Recently, when the #RaceTogether kerfuffle from Starbucks occurred, Teaching Tolerance was nice enough to share some of my thoughts on their social media feed. I never expect my writing to be loved, but there were a few comments on my blog post that caught my eye. Essentially, some people asked:
“Well, they’re trying. Isn’t that enough?”
While I appreciate the sentiment, I think it’s important to note that intent is far less important than impact. This is true in most of today’s sticky interactions around privilege and power, but I think it is especially true in our roles as teachers—roles that should include understanding and supporting the various identities represented by our students.
For many of us, it’s easy to recollect the moments when we, as students, were microaggressed, or a teacher’s expectations of us made it difficult to be our authentic selves in the classroom. Recently, a student (rightfully) called me out when I had made some heteronormative comments about two of my students. I work often to make my class a safe space, but it’s important to remember that just because we want to be helpful doesn’t mean we always are.
As teachers, the impact of our roles as mentors, authorities and guides means that the stakes are higher for us. Whether we like it or not, our job inherently asks us to judge our students (hopefully based on their work), and for students to accept the judgments we make about them as fact. This means that the messages we send students about their identities can have an even greater impact than those from other people in their lives.
Yes, a willingness to try matters, but there must also be a willingness to understand and respect our positions as educators. That means, in part, consistently holding up a mirror to our own “allyship” in the classroom. Salon recently shared a fantastic piece on how white people can truly ally with communities of color. Here are some things we, as teachers, might do to help actively create a safe space for all students.
1. “Speak With Your Ears, Not Your Mouth.”
My mentor teacher shared this idea with me when I started teaching in Hawaii, and it’s essential—but too often overlooked—in advocacy and allyship conversations.
More often than not, traditional teaching has made the classroom teacher-focused instead of student-focused: Students listen to and look at the teacher for much of the time. The teacher chooses assignments. The teacher tells students what’s “correct” and “incorrect.”
Communities of color or from oppressed backgrounds are often stripped of their voices and representation. They are traditionally underrepresented in media and positions of power. The opportunity gap presents them with fewer pathways to success in American society (of course, “success” being defined by people largely NOT from these oppressed communities).
The most important job I have as an ally is to listen and ask questions. My feelings and thoughts shouldn’t be the focus of the conversation. As Father Greg Boyle, the founder of Los Angeles’ fantastic Homeboy Industries, said once, “Hubris says, ‘Here’s what your problem is and here’s how you fix yourself.’ … Humility asks … ‘What do you need?’”
This is especially true when teaching students from communities of color or that have been oppressed. Instead of telling them about prejudices or biases, why not ask them? Why not ask them to tell you about their experiences or thoughts? My seventh-graders are adept at sharing the frustrating assumptions they feel living in Hawaii.
To take it even further: How often do we ask our students what they need from us? How often do we empower our students to have a decisive role in our classrooms? The more we realize that they are the focus of the work, the more we create space for their identities to thrive.
2. Educate Yourself About Your Students.
Listening is essential, but a commitment to allyship also means understanding and caring about the feelings of those you want to ally with. People whose identities have traditionally been oppressed have to explain their existence every. single. day. So while we may be tempted to ask a parent to explain how their experience as a person of color, a person with a disability or an LGBT person has been hard, it’s also important to recognize that people from identity groups different from our own are not there to educate us.
It is our job as teachers to know our students. It is our job to try and understand the cultures they come from, the contexts they carry with them when they walk through the door and even the big-picture factors that might affect them in the moment. This will only further enable us to create structures, lessons and activities that give them the space and validation they so desperately deserve in our classrooms.
Teaching Tolerance’s Critical Practices for Anti-bias Education and “Hearing the Lion’s Story,” as well as sites like EduColor, are great resources to start with.
3. Be Open to Feedback and Graceful When You Mess Up.
Talking about issues of identity and oppression is hard. There’s no padding on that, no addendum. It’s just hard. If we know that reflecting on these things with ourselves and our students is essential, we must also honor that it is a very difficult process.
So if, when discussing these things, we say something to a student, parent or community member and get called out, it’s important to take a moment and ask, “Why are they mad?” The easy path is to assume that they’re just another “angry teen” or “crazy parent,” but it is imperative to take a moment and hold up the mirror to ourselves.
Even if we didn’t intend to be hurtful, we are discussing things that have deep roots in the United States’ painful past. This can bring up things that are difficult to discuss and hear but are necessary to work through.
Besides, I have sometimes found that the toughest conversations with my students—the ones that pushed me to question myself and my beliefs—are the ones that also made us all so much smarter and much closer. If we are willing to be vulnerable, open and honest with students, we are modeling the relationships we hope they can have with us.
Torres is a seventh- and ninth-grade English teacher in Honolulu, Hawaii.
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