On October 10, 2015, an incident occurred
at the University of Missouri homecoming parade that made national news but
somehow escaped my attention. A group of black students protesting systemic and
overt racism dating back to 1839, when the university was built as a
whites-only institution using slave labor, blocked a convertible in which the
university’s president, Tim Wolfe, was riding. Wolfe remained in the car as the
small group of protestors interrupted the parade to present a chronological
series of examples of ongoing racial injustices at Mizzou, “not an indictment
on white folks but. . .an indictment on white structures and white supremacy.”
The mostly white crowd yelled at the protestors and chanted loudly
as if to drown out what the protestors were saying. A number of white men and
women attempted to move the protestors from the parade route and to form a
human chain to block the protest and allow the president’s car to pass. All the
while, President Wolfe remained in his red convertible, where he could clearly
see and hear the protest. The protest ended 11 minutes after it began when
several police officers intervened and asked the protestors to step aside.
To simplify a complicated story, one of the activists involved in
the protest, Jonathan Butler, began a hunger strike to protest the president’s
lack of responsiveness to racist incidents, during the parade as well as when
other complaints were reported. The hunger strike attracted media attention and
put Mizzou in the spotlight.
Nearly a month after the parade incident, Wolfe finally issued an
apology for his silence during the parade. “My behavior seemed like I didn’t
care,” the apology stated. “That was not my intention. I was caught off guard
at that moment. Nevertheless, had I gotten out of the car to acknowledge the students
and talk with them, perhaps we wouldn’t be where we are today.” Several days
later, after a threatened strike by Mizzou football players calling for his
resignation, Wolfe stepped down.
Reading the news articles about this incident and watching video
footage of the protest conjured up many emotions in me, but the part that keeps
haunting me is the line in Wolfe’s apology: “[H]ad I gotten out of the car to
acknowledge the students and talk with them, perhaps we wouldn’t be where we
are today.”
I wonder if enough educators today are “getting out of the car:”
meeting diverse students where they are and letting them know they are heard,
seen, and valued.
I’m can’t say that every school is that racially charged or that
most students of color have reached a similar brink of frustration. I do know
that 80% of public school
teachers in America are white, and that less than half of the 50 million students enrolled in public
schools are white.
For the rest of this essay, I’ll be talking mostly to the 80% of
us who are white educators, but the rest of you are welcome to join me to make
sure I’m not saying anything foolish.
According to Beverly Daniel Tatum in Why Are All the Black Kids
Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?, a 2013 American Values Survey found
that “75 percent of Whites have entirely White social networks, without any
minority presence.” The same is not true about the homogeneity of other races’
social networks. Apparently, a lot of white people only hang out with other
white people.
It’s difficult to understand the way others perceive the world if
we don’t get to know them. In order for me to understand the treatment others
experience, I need to listen to those people and hear their stories. I need to
shut up and quit my whitesplaining (ironic, since that’s what I’m doing right
here. . . sorry) so that I can give others a voice. If I know who someone is, I
am more likely to connect with them and others who share an identity with them.
If a growing number of the students I see every day come from racial
backgrounds different than mine, I face some potential challenges in connecting
with those students. I imagine some of these students feel like the students at
the University of Missouri felt: unseen, unheard, and wronged. I need to get
out of the car, listen to them, and let them know that they are valued.
So what’s a white person to do if they’re among the 75% who only
socialize with other white people? I suggest figuring out how to bring some
diversity into your social circle. It’s terribly awkward (and, really, just wrong)
to collect friends of different races like you are hunting Pokémon, so please
don’t go out into the world with a diversity checklist to complete. Consider
volunteering in the community at somewhere other than your place of worship (as
those tend to remain largely segregated in America today), attending arts
events (I love a good talkback after a theatre performance, though I usually
listen a lot more than I talk), or finding a group, such as DFW’s Community Conversations, where people meet for the
purpose of talking and listening to understand one another’s perspectives.
Making connections like these requires some effort, and there’s no
guarantee of success. A less risky way to “meet” some new people is through
reading their stories. Take a look at your bookshelf. Was every book written by
a white author? Maybe it’s time to step outside the usual to encounter some new
literary voices.
Some of my favorite reading experiences are ones in which I have
allowed a person with a cultural identity unlike mine to tell me their story.
As a college student on summer vacation reading The Autobiography of Malcolm
X, I was uncomfortable, shocked, and moved as I experienced racism through
Malcolm’s eyes and felt the source of his indignation. As an adult, digesting
Ta-Nahesi Coates’s letter to his son, Between the World and Me,
continued to stretch my thinking about race relations, cultural identity, and
the struggles black Americans face that I seldom consider as a white male.
Recently, I’ve read a number of young adult novels with non-white
characters and authors, each of which has helped me grow in my understanding of
multicultural perspectives. In Erika L. Sánchez’s I Am Not
Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, I felt the pains of growing up as
a precocious Latina teen in inner-city Chicago. Getting to know Adib Khorram’s
hilarious narrator in Darius the Great is Not Okay, who struggles with
his half-Persian identity (and general teenage angst) as he travels to visit
his mother’s family in Iran, provided some insight into cultural norms unlike
my own. Reading Dear Martin (Nic Stone), On the Come Up (Angie
Thomas), All-American Boys (Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely),
and The Field Guide to the North American Teenager (Ben Philippe) gave
me multiple perspectives on what it might be like to be a black teenager today.
Understanding another cultural identity, that of transgender youth, is easier
for me after reading Lily and Dunkin by Donna Gephart. The 57 Bus:
The True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives by
Dashka Slater helped me see two sides of an incident from the perspectives of
two teens: a gender-fluid boy and his African-American classmate.
Can I claim to be an expert on any of these cultures because I
read a few books or met a few people? Of course not. Every individual’s
cultural identity and life experiences are their own. Just as I can’t speak
with authority about the experience of every middle-aged, white male in
America, I certainly have no right to claim a full understanding of the
experiences of a group I don’t belong to based on my own interactions, however
extensive. But opening my mind and heart as I let others tell their stories develops
my understanding and empathy. And, when I learn from listening that something
in the system we (and by “we,” I mean people who look a lot like me) have built
in our country is corrupt, unfair, or unjust, I can lift my voice along with
their voice to do something about changing it.
Fellow educators, I invite you to join me this summer in getting
out of the car, meeting some new people (whether in real life or on the pages
of books), and joining the conversation. Let others be heard, so that we can make
more meaningful—more human—connections with our students, their parents, our
colleagues, and all the other wonderful humans in this beautifully diverse
country we live in.
