Why as a Black high School teacher I’m endorsing Bernie Sanders: The campaign to “fix the hole in the soul of America.”
I have spent my entire adult life as a teacher and organizer in support of educational justice, racial justice, and other movements for social justice—from building teacher’s union struggles to better fund our schools, to the antiwar movement, to Occupy Wall Street, to the struggle for marriage equality, to immigrant rights, the Black Lives Matter at School movement, and beyond. Through participating in these struggles I have seen firsthand how the political and economic system of capitalism, which allows billionaires to horde the wealth that the rest of us create, is at the root of so many problems we face.
Today, Bernie Sanders and his grassroots campaign calling for a “political revolution against the billionaire class” represents the next phase of a breathtaking resistance to corporate power that is at the root of the social inequities I have spent my life organizing against. But it isn’t just Bernie’s naming unfettered capitalism as the source of our problems that excites me about his campaign. It has also been his specific commitments to educational and racial justice—as well as his call for system change and democratic socialism—that has inspired me to embrace his candidacy for president.
I began my teaching career in the Washington, D.C., public schools in 2001. Everyday, I would drive past the halls of government and the White House, cross the Anacostia River, and enter into South East D.C., one of the most impoverished and segregated neighborhoods in America.
Only days after I began teaching, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 struck the CONTINUE READING: Why as a Black high School teacher I’m endorsing Bernie Sanders: The campaign to “fix the hole in the soul of America.” – I AM AN EDUCATOR