It's Time to Move Beyond Buzzwords and Radically Re-imagine Schools [edweek.org]

June 16, 2020

Educators have to move beyond the buzzwords and trends circulating today if we are seeking to truly transform schools. The terms “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” simply are not enough. And I fear now that the radicalism tied to anti-racist work is being watered down. Educational trendy buzzwords pave a destructive road for the commodification of otherwise transformative action. This era of “trendiness” is a distraction from the truth of how we got here: intentionally crafted systems of oppression that have sustained inequity in this country. Trends and buzzwords are lukewarm substitutes that may lead to temporary and surface-level shifts but will not lead to unequivocal, long-lasting, systematic change.

The lynching of Black bodies, the rioting, and the increasing number of Black deaths due to COVID-19 still, always, and once again point to racism and a long, deliberate history of systematic oppression and destruction. As the great author James Baldwin explained, “This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.” Therefore, the steps that we must all seek to take, the work that we must teach our children to do and hold our neighbors accountable for doing, is the lifelong and generational work of anti-racism, anti-oppression, and intersectional justice.

“Intersectionality,” a term coined by law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, acknowledges the multiple and overlapping forms of oppression that an individual can experience at once. Poor, Black, queer women, for example, experience oppression stemming from racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Understanding anti-racism is crucial and essential in order to destroy and dismantle racist systems. In order to ensure effective transformation and liberation, however, schools ought to consider an approach to justice that seeks to eradicate all forms of oppression. The police killings of Black women and men and the disproportionate numbers of Black deaths linked to coronavirus are profound, historic, and are tied to deliberate and calculated structures that have long been set up to destroy Black life; thus, our responses as educators must be premeditated and deliberate. We must dig in beyond an embrace of what feels like a trendy moment.

In my work with schools, the question often arises around where to begin. My answer remains the same: Peel back the layers, understand and study how racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression work, identify how they impact school systems and your schools, and then respond from that place. Without an understanding of how racism, sexism, classism, and other forms of oppression are perpetuated, many educators are exhausted by their frustrated attempts to combat the many problems that plague their schools that serve predominantly poor Black and Brown students. Educator and author Bettina L. Love refers to this as “radical dreaming” or “radically reimagining” schools so that educators and school leaders do more than just create a space where Black students merely survive.

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