Facebook Publication Date: 2/8/2018 12:02

On the issue of racial justice in the workplace:

Now, for some this may seem like a ‘gotcha’, but it really is not meant to be.

I have more than a few issues with the piece.

For those so inclined, I invite you to revisit the article, this time with a eye towards congruence and consistency.

As to the article. I liked it. Sort of. It’s not wrong so much as it’s incomplete.

The author speaks to racism in the classroom, and how to do the work of dismantling systemic white supremacy in the schoolroom.

To my mind, it is entirely too narrow.

Those of you who know me a little or a lot, know that I value those two virtues I highlighted above; that of consistency and congruence. To live in integrity is to be aware of and intentional about both of these things.

To those of us who are teachers, we need to remember that who we are encompasses our entire lives and selves. Who we are outside the schoolhouse influences, even drives, who we are at our desks.

Same with those in any profession that serves, which is to say, almost all professions and jobs.

A doctor or nurse is influenced by the hours they spend outside the examining room or operating theater.

A social worker or therapist is not divorced by the life they lead outside of the chair they sit in as they case manage or do therapy.

A lawyer is who he is in and out of the courtroom. And so on.

I make this point because there is literally no mention of what any given educator does outside of their constrained sphere of influence. No mention of challenging and dismantling policies, procedures and priorities of their school as a whole, or of their given school district.

No mention of what the teacher does or how and where the teacher lives when they leave the building.

I say all of the above is crucial. And goes to the heart of ambivalence, compartmentalization, and unconscious sabotaging of the very thing they, in their conscious lives want to root out of their work environments and in their own lives.

I want to be very gentle here. This angle I am hitting is not one that is usually heard. In fact it is a given that people who serve others at or near the margins on one intersection or another are doing good work. And they are, or at least they can.

But there is also societal influence and choices, individual and collective, large and small, that can either enhance or undermine stated ethos and goals.

More questions need to be asked. Where does the teacher live? I have often witnessed teachers talk about how they sacrifice to work in ‘inner cities’; or nurses share how they work in what they consider depressed and unsafe parts of town.

I know many teachers who are loathe to send their own kids to schools and districts where they teach.

This is concerning to me. Not least because of the mixed messages it sends to those they serve, but also for the compartmentalization and dissonance it creates in themselves.

A query: what exactly does it say when a teacher will not live with those he or she educates?

What does it say when a clinic staff’s cars are locked away behind barbed wire, protected from those they have chosen to heal?

It is difficult to participate in systems that dehumanize and marginalize the very people you are called to serve.

And that residue seeps into workplaces. I have seen social workers treat their clients with contempt; hardly surprising because they practice a form of commuter solidarity.

What does it mean to teach a community you can’t wait to flee?

All of this to say that there are competing forces for dominant culture folks who would stand with those on the other side of the slash. Just like desire for connection competes with desire for distance, so does desire to serve, to help, to change compete with the racist soup we live in. Where we make uncritical choices that can serve to undermine the very work we do.

The listening and discomfort should, indeed must go outside our workplaces.

Including the church analogy. The customs and the socialization that the author speaks of comes from segregation. If churches were less polarized, it would be less grating to hear a guttural ‘amen’. Even to talk about church differences as though they ‘just happened’ instead of taking a look at the supremacy that forced black churches to emerge in America undermines the work of clear eyed analysis and equity.

Who do you talk to after you leave the clinic, the classroom, the cubicle? Are you doing your best to do well by ‘them’, and never sat with the truly uncomfortable notion of just how much is loaded and baked into the word ‘them’? Are you teaching in a school you in which you would not allow your own child to learn; healing in a clinic you would not patronize yourself?

The idea that we can nibble at the edges of a given structural or institutional cookie is a flawed and harmful lie that white people have told themselves.

We need to learn to work on two tracks. The tips and suggestions in this article are important. Agitating for change, even subtle change from the inside can be effective.

But it cannot be the only thing we do. We must look at whole systems, including the systems of our lives and how we choose to live them. We cannot insist upon limited change, while the whole of our lives buttresses inequality and privilege. We need to tell truth to power, even as sometimes we service power and the status quo

Absent that, we are doing this less for those we serve as for ourselves. We need to risk outside the confines of the pay period. We will turbocharge our praxis when we do.

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