Stare Them In The Eyes
Before I continue, I’ve been nominated for the National Education Association’s Social Justice Award. If you’re an NEA / UFT member, please consider voting for me. Thank you! Voting ends on May 18th, 2015.
When John Norton, editor and writing guru, was having long conversations with me on Skype about the direction of my book, he often told me that the book would elevate my voice in ways I couldn’t imagine. The morning after my book dropped on May 6th, 2014, I was on a train to meet Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. My strategy in conversing with politicians with whom I vehemently disagree goes as follows: ask unexpected questions and challenge precisely. Before the day was over, he saw the composition of the attendees and said, “We need more of you,” referring of course to the lack of male teachers of color in our teaching corps. My reply, “I’m about it if you’re about it.”
As usual, I didn’t hold my breath on that promise, either. We’re still in the throes of overtesting, overprivatization, overpunishing, overempoverishing, and I’m over it.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, where I was chastised by so-called white anti-testing allies for asserting that predominantly white education conferences ought to have racial issues at the center of the education reform discussions, not just to counter the diversity of the “other side,” but because our students are becoming more diverse in our public schools, and alleducators should have a stake, especially with our recent BlackLivesMatter social movements. These commenters resorted to calling me jealous, sensitive, as if my essay was fueled by avarice and race-baiting, similar to what trolls do when I bring up Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Aiyana Jones, but they don’t see the patterns in their own behaviors to see their flaws. Even the mere mention of race makes many of my endorsers jump into their feelings. That’s OK. Everyone has places for growth.
We can’t criticize civil rights groups for their stance when the “anti-testing” crowd doesn’t want to deal with the re-segregation of our schools as a mechanism for disparate school resources, but that’s another post.
After a tough week in school where some of us had to inform dozens of students that they haven’t done the work to graduate to high school, it was an uncanny and refreshing feeling to go to the US Department of Education the next week for a celebration of male educators of color by the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for African Americans (full disclosure: I’m Black, not African American, but that’s for another time). The room had perhaps 100 Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American educators and education leaders from as close as Baltimore and DC and as far as Hawaii. I was invited for the express purpose of speaking about my experience as a male educator of color, but my purpose for showing up was to join with the dozens of other educators of colors who had a common experience there.
I challenged the US Department of Education through my questions. A sample:
- Do male educators get hired for their expertise or to serve as overseers?
- Is the lack of male educators of color in the National Teacher of the Year conversation a symptom of the lack of aforementioned people in the profession period or is it because we’re less likely to be seen as experts of pedagogy and more on “how to teach those kids?”
- Is hiring people like me a shortcut towards getting the teaching profession to be more culturally competent?
Unlike other education conferences where even snaps of approval for these types of questions get folks staring and leaving the room, this audience of educators from across the country met Stare Them In The Eyes | The Jose Vilson:
