Solidarity with Honesty and Compassion

Hi Friends,

I hope you’re all well and finding your way clear-eyed and hopeful. One month until summer!

I have been circling around a few themes this month that I wanted to share with you. The first is how important memory and history are to our current understanding of the world and to our ability to solve our problems. It is essential that we advocate actively for honest history and for honoring those we would want to be in solidarity with if they were still alive.

For example, Simon Maghakyan writes “Opinion: This unsung Colorado hero is actually worthy of memorializing” about Silas Soule, who refused to participate in the Sand Creek Massacre and testified against its perpetrators, likely resulting in his assassination in 1865 when he was 26 year old.

Learning for Justice Magazine, Issue 2, Spring 2022 “explores various perspectives on teaching honest history: what happens when we don’t, how educators are overcoming attempts to stop it, views from communities who are often left out of these conversations — namely rural and Indigenous — and why it matters.”

And in encouraging news, Cathryn Strout writes “Tennessee is close to becoming the next state to require Black History education.” Perhaps this is a model other states can use to address curriculum deficits.

While we’re thinking about schools (one of my favorite topics!), I wanted to share that The Urban Institute has two fabulous and eye-opening interactive tools:

- “Which Students Receive a Greater Share of School Funding?” can be used to understand state by state how progressive funding is for low income students, urban/rural students, and students of color in public schools.

- “How Much Does Your School Contribute to Segregation?” can be used to understand how your school compares to your district’s racial demographics. It can also help you find a school that is more integrated and/or more accurately reflects your district’s demographics if you’re open to making a different school choice.

After finding ourselves zoned for a very segregated school here in Denver when we relocated here last summer, we are exploring schools nearby that better reflect the student demographics of the district overall. This is a complex, personal process, taking many things into account, and I’m happy to answer questions you might have if you’re curious to learn. I just know that my kids need to learn in an environment that looks more like their diverse, heterogeneous community, not their current homogenous school, in order to prepare them to live and work and be in solidarity with their future communities.

To encourage all of you to advocate for our public education system, check out the HEAL Together Pledge — for solidarity with others who believe that we need to advocate for robust, fully funded, honest public education for our children. I hope it will inspire you to take action locally or beyond.

And finally, I have been consciously working to incorporate more humanity and compassion into my life and my work. It is hard for me to unlearn a punitive way of responding to behavior from others that makes me uncomfortable (often from my children!). A punitive approach separates people from each other when they are struggling and is steeped in white supremacy. I have been learning more about restorative justice and there are resources out there for applying this approach to families! Check these out.

I am also grateful for Elisabeth Long’s “Bringing Our Humanity to the Long Work of Change” — a conversation between Suzanne Pharr and Linda Evans. Here’s a small piece, “Building community is critically important for the rejuvenation of all of our people, but also because these circles are places where organizing takes place, and momentum takes place towards solving the problems that we’re suffering from.”

May you each build a community that loves you and nourishes your work.

Emily
Listen. Amplify. Follow. In Solidarity.

Fear Stands In Our Way

Hi Friends,

Happy Spring! I hope you’re all enjoying the re-emergence of life and nature into our surroundings and finding new ways to recognize and be in solidarity with our planet and each other.

I touched on the role of fear in my Scarcity and Hoarding post in January and I wanted to elaborate on this a bit more. There are so many current examples, from elected officials creating laws to prevent schools from making White children (or their parents) uncomfortable, to resistance to common sense changes that would make our society more equitable.

Our country’s culture puts great emphasis on individual liberties and rights, which comes with individual responsibility for success and failure, the American Dream of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, that hard work = success. This approach can mean that a person’s choices are the sole determinants of whether they achieve their goals in life or fail miserably.

While this perspective allows people to remain blind to or deny the existence of structural discrimination, it also locks them into a fearful mentality, that they can only blame themselves if things go sideways and that they may not be able to depend on others to show them mercy or kindness because others will be similarly looking out for themselves. This is a depressing, isolating way to see a land of such promise and opportunity.

Individual fear becomes collective fear when a scarcity mentality is at the root. Instead of finding community with others, we compete and undermine and hoard and focus on getting “the best” for ourselves, often more than we need, denying others the basics of survival. Collective fear leads to the whitewashing of history instruction at public schools, denial of historical facts, loss of critical thinking skills, the inability to evaluate whether something is true or not, unmoored from any context of what is happening and why.

A loss of control, especially during the pandemic, has led to a backlash, a frenzied search for control of something, often centered around protecting children from perceived dangers (to say nothing about the actual dangers they face). Seeing their children struggle to learn during virtual education led many families to feel helpless and alone and desperate for control in a time of crisis.

Some families have responded to this experience, especially those with an expectation of having their needs met and their voices heard, by using their fear to force instant (harmful) change. We must find a way to acknowledge how these families are feeling without banning books or retreating from the progress that has already been made. The legacies of their methods are steeped in white supremacy and cannot stand, even as we acknowledge their fear and pain and humanity.

A few things are happening here:

- our education system no longer emphasizes the teaching of civics or an understanding of the fundamental connection between public education and democracy;

- most White people are not educated about the truth of our history, putting us at a disadvantage when uncomfortable topics are discussed, leading to denial or entrenchment;

- politics and corporate pressure have an outsized role in determining our national trajectory and our individual choices, leading to a feeling of helplessness; and,

- critical thinking skills and the ability to understand complexity are suffering, allowing dis/misinformation to spread and to lead to damaging laws and policies based on falsehoods.

Stephen Sawchuk wrote “Revising America’s Racist Past” (EdWeek, 1/18/22) about these issues. He says, “Social studies and civics have been neglected for decades. That’s led to less teaching of the discipline overall, which has led to a weaker grasp of the value of civic disagreement, which has led to greater arguments over standards, which were difficult to write in the first place.” He goes on to say, “For Walters-Rauenhorst, the Louisiana teacher-educator, nothing less than the foundations of democracy are at stake. What happens, she said, if students never hear ideas that challenge their own, if they never are taught the tools to respectfully debate, or are never encouraged to look at a historical event from somebody else’s perspective?”

We must rally behind public education, even when we are frustrated by the faults of a racist system. We must rally behind teachers, who have suffered along with our students during a very challenging time and who were undervalued even before the pandemic. We must demand curriculums that are honest about our country’s history and that are inclusive of the diversity of our students and their families and interrogate whatever uncomfortable feelings we have about doing so.

The hateful efforts to damage and threaten school boards and classrooms must be actively countered. We cannot take the education of our children for granted. We must speak up for what we value and that we will not give in to fear or bullying, even as we recognize the pain behind them. The way forward is through — through the pain, through the fear, through compassion even when we disagree, through shared humanity and solidarity.

Emily
Listen. Amplify. Follow. In Solidarity.