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.