelling is the story of how the community came together to create an early childhood education system. The town of Reggio Emilia, like much of Italy, was devastated by World War II; as the war ended, the townspeople were fiercely determined to create a new culture, a culture in which the fascism that had taken hold of Italy in the decades leading up to the war would find no foothold. The citizens of Reggio Emilia were clear about how to begin this work of culture-building: they would create schools for young children.

Parents occupied an abandoned building near the town square, demanding that the city government make that building available to them for their first school, while the teachers and children set up school each day on the courthouse steps where the city officials would be sure to encounter them. Parents and teachers didn't set out to create private schools available to a few; they wanted publicly funded schools, open to all families in the community, organized around the values of critical thinking and joyful collaboration. One of the founders of the schools, Loris Malaguzzi, explained the vision of the community this way: "We are part of an ongoing story of men and women, ideals intact, who realize that history can be changed, and that it is changed starting with the future of children."(1)

This story has resonance for us today. It reminds us that early childhood education is a political act, and that it necessarily involves values and vision. Early childhood is the time in our lives when we develop our core dispositionsthe habits of thinking that shape how we live; our work as early childhood educators is to nurture dispositions in young children towards empathy, ecological consciousness, engaged inquiry, and collaboration. These dispositions undergird just and equitable communities; they are at the heart of activism and in the hearts of activists. Early childhood educators must believe, with the founders of the schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy, that history can be changed, and that our work is to contribute to that change. That is the premise of this book: quality early childhood education is inseparable from social justice teaching and ecological education. It is essential to rethink early childhood education, and it is essential to ensure that quality early educationprograms for children from their first months through the primary gradesis offered to all children.
Fostering Social and Ecological Dispositions in Young Children
Early childhood programs that put social justice and ecological teaching front and center share particular characteristics.

They prioritize anti-bias, culturally sensitive teaching and learning. Teachers call attention to the ways in which people are different and the ways in which people are the same, honoring individual and group identity. They intentionally introduce issues of fairness and unfairness, and coach children to think critically and to take action. Teachers learn about children's family and cultural identities and integrate those identities into the daily life of the classroom, at the same time as they acknowledge the ways in which their own cultural identities shape their teaching.

They are organized around play and ample time for exploration. Teachers create time and provide open-ended materials for children's imaginative, self-directed play. They talk with families, with other teachers, and with community members about the value of play for children's healthy development and for their learning.

They use curriculum approaches that are responsive to children's developmental and intellectual pursuits. Teachers pay attention to children's play and conversations, watching for the developmental themes, compelling questions, understandings, and misunderstandings expressed in their play. They use what they observe to develop curricula that challenge children to think deeply and to explore collaboratively.

They cultivate a sense of placeof belonging to a particular patch of earth and skyand a connection to the earth and its creatures. Teachers take the children outdoors and bring the natural world into the classroom, inviting the children to engage their senses and their minds as they come to know and care aboutand to care forthe place where they are spending their days.

They emphasize children's social-emotional and dispositional learning. Teachers seek to cultivate in children the disposition to pay attention to their own and others' emotions and needs. They emphasize the importance of collaboration and offer children coaching and practice about understanding multiple perspectives. Teachers create opportunities for children to think critically and engage intellectually with ideas and with each otherand to take action based on their critical thinking.

They learn from and stand with children's families. Teachers recognize that they have much to learn about children from their families, about children's particular ways of being in the world, about their family rituals and rhythms, and about their cultural identities. As they learn from families about their strengths and challenges, they can then offer themselves as allies to families, in ways specific to individual families and in the arena of broader community activism and justice efforts.

They advocate for children, families, and early childhood workers. Teachers acknowledge the broader social conditions that impact the lives of children, families, and teachers. They take actionspeaking out in their community, writing letters to news media and to legislators, participating in demonstrations. They know that their activism is an extension of their teaching, contributing to social justice efforts and modeling for children what it is to live in the world as a change-maker.

This is early childhood education at its best: teachers, children, and families opening themselves to each other and to the earth in ways that invite joyful play, collaborative inquiry, thoughtful observation, and deep caring that gives rise to action. These ways of being are a foundation for children's lives in community. They foster the social and emotional well-being that is at the heart of just communities, and they strengthen the intellectual development that is at the heart of academic learning.
Challenges to Early Childhood Education
This vision for top-notch early childhood programs is a stark contrast to the cultural belief system that now threatens early childhood education. Early childhood, we're told, is a time to get children ready for school and for work. Play is nice, but school is about learning and skill development, and that means memorization and drill and testing.

Pressure from federal policy has pushed assessment-driven, academic instruction into programs for the youngest children: most federal- and state-funded programs use standardized, scripted curriculum packages that emphasize literacy and numeracy at the cost of open time for play, and administer a barrage of tests to the 4- and 5-year-old children enrolled in their programs. This emphasis on a "teacher-proof" drill-and-skill curriculum communicates to families that early childhood ought to be about "school and test readiness," defined in the narrowest and most hollow academic terms. Families, in turn, are confused: should they accede to this vision for their children's earliest years, hoping to insure their children's school success, or press for a more generous and spacious experience for their young children, anchored in their intuition that childhood ought to be about more than literacy drills and tests?

Families carry their confusion to teachers, looking for reassurance that their children will be ready for schooland for the tests they're sure to encounter there. Teachers are squeezed between this push towards early academics and their commitment to children's right to play and to meaningful curricula anchored in their lives and questions. And teachers are weighed down by the emphasis on narrowly technical teaching centered on discrete skills, which stands in stark contrast to the intellectually engaging work of reflective study and inquiry that is teaching at its best and most sustaining. Teachers face wrenching pressure to abandon their desire to be reflective, responsive educators who think critically about their teaching and the children's learning, and, instead, to organize their teaching around assessments and scripted curricula.

In addition to this daily intellectual and emotional challenge, childcare teachers and caregivers work with the constant strain of low wages and no health care or retirement. Their work is dismissed as unskilled, jobs that anyone can fillan attitude born of the view that early childhood work is women's work. Caring for and educating very young children comes naturally to women, the thinking goes: women do that work by instinct, and have been doing it foreverit certainly doesn't require any particular education or professional development. That attitude has been institutionalized in the field of early childhood education: there are only minimal requirements for childcare workers in most statestypically, passing a criminal background check and having a high school diploma. No specialized training, no internships, no particular experience needed.

The attitude that "anyone can do this work" is one reason for the current emphasis on "teacher-proof" curricula. Early childhood agencies provide scripted curricula in place of professional development for early childhood educators. This communicates a startling disrespect for teachers' ability to generate engaging, thoughtful, instructive experiences for children without a script to follow, and drives people from the field who are eager to engage intellectually with children, families, and colleagues.

Given these stresses, it's no wonder that the annual national turnover rate in child care stands at around 40 percent.(2) And that turnover compounds the challenges that early childhood education faces. Children and families are shaken each time a cherished caregiver leaves; the effort of developing trust in new caregivers becomes a too-familiar detour away from learning. And teachers, too, are shaken as their colleagues come and go; they face a daunting uphill struggle to create a community of thinkers anchored by a shared understanding of the work. The disruption created by teacher turnover is felt especially in impoverished communities, where teachers typically earn rock-bottom wages and struggle with an appalling lack of resources and a corresponding high degree of stress.

Early childhood education is in a precarious situation.

We believe that social justice and ecological teaching offers a much-needed vision for early childhood education in the face of the challenges weighing on the field and confronting the planet.
Social Justice and Ecological Teaching Is Responsive Teaching
Social justice teaching grows from children's urgent concerns. If we listen to the themes embedded in children's play and conversations, we hear questions about identity and belonging, about community and relationships and fairness: Can boys be part of the game about the kitty family, or just girls? The bad guy is the one with brown skin and a funny way of talking, right? Can we have two moms in this family? And, in their everyday negotiations, children are working to make sense of the ways in which people are the same and different: Your lunch has food in it that I've never seen before. Why don't you have a dad in your family? You have Easter at your house, but I don't. Why is your skin a different color than your mom's skin? Children are fundamentally concerned with making sense of their social and cultural world; teachers and caregivers can join them in this pursuit, guiding them towards understandings rooted in accurate and empathetic understandingsor we can leave them to figure out their questions on their own, coming to conclusions based on misinformation and cultural bias. When we engage with children in questions about identity and equity, we participate in the work of reshaping our society.

Ecological teaching grows from an understanding that current ways of living on this planet are unsustainable and destructive and must be replaced. Young children are forming the fundamental understandings that will shape how they engage with the earth. Will they learn that the earth is a resource to be used and abused by humans with little attention to the price of that use, or will they grow a more intimate relationship with the earth that ranks the environment high on the list of "things to consider" in every decision? Our planet cannot afford another generation of children to grow up disregarding the earth, the sky, the water, and all who live in them. And children cannot afford to grow up ignorant of the earth and its ways, displaced from their ecological home terrain by lack of intimate knowledge.
Changing the Discussion about the Purpose of Early Education
Social justice and ecological teaching relocates the meaning of early childhood education from school readiness to social and emotional learning and intellectual development. It offers another way to understand childhood, reminding us that this is a time when children ought to be developing core social and ecological dispositions rather than cramming for the tests ahead. Social justice and ecological teaching reframes our work as educators from a too-heavy focus on academic skills that actually diminishes the capacity for deep learning, and offers, instead, an emphasis on thoughtful observation, reflection, and planning on behalf of children's dispositional and developmental learning. This is teaching at its best: responsive to children's developmental questions and pursuits and attentive to building a sturdy intellectual foundation for the academic work that children will encounter in later schooling.

In these ways, social justice and ecological teaching becomes a form of resistance to the view that early childhood education is unskilled work, important only in as much as it prepares children to recite the alphabet, identify colors, and count to 10. Social justice and ecological teaching is intellectually and emotionally engaging work; it sustains, rather than drains, teachers and caregivers. It asks that teachers listen closely to the social and cultural questions embedded in children's play, and that they think carefully about how best to engage the children around those questions. It demands that teachers stay present to the children's developing understandings about the world and themselves in order to best support their learning. This is a far remove from scripted curricula and preplanned lessons; it is authentic teachingand it is the kind of teaching our society urgently needs. We need teachers who are engaged and curious, who create in their classrooms cultures of deep listening, compassionate perspective-taking, and critical thinking. We need teachers who, in the words of Terry Tempest Williams, cultivate "democracy as a way of life: the right to be educated, to think, discuss, dissent, create, and act, acting in imaginative and revolutionary ways."(3)
Our Work Extends Beyond the Classroom
When we embrace social justice and ecological teaching, we participate in changing history, "starting with the future of children." But the challenges we face and the vision we hold of just communities carry us beyond our teaching practices into the arena of broader activism.

We can resist and subvert assessment-driven, standards-based curricula in our daily teaching, but our individual efforts won't safeguard children's right to education that is anchored by their questions, passions, and pursuits. There is a growing movement to remake the government mandates tha t locate drills and tests at the heart of education; until recently, that movement hasn't much involved early childhood educators. Now, though, Head Start directors, community childcare leaders, administrators in state-funded preschools, and other early childhood educators are coming together with colleagues in elementary and secondary education to strengthen the movement against packaged curricula and assessments.

The push to create universal prekindergarten (UPK) programs offers another entry point for activism on behalf of children, families, and teachers. Universal prekindergarten is a movement to provide preschool programs to all 4-year-old children as preparation for the academic work that they'll encounter in kindergarten; it's a state-funded driveeach state legislates its own mandates for prekindergarten programs. Universal prekindergarten offers increased access to early education for low-income families, something to celebrate given the large numbers of children who currently aren't served by affordable, quality early childhood programs in their communities. Yet UPK classrooms typically adopt (often by the mandate of funding agencies) standardized curricula characterized by rote learning and skill-and-drill teaching. This compromises the assertion that these are top-quality programs. And it is especially problematic for low-income communities most deserving of education that fosters critical thinking and social awareness: as children's opportunities seem to be expanding because of the increased access that UPK offers, the type of education that they're offered is narrow and intellectually numbing. In addition to these contradictions, UPK threatens to disrupt community-based childcare programs, as families and teachers exit these programs to move into UPK classrooms. UPK is in its infancy; this is the time for concerned educators, parents, and community members to get involved in shaping how it unfolds.

Another challenge that carries us into action beyond our daily teaching arises from the ongoing discrimination that early childhood educators face. In the late 1970s, teachers and caregivers of young children began to organize in protest of the unlivable wages and lack of benefits that characterize early childhood education. They created the Child Care Employees Project, a national effort to draw attention to poor working conditions in early care and education and to jumpstart initiatives that would make early childhood education a sustainable career. The Child Care Employees Project gave rise to the Worthy Wage Campaign, as early childhood educators across the country took part in creative, bold acts of protest and challenge, and began to form and join unions in an effort to improve working conditions. That effort has been folded into the current Center for the Child Care Workforce, a project of the American Federation of Teachers. In the three decades since this movement began, important ground has been wonand new struggles have emerged. There is work for us to do beyond our classrooms, stepping into the terrain of broad social action aimed at transforming the working conditions for early childhood educators.

There is an even broader arena of social concerns to acknowledge. Inadequate health care, immobilizing poverty, unstable housing, lack of access to decent nutritionthe best early childhood programs that we can imagine won't fix these broader social conditions. There is much work to be done, and all of it is interconnected. Caring about young children means caring aboutand taking action to improvethe social conditions that shape their lives and determine their opportunities.

When we embrace a vision of social justice and ecological teaching in early childhood education, we join a lineage of educators who are intent on changing history, participating in the "ongoing story of men and women, ideals intact," who understand that how we engage with the youngest children in our communities speaks volumes about the kind of society in which we hope to live.

Ann Pelo is an early childhood teacher and teacher mentor in Seattle, Wash.
References
1. Loris Malaguzzi. "When We Got the News," in Brick by Brick: The History of the XXV Aprile People's Nursery School of Villa Cella. Renzo Barazzoni, ed. Reggio Emilia, Italy. Reggio Children. pp. 14-15. 2000.
2. Dorrie Seavey. The Cost of Frontline Turnover in Long-Term Care. Washington, D.C. Institute for Future of Aging Services. 2004.
3. Terry Tempest Williams. The Open Space of Democracy. Great Barrington, Mass. The Orion Society. 2004.

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Rethinking Early Childhood Education - Rethinking Schools

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"If you are an educator who upholds the principle of early childhood education's attention to the whole child, then R ethinking Early Childhood Education is for you. The diverse articles give insightful, practical and moving voice to teachers' experiences with children and families and make diversity, equity, inclusion, and preserving the environment integral to a quality early childhood education program."

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"This book is food for the movement. It is sustenance for every educator committed to understanding and enacting Ethnic Studies. We take this gift as a guide for the needed work ahead."

Django Paris
James A. & Cherry A. Banks Professor of Multicultural Education, University of Washington

"Ethnic Studies as a field is about a half century old. Some may think it has outlasted its usefulness. However, in these times with a resurgence of hate crimes and vicious rhetoric, we need clear and cogent understandings about race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, culture, ability, religion and all kinds of human differences. This volume lifts our discourse and our discernment. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of ourselves and each other."

Gloria Ladson-Billings
Professor Emerita University of Wisconsin-Madison,
President, National Academy of Education

" Rethinking Ethnic Studies provides an excellent resource for teachers, students, and activists who wish to critically understand and engage the fundamental issues and questions that frame the field. The volume brings together theory and practice in ways that are both engaging, as well as extremely practical for classroom use. Overall, this is precisely the book that Ethnic Studies educators and advocates have been waiting fora powerful pedagogical contribution that embodies a genuine tribute to an abiding historical commitment to cultural democracy within education and the larger society."

Antonia Darder
Leavey Endowed Chair of Ethics & Moral Leadership
at Loyola Marymount University

" Rethinking Ethnic Studies is one of the most comprehensive, insightful, critical, and important books on Ethnic Studies in education. It charts a bold new path forward for the current Ethnic Studies resurgence that both builds off of and develops the scholar/activist history of the discipline."

Nolan L. Cabrera, PhD
University of Arizona

"In this moment of rising visibility and normalization of systemic, intersectional, and organized racism, we must more deeply understand the legacies of white supremacy, colonization, and imperialism that have long shaped U.S. schools and society, and the equally long legacies of anti-oppressive struggle. With brilliant insight, stirring passion, and evidence for hope, Cuauhtin, Zavala, Sleeter, Au, and dozens of colleagues share here a compelling framework, analyses, and examples of precisely that. Rethinking Ethnic Studies does nothing less than build our collective capacity for rethinking education more broadly."

Kevin Kumashiro
Author of Bad Teacher!: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture

Table of Contents:
Section 1: Framing Ethnic Studies

"The Movement for Ethnic Studies: A Timeline" By Miguel Zavala, R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, Wayne Au, and Christine Sleeter

"Multicultural Education or Ethnic Studies?" By Christine Sleeter, Joni Boyd Acuff, Courtney Bentley, Sandra Guzman Foster, Peggy Morrison, and Vera Stenhouse

"Ethnic Studies: 10 Common Misconceptions" By Miguel Zavala, Nick Henning, and Tricia Gallagher-Geurtsen

"What Is Ethnic Studies Pedagogy?" By Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, Rita Kohli, Jocyl Sacramento, Nick Henning, Ruchi Agarwal-Rangnath, and Christine Sleeter

"Ethnic Studies Pedagogy as CxRxPx" By R. Tolteka Cuauhtin

"Counter-Storytelling and Decolonial Pedagogy: The Xicanx Institute for Teaching and Organizing" By Anita E. Fern‡ández

"The Matrix of Social Identity and Intersectional Power: A Classroom Resource" By R. Tolteka Cuauhtin

"Creating We Schools: Lessons Learned from Critically Compassionate Intellectualism and the Social Justice Education Project" By Augustine Romero and Julio Cammarota

"Six Reasons I Want My White Child to Take Ethnic Studies" By Jon Greenberg

"Revisiting Notions of Social Action in Ethnic Studies Pedagogy: One Teacher's Critical Lessons from the Classroom" By Cati V. de los Rios

"The Ethnic Studies Framework: A Holistic Overview" By R. Tolteka Cuauhtin

Section 2: Indigeneity and Roots

"Collective Healing: Release the Tears, Confront and Bypass the Fear" By Rose Borunda

"The Kids 'n Room 36: Cognates, Culture, and the Ecosystem" By Jaime Cuello

"'My Family's Not from AfricaWe Come from North Carolina!': Teaching Slavery in Context" By Waahida Tolbert-Mbatha

"Barangay Pedagogy: Teaching as a Collective Act" By Arlene Sudaria Daus-Magbual, Roderick Daus-Magbual, Raju Desai, and Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales

"Do I Need to Mail in My Spit?: The Importance of a Teacher's Roots in Teaching Ethnic Studies" By Dominique A. Williams

"Our Oral History Narrative Project" By Aimee Riechel

"Rethinking Islamophobia: A Muslim Educator and Curriculum Developer Questions Whether Religious Literacy Is an Effective Antidote to Combat Bigotries Rooted in American History" By Alison Kysia

"Hmong Club: Empowering Us" By Pang Hlub Xiong

"Critical Family History" By Christine Sleeter

Section 3: Colonization and Dehumanization

"Burning Books and Destroying Peoples: How the World Became Divided Between 'Rich' and 'Poor Countries'" By Bob Peterson

"Genocide of Native Californians Role Play" By Aimee Riechel and interview by Miguel Zavala

"The Advent of White Supremacy and Colonization/Dehumanization of African Americans" By Deirdre Harris

"Challenging Colonialism: Ethnic Studies in Elementary Social Studies" By Carolina Valdez

"Cherokee and Seminole Removal Role Play" By Bill Bigelow

"Sin Fronteras Boy: Students Create Collaborative Websites to Explore the Border" By Grace Cornell Gonzales

"The Color Line" By Bill Bigelow

Section 4: Hegemony and Normalization

"Connecting the Dots" By Stephen Leeper

"History TextbooksTheirs' and 'Ours': A Rebellion or a War of Independence?" By John DeRose

"Learning About the Unfairgrounds" By Katie Baydo-Reed

"Whose Community Is This?: The Mathematics of Neighborhood Displacement" By Eric "Rico" Gutstein

"Reclaiming Hidden History: High School Students Face Opposition When They Create a Slavery Walking Tour in Manhattan" By Michael Pezone and Alan Singer

"Teaching a Native Feminist Read" By Angie Morrill with K. Wayne Yang

"Teaching John Bell's Four I's of Oppression" By R. Tolteka Cuauhtin

"Ethnic Studies Educators As Enemies of the State and the Fugitive Space of Classrooms" By Tracy Lachica Buenavista, David Stovall, Edward R. Curammeng, and Carolina Valdez

Section 5: Regeneration and Transformation

"Reimagining and Rewriting Our Lives Through Ethnic Studies" By Roxana Due–ñas, Jorge L—ópez, and Eduardo L—ópez

"Regeneration/Transformation:Cultivating Self-Love Through Tezcatlipoca" By Mictlani Gonzalez

"Happening Yesterday, Happened Tomorrow: Teaching the Ongoing Murders of Black Men" By RenŽée Watson

"We Have Community Cultural Wealth!: Scaffolding Tara Yosso's Theory for Classroom Praxis" By R. Tolteka Cuauhtin

"Standing with Standing Rock: A Role Play on the Dakota Access Pipeline" By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca

"Tipu: Connections, Love, and Liberation" By Curtis Acosta

"Teaching Freire's Levels of Consciousness: A Lesson Plan" By Jose Gonzalez

"Chicana/o-Mexicana/o Resistance and Armation in the Post-Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Era: Curriculum Unit Narrative" By Sean Arce

Section 6: Organizing for and Sustaining Ethnic Studies

"Moving Ethnic Studies from Theory to Practice: A Liberating Process" By Guillermo Antonio G—ómez and Eduardo "Kiki" Ochoa

"Missing Pages of Our History" By Kaiya Laguardia-Yonamine

"The Emergence of the Ethnic Studies Now Coalition in Yangna (Los Angeles) and Beyond: Two, Three, Many Tucsons" By Guadalupe Carrasco Cardona and R. Tolteka Cuauhtin

"The Struggle for Ethnic Studies in the Golden State: Capitol City Organizers and Activists" By RubŽén A. Gonz‡ález, Maribel Rosendo-Serv'ín, and Dominique A. Williams

"Ethnic Studies in Providence Schools" By Karla E. Vigil and Zack Mezera

"We Don't Want to Just Study the World, We Want to Change It: Ethnic Studies and the Development of Transformative Students and Educators" By Kyle Beckham and Artnelson Concordia

"Ethnic Studies and Community-Engaged Scholarship in Texas: The Weaving of a Broader 'We'" By Emilio Zamora and Angela Valenzuela

"For Us, by Us: Ethnic Studies as Self-Determination in Chicago" By Noem' CortŽs, Jennie Garcia, Stacey Gibson, Dua'a Joudeh, Lupita Ramirez, Cecily Relucio Hensler, Cinthya Rodriguez, Maraliz Salgado, David Stovall, JohnaŽ Strong, Jessica Suarez Nieto, Aaron Talley, Lisa Vaughn, and Asif Wilson

"Victory for Mexican American Studies in Arizona: An Interview with Curtis Acosta" Interview by Ari Bloomekatz

At a Seattle School Board meeting, students, teachers, and parents held signs reading "Teach Us Real History," "Decolonize Seattle Public Schools," and "Ethnic Studies Is the Truth." In Portland, Oregon, students yelled, "Fists up, everyone!" and cheered as the Portland Public School Board passed a resolution in support of Ethnic Studies. Students descended on the California State Capitol in Sacramento to testify about how Ethnic Studies taught them about their histories and cultures and encouraged them to perform well in schools. In Providence, Rhode Island, student activists rallied for Ethnic Studies outside the Providence School Department, with one speaker proclaiming , "I deserve an education that makes me feel powerful." In Texas, as the State Board of Education was considering the adoption of Ethnic Studies, student and community activists rallied with signs reading "We Are MAS [Mexican American Studies] Students, Hear Us Roar!"

On the heels of the banning of Ethnic Studies in Arizona in 2011 and atop a wave of California school districts making Ethnic Studies a graduation requirement, a movement has been unleashed in the United States. It is a powerful movement for K-12 Ethnic Studies that has sprung from students, teachers, and community activists seeking to transform curriculum and teaching into tools for social justice in public schools.

The Tucson Unified School District in Arizona is a touchpoint for K-12 Ethnic Studies. Although not the first to offer high school Ethnic Studies classes, Tucson Unified was the first to do so at a districtwide level with its Mexican American Studies program. Tucson's Ethnic Studies program had a powerful impact on students that was documented by several studies: In Tucson's schools, Mexican American Studies reversed the low-achievement/high-push out levels and general intellectual stagnation for Latinx/Chicanx students typically produced by the Eurocentric, standards-based curriculum and test-driven teaching of the past three decades.

In short, Latinx/Chicanx students who had seemed apathetic came alive through Ethnic Studies classes.

Teachers across the nation who had been teaching Ethnic Studies in their own classrooms already knew of its positive effects. Many teachers knew their textbooks fell far short of including Ethnic Studies knowledge. Many teachers viewed their purpose as not simply to raise students' test scores but rather to equip students with the knowledge and experiences they would be able to use to improve conditions in their communities and their lives. These teachers knew from their own teaching that when students of color see their experiences, realities, histories, and intellectual frameworks represented in the classroom, they wake up and dive in.

In response to the progressive politics of the Ethnic Studies program, right-wing conservatives in Arizona viciously attacked the program and eventually banned Ethnic Studies in Arizona's K-12 schools through state law HB 2281 in 2010. This law essentially outlawed Ethnic Studies for several years. The uproar it caused had a tremendous effect around the country, however, inadvertently launching what has become a national movement.

In a short period of time, the Ethnic Studies movement has spread like wildfire. Numerous school districts across California now require Ethnic Studies, and the state of California is in the beginning stages of developing model Ethnic Studies and Native American curricula. Oregon has a statewide requirement to develop and offer Ethnic Studies K-12, and in Kansas there are efforts to introduce statewide legislation. Indiana high schools will soon be required to offer Ethnic and Racial Studies as an elective course. States with large Indigenous populationslike Montana, Washington, and Alaskahave standards for including Indigenous knowledge in the curriculum. Seattle is in the process of implementing Ethnic Studies across the district; students in Providence, Rhode Island, have successfully lobbied for an Ethnic Studies pilot; and Albuquerque, New Mexico, is launching Ethnic Studies courses in all of its high schools. There are also individual Ethnic Studies courses popping up in individual schools around the country.

An Ethnic Studies Framework

The growing movement to bring Ethnic Studies into K-12 schools raises many important questions for teachers. What does Ethnic Studies mean and how should it be taught? Does Ethnic Studies mean teaching separate units about the cultures and histories of different ethnic groups? Does it have to be a separate class? Can one Ethnic Studies curriculum be developed, packaged, sold, and taught everywhere? Can anyone teach Ethnic Studies? If not, what kind of training and knowledge do Ethnic Studies teachers need? Is Ethnic Studies just for social studies or is it a way of envisioning and teaching the entire curriculum? Is Ethnic Studies the same as multicultural education or something else entirely? These are the kinds of questions we address in the pages of Rethinking Ethnic Studies.

Rethinking Ethnic Studies is organized around a holistic Ethnic Studies Framework that was initially proposed by co-editor and high school Ethnic Studies teacher R. Tolteka Cuauhtin. The framework connects directly with a review by co-editor Christine Sleeter on themes that run across the literature in African American, Latino, Asian American, and Native American Studies. Principles within this framework have been articulated by co-editor Miguel Zavala's conceptualization of a rehumanizing and decolonizing pedagogy for Ethnic Studies, as well as co-editor Wayne Au's ongoing work in anti-racist teaching and education for social justice. The framework is based on four basic premises:

1. All human beings have holistic, ancestral, precolonial roots upon our planet.

2. For many students of color, colonization, enslavement, and forced diaspora attempted to eliminate and replace their ancestral legacies with a Eurocentric, colonial model of themselves.

3. This Eurocentric, colonial model has been normalized for all students, translating to a superficial historical literacy and decontextualized relationship to history today and negatively impacting academic identity for students of color in particular.

4. In order for colonized students to initiate a process of regeneration, revitalization, restoration, and decolonization, they must honestly study this historical process as an act of empowerment and social justice.

Language and Ethnic Studies

We also need to address how language is used in this volume. Our language very often fails us. This book is written in English a linguistic vestige of settler colonialism and white supremacy in the United States. It is the language of the "victors," and it was used to carry out attempted cultural genocide. Our use of English carries this legacy with it. We recognize that when we use English to communicate, we are fundamentally bound by the politics of racism, patriarchy, sexism, capitalism, and colonization buried within the English language. Indeed, even when communicating in Spanish (which three of us also do), we are also using a Eurocentric language of colonization. Because Ethnic Studies is so strongly centered on anti-racism, cultural revitalization, and decolonization, it has always (and rightfully) struggled with the inherent contradiction of our use of the language of the colonization: Fundamentally we are trying to use what historically has been a tool for domination as a tool for resistance and liberation.

The word "ethnic" in Ethnic Studies symbolizes this contradiction perfectly. Although we currently use "ethnic" to refer to culture or a cultural group, the origin of the term is imbued with politics and power: Originally it meant "heathen" or "pagan"both terms used to refer to non-Christian groups. More specifically, "ethnic" comes through the Latin and Greek ethnikos (heathen) to ethnos (nation), connoting a non-Christian (and, we might argue, non-Western) "other." The politics of this should not be lost on us considering that "ethnic" is most often used to refer to non-white groups.

That said, Ethnic Studies is both about the critique of unequal power and the reclamation of power by marginalized and oppressed communities. In this way, the term "Ethnic Studies" itself is an example of one such reclamation. We've taken the word "ethnic" back, flipped the old meaning on its head, and are using it to build a movement that focuses on anti-racist and decolonizing curriculum and teaching. A term of oppression has been transformed into a term of potential liberation.

The chapters in Rethinking Ethnic Studies embody the overall struggle between Ethnic Studies and the English language in two ways. The first has to do with terminology. The English language categories for talking about race, culture, and gender are rigid, constrictive, and built on legacies of racism, patriarchy, sexism, and white supremacy. They are too inflexible to really describe our realities, especially if we want to name ourselves in ways that move beyond gender binaries and challenge the politics of race. In response to the confines of English, Ethnic Studies has pushed on the spellings and pronunciations of many commonly used racial and cultural categories and the gendered nature of the English language.

For instance, here in the pages of Rethinking Ethnic Studies, you will find a range of terms being used to identify the Indigenous and colonized peoples of the Americas (even the Italian roots of the term "America" communicate the political legacies of naming; Abya Yala, Turtle Island, and Ixachilan are three Indigenous names for the continent). While no Rethinking Ethnic Studies authors use the term "Hispanic" (which problematically means "of Spanish origin"), authors use "Latinx" or "Latin@" or "Latina/o" for peoples commonly referred to as Latin American. We see the limits in this terminology as well, given that the root of all these terms is "Latin"thus based in a language of colonization, since Latinxs can actually be of any precolonial continental ancestry, which the term obscures. For these reasons, several authors also use "Chicana/o" or "Chicanx" or "Xicanx" to challenge gender binaries and to move closer to more Indigenous words, spellings, and identities.

Authors in this volume also try to challenge the gendered nature of several terms, including "history." So you will see the term "herstory" used as a gendered counterpart, or even "hxrstory" (still pronounced herstory) as another step beyond the gender binary. Out of respect for the variety of terms and the politics and power of naming, we as editors of Rethinking Ethnic Studies have chosen to follow the lead of our contributors in how they've named many of these categories. This means that terms may shift from chapter to chapter.

In addition to new terminology, the second way the chapters here embody the struggle between Ethnic Studies and the English language is through the use of more academic and intellectual language. Ethnic Studies rests on the foundational understanding that education has been used for colonization and white supremacy, and as part of these processes, knowledge has either been kept from communities of color or offered up in safer, tamer forms that keep us from struggling for liberation.

So there is a tradition in Ethnic Studies of recognizing that those in power do not want us to know particular hxrstories, theories, politics, cultures, and forms of resistance; do not want us to be "smart"; do not want us to be intellectuals capable of thinking deeply about our existence. In response, Ethnic Studies has developed its own tradition of using academic and intellectual language as a point of resistance-a way to say, in the face of racism and white supremacy, "Yes, we are smart, and we have a right to understand the world in complex ways too." As such, while Rethinking Ethnic Studies is not an academic text, it respects students and teachers enough to recognize that we can learn important and powerful concepts that can help us understand ourselves and the world.

Organization of the Book

Although Rethinking Ethnic Studies is not based on all the dimensions in the comprehensive Ethnic Studies Framework (see p. 65 for a more detailed discussion of the framework), elaborations of central elements are present throughout the volume.

Chapters in Part I, "Framing Ethnic Studies," offer holistic conceptualizations of Ethnic Studies that connect curriculum, pedagogy, students, and community. Prior to the chapter that elaborates on the Ethnic Studies Framework that organizes Rethinking Ethnic Studies, chapters explain what Ethnic Studies is and is not, the centrality of students' lives and student activism to Ethnic Studies, why Ethnic Studies matters for everyone, and what it means to teach Ethnic Studies. The four subsequent sections of the book are expressions of the four "macroscales" or "macrothemes" in the Ethnic Studies Framework.

Part II develops "Indigeneity and Roots"the recognition of the sovereignty of the Indigenous nations on whose land teaching is taking place, as well as the identities, ancestral roots, and intergenerational legacies of students in the classroom. Chapters describe various strategies used by teachers from elementary through high school levels to help students explore their family backgrounds, in some cases opening up space to consider painful experiences of family members, such as having fled a war, having been enslaved, or having been forced to forget their ancestral family languages and stories. Chapters illustrate tapping into ancestral knowledge students may have learned at home or community members may hold and be willing to share.

Part III delves into "Colonization and Dehumanization"the historic processes through which peoples of color have been robbed of land, labor, dignity, and autonomy. If students are to heal from the historic traumas of colonization and racism and learn to work for justice, they need to be able to understand oppressive relationships in historical terms. Chapters in this section take on issues such as genocide, segregation, institutional racism, and white supremacy, with some drawing connections to oppressive systems such as capitalism.

Part IV unmasks "Hegemony and Normalization"the processes through which oppressive relations have come to be seen as normal or natural. Some chapters in this section critique and move beyond textbooks; others engage students in activities such as simulation and role play that are designed to prompt students to question "realities" they had previously taken for granted.

Part V addresses "Regeneration and Transformation"the potential of working toward rehumanization and social justice activism. Chapters show multiple processes and concepts teachers have used to help students claim powerful identities of themselves as historically and culturally located people who are intellectually as well as politically capable of making a difference. Through combinations of hxstorical study, community study, role plays, and humanizing experiences in the classroom, young people learn to take on pressing issues in their own communities such as militarization of schooling and police violence.

The last section, Part VI, looks at the work of "Organizing for and Sustaining Ethnic Studies." Here, authors from diverse parts of the countryranging from San Francisco to Providence, from Chicago to Austin, from Sacramento to Portlandreflect upon their efforts alongside students and communities to advocate for and build Ethnic Studies programs. We envision this last section as an opportunity for organizers working for Ethnic Studies to learn from counterparts who have engaged in that work themselves. We envision this last section as an extension of the fourth macroscale, Transformational Resistance, and as an opportunity for organizers working for Ethnic Studies to learn from counterparts who have engaged in that work themselves.

Limitations of Rethinking Ethnic Studies
We recognize that there is a tension here: Our teaching is often contradictory in that we take part in designing lessons and developing units that are linear and exist within the standardization of public schools, yet we are also interested in being creative, engaging, and responsive, if not also liberating, in our teaching. Our hope is that our vision and orienting frameworks embrace a particular kind of "visionary pragmatism," in the words of Patricia Hill-Collins, in which we keep our hearts in and our eyes on Ethnic Studies as a movement while also respecting the planning and carrying out of instruction that teachers must do within their specific contexts, institutions, and communities.

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As part of a growing nationwide movement to bring Ethnic Studies into K-12 classrooms, Rethinking Ethnic Studies brings together many of the leading teachers, activists, and scholars in this movement [...]

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"A handbook to help all educators fight racism."
- The Washington Post

"This book is not just for teachers in the classroom, but also for those of us who care about making Black lives matter in the community. It should be required reading for all who care about the future of Black youth."
- Opal Tometi, #BlackLivesMatter co-founder and executive director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration

"I love Teaching for Black Lives because it's a bible to understanding both the contributions of Black and Brown people to America as well as the struggles and chains of institutional racism."
- Michael Bennett, author of Things That Make White People Uncomfortable

"Every teacher in America needs to pick up this book."
- Linda Sarsour, National co-chair of the Women's March and co-founder of MPower Change

"Again, the folks at Rethinking Schools have stepped out to produce a timely volume that should become a central staple in how we understand race and the radical imaginary in K-12 classrooms."
- David Stovall, Professor of African American Studies and Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago

"In this edited volume, we learn that Black Lives Matter is not just a rallying cry in the movement against police abuse and violence, but it is also a critical framework for understanding the persistent attacks on public education. As public schools face withering attacks on the national, state, and local level, this important collection edited by Watson, Hagopian, and Au will educate, inspire, and rally those in the struggle for education justice. From students, to educators, to a public that cares about public education, this book is a must-read to know the issues at stake and the strategies necessary to win."
- Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

" Teaching for Black Lives is a moral lifeline for all educators looking to rehumanize our schools and society through education, love, and action."
- Awo Okaikor Aryee-Price, educator and national co-organizer of Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action

"Anyone who teaches Black students or has a Black child in school must read this book."
- Darnell M. Hunt, Dean of Social Sciences and Professor of Sociology and African American Studies at UCLA
American Studies and Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago
CONTENTS Section 1: Making Black Lives Matter in Our Schools Black Students' Lives Matter
Building the school-to-justice pipeline
By the editors of Rethinking Schools How One Elementary School Sparked a Citywide Movement to Make Black Students' Lives Matter
By Wayne Au and Jesse Hagopian
Student Athletes Kneel to Level the Playing Field By Jesse Hagopian Happening Yesterday, Happened Tomorrow
Teaching the ongoing murders of Black men
By Renée Watson Space for Young Black Women
An interview with Candice Valenzuela
By Jody Sokolower Trayvon Martin and My Students
Writing toward justice
By Linda Christensen Two Sets of Notes By MK Asante Taking the Fight Against White Supremacy into Schools By Adam Sanchez A Vision for Black Lives
Policy demands for Black power, freedom, and justice
By the Movement for Black Lives coalition Section 2: Enslavement, Civil Rights, and Black Liberation The Color Line
How white elites sought to divide and conquer in the American colonies
By Bill Bigelow
Presidents and Slaves Helping students find the truth
When Black Lives Mattered: Why Teach Reconstruction By Adam Sanchez Reconstructing the South Medical Apartheid Teaching the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
By Gretchen Kraig-Turner
Beyond Just a Cells Unit
What my science students learned from the story of Henrietta Lacks

By Gretchen Kraig-Turner
Teaching SNCC
The organization at the heart of the civil rights revolution
Claiming and Teaching the 1963 March on Washington By Bill Fletcher Jr. Reflections of a "Deseg Baby" By Linda Mizell What We Don't Learn About the Black Panther Party - but Should By Adam Sanchez and Jesse Hagopian
COINTELPRO Teaching the FBI's war on the Black freedom movement
By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca Section 3: Gentrification, Displacement, and Anti-Blackness Burned Out of Homes and History
Unearthing the silenced voices of the Tulsa Race Riot
"The Most Gentrified City of the Century" By Becky HenkleBerry and Jeff Waters What Do You Mean When You Say Urban?
Speaking honestly about race and students
Vacancies to Fill
Considering desire in the past and future of Chicago's vacant schools
By Eve L. Ewing Plotting Inequalities, Building Resistance By Bridget Brew, Crystal Proctor, and Adam Renner Bearing Witness Through Poetry By Renée Watson Shock-Doctrine Schooling in Haiti Neoliberalism off the Richter scale By Jesse Hagopian Lead Poisoning
Bringing social justice to chemistry
By Karen Zaccor Section 4: Discipline, the Schools-to-Prison Pipeline, and Mass Incarceration Jailing Our Minds By Abbie Cohen Schools and the New Jim Crow
An interview with Michelle Alexander
By Jody Sokolower Racial Justice Is Not a Choice
White supremacy, high-stakes testing, and the punishment of Black and Brown students
How K-12 Schools Push Out Black Girls
An interview with Monique W. Morris
By Kate Stoltzfus Haniyah's Story By Haniyah Muhammad Teaching Haniyah By Jody Sokolower Teaching the Prison-Industrial Complex By Aparna Lakshmi
Restorative Justice What it is and is not
By the editors of Rethinking Schools Baby Steps Toward Restorative Justice Section 5: Teaching Blackness, Loving Blackness, and Exploring Identity A Talk to Teachers By James Baldwin Black Like Me By Renée Watson Dear White Teacher By Chrysanthius Lathan Black Boys in White Spaces One mom's reflection By Dyan Watson Raised by Women
Celebrating our homes
Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class By Clint Smith #MeToo and The Color Purple
By Linda Christensen
Queering Black History and Getting Free By Dominique Hazzard Rethinking Islamophobia Combating bigotry by raising the voices of Black Muslims By Alison Kysia Rethinking Identity Afro-Mexican history By Michelle Nicola Brown Kids Can't Be in Our Club
Teaching 6-year-olds about skin color, race, culture, and respect
By Rita Tenorio A Message from a Black Mom to Her Son By Dyan Watson Black Is Beautiful By Kara Hinderlie
Introduction to Teaching for Black Lives

Black students' minds and bodies are under attack.

Fifteen-year-old Black student Coby Burren was in geography class at Pearland High School near Houston in the fall of 2015. As he read the assigned page of his textbook, he noticed something that deeply disturbed him: A map of the United States with a caption that said the Atlantic slave trade brought "millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations." Coby took a picture of his textbook and texted it to his mother, adding, "We was real hard workers wasn't we," along with a sarcastic emoji. Not only had the McGraw-Hill textbook replaced the word "slave" with "workers," they also placed the chapter on the enslavement of Africans in the chapter of the book titled "patterns of immigration" as if Africans came to the U.S. looking for a better life.

In the winter of 2017, a mother in Connecticut wrote about how she was troubled by a worksheet on slavery that her daughter had completed for school. The question asked, "How were the slaves treated in Connecticut?" Her daughter had initially written, "The slaves were treated badly and cruelly," but crossed that out and replaced it with the answer that was written in the textbook, which stated slaves were, "often cared for and [the slave owners] protected them like members of the family."

From the north to the south, corporate curriculum lies to our students, conceals pain and injustice, masks racism, and demeans our Black students. But it's not only the curriculum that is traumatizing students.

In October of 2015, a Black girl in South Carolina was ripped out of her desk and thrown across the room by a police officer in the school for allegedly refusing to put away her cell phone. The video captured by a classmate of the incident went viral. The officer who brutalized the girl was not charged with a crime and instead both the girl videotaping and the girl thrown across the room were arrested and charged with "disturbing schools." In May of 2017, surveillance video revealed a police officer at Woodland Hills High School in Churchill, Pennsylvania, choked and body slammed a Black boy in the office.

Recent data reveals that school security officers outnumber counselors in three out of five and four out of the top ten of the biggest school districts in the country, including New York City, Chicago, and Miami-Dade County, and Houston.

These examples reveal some of the policies that result in pushing kids out of school, making it difficult to graduate, then difficult to get a job, and finally more likely that they will end up in jail. This school-to-prison-pipeline begins with a curriculum that conceals the struggles and contributions of Black people and other people of color. It is a curriculum that fails to respect young Black people as intellectuals, and ignores their cultures, communities, and concerns. In the majority of textbooks, African Americans struggles and contributions are minimalized, portrayed as blatant stereotypes, or confined to a few roles that are acceptable to mainstream white society. This absence (or destructive presence) begins in elementary and continues throughout a Black student's schooling.

Even when teachers include African American history, they often fail to consider the methods used to teach about Black lives to Black and non-Black children. Command and control lecture and rote memorization are not effective means of teaching for Black lives. Indeed, teaching for Black lives means just the opposite: engaging students in critical self-reflection, grounding our curriculum and teaching in their lives and communities, and orienting them towards community activism and social transformation.

Teaching for Black lives means that we can't relegate Black history to certain historical time periods or events and we must include Black lives in all aspects of curriculum including science, math, literature, and the arts. Teaching for Black lives also means considering the loneliness of learning about one's history when you might be one of a few students in class (or few teachers in a school) that this history represents.

When Black history and Black contributions are denied in the curriculum and by those who teach it, Black people are themselves denied. Consequently, students who become disinterested in a course or vocal about its shortcomings and historical erasure are often labeled defiant and pushed out of the classroom. These students may then get swept up by police officers stationed in school and be hit with criminal charges for behavior that was once handled by school administration. If the offending student is sent to administration, they are often required to implement zero tolerance discipline policies prescribed by the school district that mandate suspension or expulsion for various infractions. When a decision to suspend a student is left up to an administrator's discretion, Black students are far more likely to be punished than their white peers. When students miss school, they fall behind in their classes and are more likely not to pass. The pipeline continues with the lack of tutoring programs, counseling services, college access programs, after school programs, healthcare, proper nutrition, and other support services that would assist students who are falling behind. And if a student makes it through that gauntlet of perils, high-stakes end-of-course exams are waiting to deter them from graduating.

The school-to-prison-pipeline is a major contributor to the overall epidemic of police violence and mass incarceration that functions as one of sharpest edges of structural racism in the United States.

The rise of the #BLM movement

A new rebellion against structural racism is underway in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement, galvanized by extrajudicial executions of Black people by the police and white vigilantes. The murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and the ensuing national protests that followed showed the potential for a mass social movement, and the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was launched by three Black women, Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi. Their demand that all Black lives have value was simple, yet visionary, especially in its call to highlight the most marginalized Black lives, including LGBTQ folks, women, and Black immigrant lives.

In August of 2014, Michael Brown was killed in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, his body left in the streets for hours as a reminder to the Black residents in the neighborhood that their lives are meaningless to the American Empire. But this time the potential for a national uprising was actualized as thousands of mostly Black residents of Ferguson took to the streets and inspired rallies across the country and around the world. Only weeks after the non-indictment decision of Michael Brown's killer, Darren Wilson, a NY grand jury failed to indict the officer who strangled Eric Garner to death on camera, and the movement went into high gear. Student walkouts, mass marches, and urban rebellions swept the country as people's anger boiled over at the racist criminal (in)justice system.

In 2015, the African American Policy Forum coined the hashtag #SayHerName in an effort to raise awareness about state violence against women including Black queer women and Black transgender women and the campaign took off in the aftermath of the death of Sandra Bland who died in jail while in police custody after being detained by an officer for a traffic stop.

Despite the ongoing protests, police killings of Black people have continued unabated, including widely known cases of Freddy Gray, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, and Charleena Lyles, a pregnant mother who was killed in front of three of her four children. In addition to these adults, police have also killed many Black children in past few years including 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, 12-year-old Tamir Rice, 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, 15-year-old Jordan Edwards, 13-year-old Tyre King, and 15-year-old Darius Smith.

The continuing police murders of Black people, and the refusal of the court system to punish police for these crimes, has continued to fuel an explosion of protests from the streets to the schools. Protest even erupted on NFL football fields in 2016 when then San Francisco 49er quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, sat and then took a knee, during the national anthem in protest of police brutality. Following Kaepernick's lead, student athletes from middle school through college took a knee against racism.

In Seattle, on October 19th 2016, the movement for Black lives burst into the struggle for equitable education when some 3,000 educators came to school wearing shirts that said, "Black Lives Matter, We Stand Together," with many of them teaching lessons about the long history of the struggle against racism. This movement spread across the country with educators in Philadelphia and Rochester, NY, holding similar actions. Then during the first school week of February, 2018, educators from around the country organized the first national, "Black Lives Matter at School" week of action. Educators taught lessons throughout the week that corresponded to the thirteen principals of the Black Lives Matter Global Network organization and raised three demands:

1) End Zero Tolerance Discipline and implement Restorative Justice.

2) Hire More Black Teachers

3) Black History/Ethnic Studies Mandated K-12.

Teaching for Black Lives grows directly out of the movement for Black lives. We recognize that anti-Black racism constructs Black people, and Blackness generally, as not counting as human life. The chapters here in Teaching for Black Lives push back directly against this construction by not only providing educators with critical perspectives on the role of schools in perpetuating anti-Blackness, but also by offering educators concrete examples of what it looks like to humanize Black people in curriculum, teaching, and policy. Throughout the book, we demonstrate how teachers can connect the curriculum to young people's lives and root their concerns and daily experiences in what is taught and how classrooms are set up. We also highlight the hope and beauty of student activism and collective action.

The first section of Teaching for Black Lives, "Making Black Lives Matter in Our Schools," frames how police violence and the movement for Black lives can explicitly be brought to schools and classrooms by educators through organizing mass action and through curriculum. The pairing of these is purposeful: Not only is it critical that we teach about the systemic violence against Black people and the travesty of Black deaths, it is also important for students and teachers to understand their roles in organizing in support of Black life and Black communities, and against anti-Black racism.

In Section II, "Enslavement, Civil Rights, and Black Liberation," Teaching for Black Lives takes a historical turn. Here the chapters focus on how Black history is taught in the classroom. We recognize for instance, that the enslavement of Africans and their descendants, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights movement are all regularly taught in schools, but, as we alluded to at the beginning of this introduction, we also know that these subjects are too often taught in ways that further dehumanize Black people and perpetuate anti-Black racism. Thus the chapters we include in this section reframe the teaching of these histories in ways that challenge white supremacy and reject many of the popular, yet racist, myths that all too often paint Black people as non-actors in their own liberation. To that end, through textbook critique, role plays, and other classroom-based activities, several chapters in this section focus on how racism and white supremacy have operated historically, and highlight how Black people organized in the interest of their own freedom.

However, we know that anti-Blackness isn't just historical: It is spatial too. Through gentrification and the violence of displacement, anti-Blackness terraforms Black communities into white ones, and working-class communities into spaces for wealthy elites. Anti-Black racism also starves Black communities of resources, either turning them into neoliberal marketplaces for profit, as in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina, or simply allowing them to remain toxic for Black residents. Teaching for Black Lives takes this up in Section III, "Gentrification, Displacement, and Anti-Blackness." In particular, the chapters in this section highlight how these issues can and should be taught through a critical lens of racial and economic justice.

Displacement is not just a socio-economic process. It is real and concrete because it happens to Black bodies. Specifically, this happens in part through our schools' roles in the mass incarceration of Black people. In Section IV, "Discipline, the School-to-Prison Pipeline, and Mass Incarceration," the chapter authors explore the ways that school discipline policy and practice contribute directly to the disproportionate punishment and incarceration of Black students. This section examines what it means to teach students whose family members are incarcerated, as well as how to teach about the system of mass incarceration impacting Black communities. Section IV concludes with chapters that highlight the ways that schools can challenge mass incarceration, including some possibilities for restorative and transformative justice.

Finally, Section V, "Teaching Blackness, Loving Blackness, and Exploring Identity", recognizes that Teaching for Black Lives encompasses more than just teaching critique and social action. It is also about teaching Black identity and the beauty of Blackness both as self-care for Black students and as a way to directly confront anti-Blackness. Here, we pivot towards looking at ways we can and should affirm Black identity in our classrooms and with our children, as we explore the varied and complex relationships between teaching, learning, and being Black. This includes respecting and affirming the language that bathes our existence, and explores the intersectionality with other identities. Here the authors celebrate Blackness and all of its hues while explicating the tensions between being seen and unseen all at once.

We do not expect Teaching for Black Lives to end police violence against Black communities, stop anti-Black racism in schools, or end the school-to-prison pipeline. We do, however, see this collection as playing an important role in highlighting the ways educators can and should make their classrooms and schools sites of resistance to white supremacy and anti-Blackness, as well as sites for knowing the hope and beauty in Blackness. The ferocity of racism in the United States against black minds and black bodies demands that teachers fight back. We must organize against anti-blackness amongst our colleagues and in our communities; we must march against police brutality in the streets; and we must teach for Black lives in our classrooms. We call on others to join us in this fight.

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Teaching for Black Lives grows directly out of the movement for Black lives. We recognize that anti-Black racism constructs Black people, and Blackness generally, as not counting as human life. [...]

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Black Lives Matter at School

An Uprising for Educational Justice

by Jesse Hagopian and Denisha Jones

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"The educators, students, and community activists whose stories are documented here are fighting for a transformative vision of what public schools can be, and the grassroots efforts we will need to get there. Black Lives Matter at Schoolis an essential resource for all those seeking to build an antiracist school system."
-Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award-winning and #1 New York Times Bestselling Author

"Black Lives Matter at School is a remarkable contribution to understanding that education can be a powerful pathway to justice and liberation. Here is inspiration for anyone who cherishes young people both inside and outside of schools." -Barbara Smith, Cofounder the Combahee River Collective

"We need this book right now. The shadow-loving fungus of white supremacy won't continue to send its spores to infect our children if we act now to bring the curative light of anti-racist knowledge, compassion, and justice into their lives. Built upon the Black Lives Matter at School organization's Week of Action, this volume provides the adults in our educational institutions with inspiration, organizing principles, strategies, and examples to take 'bold action against anti-Blackness.' The authors - visionary educations of what is possible - call on all of us to radically reshape learning environments to make them safe, supportive, and transformative for all students (and teachers). Please read ASAP!" - Lisa Delpit, Executive Director of the Center for Urban Education and Innovation at Florida International University

"There is no easy way to talk about the complexities of race facing our school system in America-but we have to talk about it if we are ever going to achieve the schools our children deserve. The Black Lives Matter at School movement has been disrupting the complacency of those who, for too long, have been comfortable not having these conversations about the impact of racism in the schools. Black Lives Matter at School is a playbook for undoing institutional racism in the education system. - Michael Bennett, NFL defensive lineman, Superbowl champion, and author, Things That Make White People Uncomfortable

"This book asserts that we are at a critical moment in time, where the racial uprisings underpin the absolute need to transform education and it's foundational practices. Black Lives Matter is a movement sweeping the globe and affirms that our babies lives matter. It's time for educators to be bold, standing up for our students and communities. Our students are looking to us to lead the fight against injustice and dismantle systemic racism as we aspire to realize the schools our students deserve." - Cecily Myart-Cruz, UTLA President, NEA Black Caucus Chair

"This book makes the strong case for why we need to elevate Black lives and people in our curriculum and pedagogy year-round. This book serves as a blueprint to achieve this honorable goal." - José Luis Vilson, author, This Is Not A Test, A New Narrative on Race, Class, and Education

" Black Lives Matter at School centers the humanity of our children. It is a sharp rebuke of white supremacy-the very thing that interrupts the healthy development of Black youth. School communities must affirm Black lives. Educators have to dismantle systems of oppression-systems that we influence daily. We have to be radically different from the missionary educator depicted in popular culture. BLM at School is essential. Period." - Stacy Davis Gates, Vice President, Chicago Teachers Union

"Toni Morrison reminds us: 'If you can't imagine it, you can't have it.' This book helps us to imagine Black Lives Mattering in schools. With accounts from teachers across the country doing the work, along with student interviews, poems, posters, and historical background, this is a primer for anti-racist educators to see the way forward in terms of reshaping school curriculum, diversifying teacher hiring, and transforming school discipline." - Jeanne Theoharis, author, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History

"The new book, is part documentary, part guide to this movement for racial & educational justice on school campuses" " Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice... springs from a movement that started several years ago to resist racism and imbue anti-racism in school curriculums as well as educational practices and policies." - Washington Post

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"The educators, students, and community activists whose stories are documented here are fighting for a transformative vision of what public schools can be, and the grassroots efforts we will need to get there. Black Lives Matter at Schoolis an essential resource for all those seeking to build an antiracist school system."

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Padlet with many links and resources.