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Student-led Black Lives Matter march in Minneapolis.
In a country founded upon revolution it’s become a fad to call for “revolution” in all sorts of arenas— particularly in education, where schools and educators are often accused of being hidebound to a “broken,” “outdated” system.
But it’s a disservice to students and teachers to exhort educators to be more revolutionary without understanding the stakes at hand. Those prone to insisting educators immediately take up a particular cause should proceed with caution.
Consider Colin Kaepernick, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback who famously knelt during the national anthem in protest of police brutality and the living conditions of black people in this country. Originally a solitary act, the silent protests caught on, first with teammates, then other players in the league, then any number of athletic events across amateur and professional sports. While raising national consciousness about issues, it also illuminated—not caused—deep divisions among students, parents, and educators. The national public squares we call arenas and stadiums got doses of resistance during America’s most popular form of pageantry.
I wince at a massive and complicit corporation taking up a radical aesthetic for the purposes of selling new products.
Among other activities, Kaepernick has been busy funding grassroots groups by the millions, visiting schools and prisons, and receiving awards for his humanitarian efforts. A Nike campaign with Kaepernick, launched in September, signaled to the rest of the world that Nike had sided with the former QB’s stand on history. As appalled racists cut and burn their Nike socks and sweats in protest, it feels good to see people angry that the exiled football player still has a national platform.
But I feel conflicted about the Colin Kaepernick ads. At a time of extreme economic and racial stratification, does this really qualify as “revolutionary”—and does it need to?
I wince at a massive and complicit corporation taking up a radical aesthetic for the purposes of selling new products. Human rights groups have criticized Nike for their unapologetic use of prison labor. They pay mere pennies on the dollar for every sneaker made in their sweatshops. Nike has always capitalized on controversies surrounding the athletes they sponsor, including Serena Williams and LeBron James.
Meanwhile, the protests during the national anthem and the Black Lives Matter movement—one of the most important movements of the century—have had an increasing presence in public schools. In an era where wokeness–or at least critical consciousness–has come into vogue for corporations and social media entrepreneurs alike, it gets harder to distinguish superficial performances from real work that seeks to transform and move communities. How deep do educators dig to achieve the nebulous revolution?
I believe that educators do their best to teach children. But teachers of conscience are constantly pushed to do more with less, from funding classrooms and meals for students out of their own pockets, to grading papers and setting up meetings at all sorts of hours. Higher-ups use the “do what’s best for kids” plea to make large-hearted educators work above and beyond their own capacities, leading to mass burnout and teacher turnover.
As educators, our platform isn’t just as people who teach a given subject, but contractually as agents of the state. We transmit the values of our system as part of our jobs. The standards and curriculum we teach matter, and so do our pedagogical approaches. Teachers, especially those of color, have historically been met with termination for bringing ideas of progress and humanization. Teaching subversively works to a point; the kids always tell.
In “The Challenge of Blackness,” historian and journalist Lerone Bennett writes that, “an educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor.” This puts a spotlight on the ways that educators are complicit in the subjugation of our most marginalized children—that we are one of the earliest propagators of our children’s oppression. It’s obvious enough when the majority of public school students are non-white, while the staff they see in front of them is predominantly white, but this role for education has deep historical roots.
It’s incumbent on teachers to teach for equity and liberation.
Just working within the educational system makes us complicit with injustice in a number of ways we have no immediate ability to influence: We take discounts at major office supply chains that actively suppress workers wages. We continue to support an underfunded, exploitative system, by setting up pages on donation websites to get our classroom supplies bought. We talk up the need for politicians and policymakers to hear our voices, but we dissuade students from speaking in our classes unless they speak according to dominant social norms. That’s neither liberation nor revolution; it’s assimilation and deculturalization.
And even the most thoughtful of us must create a façade of compliance to keep our jobs. We work in schools that both teach The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and suspend children of color at astonishing rates. We have administrators who are willing to post signs protesting Trump in front of schools, but want things to go back to the way things were before Trump. We are not all revolutionaries. We are not all woke. We can learn to do better for all of our students, and do so now.
It’s incumbent on teachers to teach for equity and liberation. I remember being eighteen, listening to speakers who had lived the 20th century revolutions. The first speech I ever saw at Syracuse University was from abolitionist Angela Y. Davis. I heard former Young Lord president Felipe Luciano speak to my experience as a black person descended from a Latin American country. I sat with wonder listening to Bobby Seale, Elaine Brown, and Howard Zinn on different occasions at the university. One of the lessons I learned listening to the luminaries during my formative years is that resistance of any sort requires complicated human beings to work in complicated situations with firm principles and moveable understandings of the world around them.
We can learn to do better for all of our students, and do so now.
We need to model critical discussions, engage in the civil and political discourse with a critical and identity lens, and teach content in ways that allow students to ask deeper questions about what’s presented to them. This requires knowledge of the content, but it also requires an understanding that, whatever they learn isn’t as important as how they learn it, and how they can continue to pursue that learning individually and collectively.
Our schools are the first true public square for our students, and the adults in these spaces are its most important moderators.