The Race Fear

There is something frightening about talking about "race." My dissertation quest has taken a turn for better or for worse. Who knows. I just know it is the right thing to do. I feel like I am looking down the barrel of a shotgun and staring right back at me are the bullets of "race." I have to face this fear of race because I have lived with it but I am not intimately acquainted with it. Frankly I am petrified to even open this box. Although I am a brown woman and have had to deal with race all my life, I never really had to experience race like black or Latino women. When you are a Pacific Islander most people talk about us in terms of being "Hawaiian" and the media has painted us as exotic and desirable. You could say we "passed" to some degree and gained access to many "white" experiences because we were not like "them." Now there will be many in my community who would disagree with me. But they did not have my experiences. Perhaps my experiences were tempered with a religion that advocated for loving one another. While many of them failed horribly at it, for some reason I was able to be like water and ebbed and flowed. This came naturally but I bet if I deconstructed my survival skills I believe I would encounter many private moments of being strategically friendly and purposely working my way into the white man's world over the years. I think this is called fitting in...after a lifetime, these survival skills are normal and switching from one world to another without giving race a second thought was a walk in the park.

Yet, racism does exist. In my case it was micro discrimination we felt in not being seen or heard in the matters of knowledge and professional aspirations. It was more a feeling of knowing I was dismissed. In a school organization, racism is supposedly non-existent. Bless my teacher friends for struggling so much in trying to reach all students. But who has time to deal with race? We are so busy with learning how to learn that we don't learn about the elephant in the living room. Racism is truly experienced in systems or organization. But for some of us who have not been the primary target in race discussion. We can say we get it but do we really? For me I have spent my entire life living among the white race. I ate with them, learned from them, was a part of their lifestyle and embraced their white ways. So why would I think that I would have been denied all that was offered to my white friends? But I know there are others like me who take race for granted. We know it is all around us but living in America it is just the way it is and it will never change. Or, we only know it from an individual experience and do not see its subtleties in our everyday experiences. What of us? Being brown, I have been able to get by. I get upset when I see racism in its raw form. But when I have to describe how race effects me at work and in the very decisions I have to make, I consider myself a novice. This is a very vulnerable position to be in as it means that I am inadequate in something I am expected to know and understand. I failed to see the evidence, but they were there.

In my doctoral program, I couldn't accept that race was perhaps the central cause of systemic problems in literally every organization. I was blind in seeing how policy was written to write us out of the picture. I couldn't see that people of color were not wanted among the whites or that what we thought was important was not the same for them. I believe I bought into the notion that racism didn't exist in school systems. Yet, in reflection, I knew that race did exist. I saw it in student achievement...I saw it among teachers who claimed they did not see color...I felt it when discipline reports indicated more students of color were being suspended from school...I experienced it when what I believed need to change was how teachers were teaching their diverse learners and shut down quickly because this change meant more work. Who was I fooling? Only myself and in turn I missed so many opportunities to make a difference in education over time.

It sounds like an us against them whenever we talk about race. When speaking about race it is so raw, so cold and heartless, and ugly. But isn't that the point? Our white counterparts who are in power and in the green could not be viewed as racist otherwise they would have mutiny on their hands. So how to make it palatable among their constituents while promoting their hidden agenda? How to make race or the talk about race go away so they could get on with maintaining our stronghold in world economics? Well, you can either never discuss it or make it invisible....neutral if you will...to make people believe that race doesn't matter because we are all working together to solve problems.. particular problems in education. I have to be part of this change and now is my chance. But this means learning a vocabulary of clarity centered on race. It also means leading the charge to inform, teach, and celebrate in the knowledge of race to examine the issues in education.

So my task to understand race while a bit frightening is actually exciting. I feel like the cat who is curious. And we all know what happens to the curious cat....if you don't...curiosity kills the cat. LoL. Gotta love this journey.

So in my more formal writings I will begin immersing myself in what is race? what does it matter? and how can this knowledge make a difference in education? Wish me luck.

Insider and outside which is it?

My writing seems to be going in circles. I have already had several meetings with my chair and she keeps saying that I am making great strides in finding my voice. Most recently the subject for my proposal is now on professional learning communities.

In schools these professional communities are comprised of teachers who come together to learn from each other about their teaching experiences such as what do they want students to learn, did they learn it, and if not, what are teachers doing about it. Well this may seem like a very simple process but it really is a huge change from what teachers have done in the past. They just decided what they want their students to learn and in the privacy of their classroom they teach how they wanted to teach without any bother from other educators and teachers.

Well times of changed. The classroom is a fishbowl and the teacher and students are seemingly under a significant amount of surveillance 24/7. The pressures to make sure students learn are increasingly difficult to bear so the idea of teachers coming together to help each other help their students is pretty much a novel idea.

Well, here I am focusing on the inequities in education and struggling with several ideas. One in particular where I know that even with the professional learning communities working in schools, something is still wrong. How do I know this? Well, more and more of our students of color are still dropping out or going to alternative programs or are graduating by the skin of their teeth through the packet program (buy a packet complete it and earn a quarter credit towards graduation)

In my struggle to understand why this is happening, I still hear many teachers say that it is the fault of the students because they are lazy or don't care. Their mama's don't care because they never come in to the schools and so the list continues. But seldom if ever do I hear that teachers are at fault. Teachers always believe that the strategies they selected is perfect for learning and that if most of their students are learning then why can't these other students learn too. Of course "these other" students makes you wonder if they even know who theses students are too.

But my chair turned to an article about tempered radicals. It was significant to me because I for once could see that my struggles of being a professional in schools and having multiple identities where important. This term "tempered radicals" is about individuals who are in the inside of organizations who know how to apply and use the language of the system as a professional but is also an outsider who is aware of external tensions that are operating in the margins. This marginalization is important because it keeps this tempered radical sharp to support small changes that would positively impact the organization to increase opportunities of achievement for individuals who may have been marginalized or not understood.

If ever there was a need for this article it is now. I have come to appreciate the importance of being on the inside of an organization. My struggle which I expressed with my chair wasn't that I wasn't happy with school reform only that there were some parts that we should not assume will serve each student, particular students of color. There are hidden value systems and beliefs that are written in a neutral language. It is the language that we assume supports all students when in reality the language dismisses even misses many students who are on the margin of education and never make a connection. The are held hostage. And although we expect our teachers to make this connection the dilemma is whether or not the teacher has the capacity to use new tools such as building relationships, knowing their students, looking for student teacher connections to partner in learning. Administrators should be at the forefront of this challenge, but who will help the administrators in this role? I believe there is limited capacity on their part which is a dilemma all by itself. It is here in this crossover that I believe I should work to make a difference to support our teachers. This will indirectly be a support for students in the margins of learning.