Racism 101

I work for the Montgomery County Maryland Public Schools. And I have to say, it's one of the most rigorous, diverse, and cutting edge school systems in the United States. Witness the very fact of my job. I am the Staff Development Teacher in my building. A position that all schools have. A non-classroom based position given to a master educator in which we become the mentor/catalyst/bringer of innovation and initiative disseminator in the building.

On Thursday I attended a half-day training part of which was dedicated to creating racial awareness. Something we are charged to do at our buildings sites in order to foster a deeper awareness of the pervasive ways race effects student achievement and instructional practices. The multi-year goal of MCPS is to eliminate the racial gap between student achievement. And, perhaps, to meet the requirements of No Child Left Behind the data scrutiny of student performance includes differences in gender, socio-economic status, English language proficiency, and Differently-abled/Mentally-challenged students. But most of our work vis a vis our trainings concern race. At one point, the 120 participants were encouraged to share from our personal stories; our counter story, i.e. a story which could be seen from other perspectives, but which we saw with a meaning that came from our cultural perspective uniquely. Most of the participants were white, a few were black, a few hispanic, a couple bi-racial, there were 4 men in the house.

After a couple people shared, I offered the story of a trip that I took with one of my students back in 1980 when I was teaching at an English Academy in Taiwan (I was 19 at the time....for the record!) We drove to a very rural area where the children in the village ended up surrounding us as we sat perched upon his Vespa. They were pointing and calling out something. When I asked Ho what they were saying, he replied, "They are children. They are calling you "Big Nose". They don't mean anything by it...all Americans have big noses."

Racism isn't an American invention. It isn't even a European (read white) invention. It is one of the ways that the world's people have come to see themselves against the backdrop of others. It can be as silly and innocent as those beautiful children's raucous chant or it can be endemic and poisonous to the very core of our humanity, a bringer of enslavement, a justifier of genocide. In all of it's dimensions it must be recognized. We must see it as clearly within ourselves as we see it in others. There are no clean hands, and whether innocent or incidious we must choose to be better than those who went before us.

I am so glad that I am working for a school system that recognizes the need to shift the paradigm that pervades our social network.