I’ve been job hunting for months. As someone with many years of teaching experience under my belt, I have alerts set for education-related positions on several job sites. The entire time I’ve been searching, I’ve been seeing job postings from the FBI looking for “experienced teachers.” Here’s a screenshot of an ad I found on LinkedIn in June. It says they’re “no longer accepting applications,” but this same ad has been reposted many times targeting cities all over the US.
Here are a few screenshots from LinkedIn that show some of the breadth of the FBI recruitment of teachers:
There are many more. The job posts labeled “Special Agent” list “EDUCATION/TEACHING” as a special skill for which they’re specifically recruiting.
Back in June, I posted to my personal social media accounts about this, speculating that the FBI was planning to put undercover operatives in American classrooms to spy on educators who were teaching things the GOP calls “liberal indoctrination,” such as climate science, ethnic studies, critical race theory, race-based demographics, and history that centers the experience of BIPOC (such as the 1619 Project or discussions of the genocide of Native peoples). In June, this was just speculation.
Well, the other shoe has dropped. Now we have this:
Trump and Russ Vought, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, are, astonishingly, urging Americans to report other Americans for “un-American” activity. Once again, the US Government is demanding that Americans “name names” in order to ruin the careers and lives of fellow Americans. Joseph McCarthy lives.
A lot of people confuse McCarthy with the House Un-American Activities Committee of a few years prior. While McCarthy didn’t run the HUAC, its focus on rooting out “Communist infiltration” and its abusive tactics are all part of what we now call “the McCarthy era.” McCarthy campaigned for his Senate seat on paranoid delusions of a Deep State, supposedly made up of Communists who had “infiltrated” the government and were attempting to destroy it from within. Sound familiar?
Once in the Senate, Joseph McCarthy became more insistent that “Communists” had “infiltrated” the US government. He forced hundreds of loyal Americans into hearings that were notoriously insulting and hostile. All the Democrats on his committee resigned, and, eventually, bit by bit, McCarthy lost Republican support as well, leaving the hearings in the hands of himself and his attack dog, Roy Cohn.
In 1954, they decided to take on the US Army, accusing it of being controlled by their imaginary Communist Deep State. The Army-McCarthy hearings ended, along with McCarthy’s public support and career, with Army attorney Joseph Welch’s immortal words, “Have you no sense of decency?” McCarthy died just three years later, but Roy Cohn returned to New York, where he eventually took on a protegé– Donald Trump.
Donald Trump with Roy Cohn (and, in the second image, Ed Koch.) (Photo: “El diablo que enseñó a golpear a Trump El presidente resucita la figura de su mentor y compañero de juergas, Roy Cohn, inquisidor mcCarthista y abogado de mafiosos” by rupertomiller@hotmail, Creative Commons license.)
Trump, then in his 30s, was (for once in his life) a good student. Now, 40 years later, Trump has used what he learned from Cohn and taken the tactics of McCarthy’s Red Scare to create his own Red Hat Scare. The Office of Management and Budget has provided a handy email address to use to turn your neighbors and coworkers in for ”any sightings of critical race theory trainings” because Trump has decided that discussions of racism are “un-American” activities.
How is Trump defining “un-American”? The average American has no idea what “critical race theory” is, so Trump’s relentless lies about it provide the definition. Trump has attacked anything that mentions white privilege or systemic racism, anything supportive of protests for racial justice, and anything that says the words “Black lives matter.” He has, after years of these attacks, variously referred to anything related to the struggle for racial justice as “Antifa,” “the radical left,” and, now, “critical race theory.” He clearly thinks “critical” means “to criticize” rather than “to think critically,” and assumes the fight for racial justice is an attack on white people– specifically, on him.
A protester in Washington, DC. (Photo: “George Floyd Black Lives Matter Protest, 14th & U Streets, 5/29/20 [Explored]” by Geoff Livingston, Creative Commons license)
The Trump Administration has imagined a nefarious purpose for any type of education or training around race, and is instructing its cult followers to “report” any “sighting” of it in “Federal Agencies.” And while it’s comforting to assume Trump means in his own administration only by “Federal Agencies,” remember that he has already said that schools and universities that teach “critical race theory” will be cut off from federal funding, so he has already very much included them in this. They’re clearly seeing public education as a “Federal Agency,” and any kind of education as a potentially “un-American training.” Just yesterday, the Department of Education announced it is “investigating” Princeton University– a private university– just for saying publicly that systemic racism exists. Princeton’s admission that systemic racism exists on campus is being weaponized against them in a clear attempt by the Trump Administration to bully educators and intimidate us from discussing the realities of systemic racism.
And the FBI has been trying to recruit experienced educators for months.
Are there undercover FBI agents currently placed in schools and universities? Is this what Vought means by “working with other agencies”– like the FBI– to “identify un-American trainings”?
In addition to the Princeton announcement yesterday, Trump once again directly targeted schools for “un-American” education, and he announced the formation of a “national commission to promote patriotic education.” How long will it be before he sends DeVos or even Barr to investigate an HBCU? Or the University of Chicago’s Race & Ethnic Studies Department? Or the New York Public School District?
Since nearly anything can be termed “un-American trainings,” this is clearly a weapon used to silence discussions of race in America. Past experience teaches us that any weapon Trump has will be used in service to his personal grievances, and that both William Barr and the Senate GOP will enable every corrupt, horrific abuse he cares to commit.
Whether there are undercover FBI agents placed to surveil schools and universities or not, make no mistake: This is about targeting and silencing BIPOC people, especially Black people, and their allies. Trump isn’t satisfied gassing, shooting, or disappearing protesters for racial justice; he’s not satisfied with the prospect of using a supervillain-style heat ray against them. Now he wants to prevent us from even discussing racism.
Photo: “First Amendment to the US Constitution” by elPadawan, Creative Commons license
Think about this email address and the Trump Administration’s urging that the public “report” any “un-American trainings” to the Office of Management and Budget.
What will the Office of Management and Budget be doing with a report that Ms. Kennedy taught “critical race theory” in her 10th grade English class by having students read a chapter from Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race? What will the Office of Management and Budget be doing with a report that Dr. Abiola, Chair of the Department of Chemistry, required his department to do a day-long retreat on anti-racist pedagogy? What will the Office of Management and Budget be doing with the fact that nearly every university in the nation has an ethnic studies department?
And what will the Office of Management and Budget be doing with the information that schools and universities won’t begin pretending that white privilege and systemic racism do not exist just because Trump demands it? Does Trump imagine he can intimidate HBCUs into lying about the lived experience of their faculty and students? Does Trump think we will all just set aside the mountain of data we have on these topics because he said so?
Trump will not win this fight.
More Americans believe racial and ethnic discrimination is a major problem in America than support Donald Trump.
Trump does not get to define “un-American.” We will not sit silently by while Trump defines “un-American” as “BIPOC.” We will not sit silently by while Trump demands punishment for BIPOC speaking out about the truth of their lives.
Pull your [ALLEGED, ugh] undercover FBI agents out of our schools and universities, Don.
We will not sit silently by while Trump tries to force this nation into a new era of McCarthyism.
It’s Disability Awareness Month, and in the middle of this pandemic, at the 30th anniversary of the ADA, there’s never been a more important time to center people with disabilities. Unfortunately, the national discussion around Covid-19 has been marginalizing, rather than centering, PwDs.
All the images in this post promote independent mask makers. This cute design has a window, making it easier for deaf and hard-of-hearing people to understand you! The maker is Rebirth Garments on Etsy. (Pictured: A smiling person with very short black hair, wearing colorful garments and a face mask with a plastic window through which their mouth can be seen.)
We are not disposable. Although little is still known for certain about Covid-19, people with chronic illnesses and certain disabilities appear to be at greater risk. “It’s mostly just old people and people with other conditions,” is tossed out by people looking to shut down concerns. Some prominent conservatives have even gone as far as to say that the elderly and/or people with disabilities should be sacrificed to “save” the US economy.
Perhaps the worst aspect of this is around pediatric cases. In news stories about the children who have died, “[Name of child victim] had underlying conditions” is featured prominently whenever it’s applicable. I’ve even seen it on a line by itself. “Reduce your concern,” it seems to say, “This child was disabled, so it’s not as bad.”
PwDs and families of PwDs are facing the very real possibility that our access to life-saving medical care will be impacted by ableism. In areas of the country overwhelmed by serious cases of Covid-19, hospitals face the unpleasant task of triage, and while disability is not supposed to be a concern, ableism– like racism, like sexism, like transphobia, like fatphobia, like every other kind of bigotry– is often expressed in implicit bias. We believe we have “good reasons” for a decision that, when more closely examined, are actually the result of bias. When there’s one ventilator left in the hospital and three patients who need that ventilator, “quality of life” and “best chance for a full recovery” can knock a person with a disability out of consideration.
Both the widespread sentiment that the danger of reopening schools and businesses is overstated because most of the people who will die have pre-existing conditions and the implicit — and explicit— bias at work in triage reflect systemic ableism. Our lives are not just considered less important than the lives of the able-bodied, our lives are considered less important than the economy. Which means, at its heart, that our lives are less important than protecting the wealth of billionaires. It’s not about “getting people back to work,” as the US has ample resources to temporarily provide income to people who must stay home and childcare for people who cannot. We just choose not to because it would require raising taxes on millionaires and billionaires.
The lives of PwDs are considered a more acceptable sacrifice than 1% of the wealth of billionaires.
Our lives are as valuable and precious as the lives of able-bodied people. We will not be sacrificed so you can “reopen the economy” and hold in-person classes, football games, or two-for-one jello shot nights at McCovid’s. You cannot have our children to sacrifice on the altar of capitalism.
The MVerse is making gorgeous silk masks. (Pictured: Five colorful, patterned face masks arranged in a fan pattern.)
The other group Americans seem more than willing to sacrifice for the economy are people of color.
Two of the most significant conditions correlated with serious Covid-19 complications are asthma and cardiovascular issues, both of which are over-represented in BIPOC communities, especially Black and Indigenous communities. The impact of systemic racism on health has been studied for years, yet there is still widespread white resistance to the fact that racism is a public health crisis. White health– like able-bodied health– is considered more valuable and important.
Anything that primarily impacts BIPOC or PwDs is not a “crisis”; it’s a “special interest.”
Too many able-bodied white Americans do not consider disabled lives or Black lives important enough to protect. We were all in favor of social distancing and shelter-in-place until it became clear that the higher risk was borne by people with disabilities and people of color. Immediately, conservatives peeled off and became stridently insistent that the pandemic was a hoax, masks were “mind control devices,” and every healthcare provider and scientist around the world were somehow lying for “profit.” Suddenly allowing people to die to strengthen the economy was an acceptable sacrifice.
Are less likely to be believed by healthcare providers when self-reporting symptoms, especially if the PwD is a woman.
If you are a BIPOC PwD, you face all of these same barriers at twice the intensity.
BIPOC, especially Black and Native people, are much more likely to live in poverty due to generations of aggressive economic disenfranchisement, making it more difficult to access medical care. When they do access medical care, they face enormous bias in the healthcare system. Both Black and Latinx people are less likely to have their pain properly treated in emergency departments and are less likely to be believed when self-reporting symptoms.
Black people in particular face shocking levels of bias and discrimination while seeking medical care.
Almost half of medical students surveyed in 2016 reported believing that Black people do not feel pain as acutely as white people, have thicker skin than white people, and have fewer nerve endings than white people.
In 2015, another study found that Black children with appendicitis were far less likely to be given pain relief in the Emergency Department than white children.
In 2017, the publisher Pearson was forced to pull a popular nursing textbook when a page teaching racist stereotypes was posted online. The text claimed, “Blacks believe in prayer and the laying on of hands to heal pain” and “report higher pain intensity than other cultures.”
While overall maternity mortality rates in the US are higher than any other developed nation, Black women are three times more likely to die from childbirth complications than white women.
BIPOC people with disabilities, especially women, face systemic barriers to healthcare that make their ability to survive any health crisis, Covid-19 or otherwise, extremely difficult.
This little cutie is wearing a mask from Conscious Change, a Black-owned Etsy shop. (Pictured: Adorable Black girl with pigtails wears a white t-shirt that says “Black Girl” in black cursive and a black face mask that says “I Matter” in white below a white heart with an black, upraised fist.)
Being a BIPOC PwD is an especially potent intersectional identity because white supremacy measures the worth of BIPOC lives by how useful they are to the white supremacist narrative: Are you making money for white people? Are you appropriately grateful to your white benefactors for the opportunities you’ve been “given”? Do you refuse to participate in protests against racism, including non-violent protests like taking a knee? Are you “happy” or “angry” and “rude”?
Nowhere is this more robust than in the white understanding of Black people. White people see the existence of Black people as being about white people. Every Black event, movement, slogan, or group is criticized bitterly if it does not center whiteness. If you doubt this, remember that they can’t even say “our lives matter” without white people angrily denouncing them as “racists” and responding with “white lives matter,” “white lives are better,” “only white lives matter” and support for white supremacy.
The angry and even violent white backlash to Black people publicly stating that their lives matter, combined with the widespread ableist belief that the lives of people with disabilities are less valuable, means Black PwDs face some of the most virulent and insidious bigotry in the country at the very moment when the nation is hotly debating whether we should sacrifice American lives to reopen schools and businesses.
The Black-owned Etsy store HipFruit has a wide variety of masks, including both floral and BLM designs. (Pictured: A Black woman with long, straight hair and an off-the-shoulder top with navy and white stripes is wearing a face mask featuring white flowers on a black background.)
Government Apathy. This pandemic has highlighted the brutal impact of systemic ableism and systemic racism. Yet, as more and more people suffer, die, or survive with long-lasting medical complications, the government is less and less interested in providing relief. The Trump Administration, aided in large part by their ghoulish GOP allies in Congress, is insistent that unemployment and disability should be slashed, funding for Covid testing and tracing should be eliminated, and the CDC budget reduced in addition to pulling out of the World Health Organization. The press heaps praise upon Trump for wearing a mask in public and for making a speech without a single dangerous lie while his inaction and incompetence have caused the deaths of over 140,000 Americans (and counting).
The pandemic has put a spotlight on some pre-existing inequities. But what we choose to do about those inequities is the critical question. Thus far, we seem content with nothing better than comforting able-bodied white people with narratives like “People of color are at higher risk” and “People with underlying conditions are at higher risk” while half the nation insists that our deaths are irrelevant if the economy rebounds.
When you say, “Black Lives Matter,” please remember that some of those Black lives are disabled lives. When you say, “We should reopen schools and businesses because most of the people who die have underlying conditions,” remember that what you’re really saying is “the deaths of PwDs, especially the BIPOC PwDs at the highest risk, are an acceptable sacrifice to maintain billionaire wealth, since we can’t expect them to pay higher taxes for a few years.”
In a nation where months of conservative propaganda has resulted in 31% of people refusing to wear a mask regularly to protect others, , it’s impossible to predict just how deadly this pandemic will get in the US before we have a vaccine– which anywhere between 27% and 50% of Americans say they will refuse, thanks again to propaganda, this time on the standard sources for antivax hooey on the fringe left as well as the right.
There are many things in life that are “risky,” and “acceptable risks” are part of life. In this case, however, we’re not talking about “risk.” We know this virus is deadly; we know a certain percentage of people will die or suffer long-term debilitating consequences. In this case, “acceptable risk” means “it is acceptable to me that these people will die.”
We refuse to be your “acceptable risk.” Allies, accomplices, loved ones: stand with us. And we all need to remember that BIPOC PwDs are bearing the brunt of every aspect of this crisis.
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Pictured: The hand of a Black child raised in class.
As educators enter summer “break” each year, we begin planning for the fall. Never in the history of education in the US has that planning been more critical than it is now. The main concern in every other year has been delivering equitable, high-quality education. For the first time, the main concern for the 2020-21 school year is minimizing the number of students and staff who will die (while delivering equitable, high-quality education).
When we believed that white people and people of color would suffer and die in equal proportions, we shuttered all school buildings and sent everyone home. Now that we know that communities of color have higher rates of infection and death, we’re suddenly fine with reopening schools. It’s suddenly “safe” to reopen. Safe for whom?
THE PUSH FOR IN-PERSON CLASSES
School districts all over the country are deciding what to to about the upcoming school year right now, and there’s been a vocal push to reopen schools for onsite classes. On June 18, Texas announced that its public schools statewide will be returning to onsite classes in the fall. Texas governor Greg Abbott also announced that families with “health concerns” would be allowed to make arrangements for remote education. Texas has furthermore announced that masks will not be required, temperature screenings will not be required, and the details around how any of this will be handled (or funded) will be left up to the individual school districts.
Texas has over 5.4 million students enrolled in its public school system and employs close to 400,000 adults. While Covid-19 appears to be less dangerous for people under 18, it’s still dangerous. Even with schools completely shut down, over 90,000 children have been hospitalized nationwide, and the current surge in cases has seen a marked increase in infections among younger people. In California, for example, 44% of new diagnoses are in people under 35.
We know that indoor, in-person gatherings greatly increase infection rates, as we’re seeing with record spikes in areas that are re-opening. As cases rise, the death toll mounts, with many states posting record Covid deaths. If just .001% of those 5.8 million people in the Texas public school system die from Covid-19 contracted as a result of in-person classes, that’s 5800 people in Texas alone.
CDC has recently, due to expanded testing, discovered that about a third of cases are asymptomatic, which has reduced overall mortality rates to 0.5% of confirmed cases, but reveals how the virus is able to spread so rapidly in even brief gatherings in indoor spaces like churches, choirs, and classes. The only way to keep the death rate down is to slow the rate of infection. Yet here we are, proposing to force children and educators into in-person classes knowing full well that infections will spike as a result.
Infections and deaths won’t stay confined to school sites. Families of schoolchildren will see increased rates of infection and death after their student brings the virus home from school, and parents will spread that infection into other workplaces before they even know they’re infected.
How many deaths are we willing to cause to avoid the inconvenience of online classes? And why is it “managed risk” when the suffering and death will disproportionately impact people of color, but it was an intolerable risk when we believed white people would suffer and die in equal proportions?
Here’s the thing: We have a perfectly good alternative. Unlike a restaurant or a nail salon, education has a functional distance option. Is it perfect? No. Are in-person classes perfect? Also no.
If we decide right now to continue with distance learning in order to save thousands of lives, we can spend the summer preparing and addressing the problems of distance learning.And if we do, we will be beginning the 2020-21 school year far more prepared to address inequities than we ever have been in the history of American education.
Pictured: A Black high school student, pictured from behind, raises his hand as his Black teacher calls on him. (Photo: Getty Images)
INEQUITIES ONLINE AND ONSITE
The primary problem facing American education is inequity, whether classes are held in person or online. We have been, as a culture, singularly uninterested in addressing the inequity issues attached to in-person, traditional K-12 education.
You only get answers to the questions you ask. And the questions we, as a culture, have asked so far are all, in effect: How can we do something to address inequity in education without tackling inequity in society at large?
We’ve been content to pretend that failure to successfully address inequity in education is due to “bad teachers” or the lack of the “right” programming rather than systemic inequity in every aspect of our culture.
We’ve been content to accept that school funding is tied to property taxes, and that one child attends a school with state-of-the-art equipment while another comes from an underfunded and understaffed school with broken windows, no heating or cooling, outdated books & broken equipment (and not enough of either to go around), and daily police violence, both in school and out.
We’ve been content to accept economic inequity as part of a larger good– “American freedom” and “capitalism.” We’ve been content to shrug our shoulders about the fact that economic inequity hurts children. “What can we do about it?” We’ve been content to accept that a wealthy family can purchase higher SAT scores and better grades with expensive test prep classes and tutors while poor students don’t even have a local library, and have to race home after school to take care of younger siblings while mom is at her second job.
If that student is Black, they have to worry about whether they’ll make it home at all, whether they’ll successfully avoid police or get beaten, shot, or choked out in the street for “looking suspicious.” If that student is Black, they are many times more likely to be living in poverty due to years of aggressive economic disenfranchisement. If that student is Black, they are at higher risk of health complications from all sources due to the stress of racism.
The impact of systemic cultural racism on students and on education is widely known, yet we have always lacked the political will to do anything about it except Make. It. Worse.
That’s our current reality. That’s the “ideal” we’re willing to sacrifice student and staff lives to return to.
Online education is inequitable, but it is not more inequitable than in-person education. And we have the opportunity to address equity in online education as we invent widespread online public schooling.
Pictured: A Black student works at a desk.
The inequity issues with online education are immediately apparent, and many of them are the same inequities that onsite education has: lack of equipment, lower rates of reliable internet connectivity, higher rates of reliance on older children at home to watch younger children (due to excessively high-priced childcare). If we start now, we can work to resolve many of those issues before mid-August and start school with less inequity than we would have if we just simply reopened in-person education.
We can (continue to) work with tech companies to supply districts with laptops at cost and wifi hotspots. We can provide federal funding to states to subsidize high-speed internet for families in need. We can require businesses to allow parents to work from home, and we can extend wage subsidies to cover those whose jobs don’t have a remote option, effectively extending paid parental leave to cover the 2020-21 school year. We can increase parent education around learner needs, and create a commonsense truancy oversight system run by trained specialists who can identify the problems and work with the families to correct them, connecting them to needed resources. We can increase funding to SNAP and make qualification faster and easier, ensuring our students are fed.
We could provide teachers professional development around distance learning, and create resources based on what we already know from years of pedagogy around remote education. It’s not like distance learning is an entirely new concept; the clunky rollout last year was due to the lack of preparation and planning. Teachers were given just a few days to turn their in-person classes into distance learning right in the middle of the year. None of our classes were designed to be distance learning from the start. Remote education requires a different pedagogical approach, but now we have the opportunity to prepare classes as effective distance learning from the start.
Yes, this will all require a significant increase in funding. No one ever asks where the funding will come from when we want to give corporations and the wealthiest 1% a massive tax cut; no one ever asks where the funding will come from when we want to increase police or military spending. But when we pit money against children in America, money wins every single time. It’s time to make a different choice.
BUT WHAT ABOUT HYBRID CLASSES?
“Hybrid” classes are perhaps the most popular approach amongst politicians. The type of hybrid education being proposed for social distancing means half of the students are onsite on any given day while the other half are at home in online classes. Students rotate from onsite to online, back and forth, to maintain onsite attendance at half capacity. Hybrid proposals also usually provide an option for parents to choose online education for their child all year if they have concerns about the safety of onsite classes– and they should.
The “hybrid” model is not new. It hasn’t been put into widespread use, in part because it requires a deep restructuring of every aspect of K-12 pedagogy. And while hybrid models are a fantastic idea for high school and college, they rely heavily on deep parent involvement for younger children. We often hear “our economy can’t reopen until our schools reopen” because schools provide the vast majority of the childcare in the US. But there’s no safe way for schools to fully reopen, and the hybrid model still requires an onsite parent/caregiver for most students.
Additionally, hybrid classes will only work with a massive influx of new staff at a time when most states are facing staff layoffs. The pedagogy of distance learning is different than the pedagogy of in-person learning. What this means in practice is that Mr. Nagel would have to create the same lesson on apostrophes twice– once for the in-person students and once for the online students– following different pedagogical approaches. Teacher prep time would double, which is– trust me– physically impossible to execute with the current workload. Most teachers are using the majority of their “off” hours doing prep work already.
Most people think that “instruction” is all we do. Graphic from weareteachers.com shows that teachers work more hours per year than average full-time employees for less pay.
And what, specifically, will the students at home be doing? Teachers who teach an online class are available to teach lessons in real time via Zoom, answer questions, and work with students online during class. Teachers who teach an in-person class are available to give the lesson, answer questions, and work with the students in their classrooms during class. But a “hybrid” teacher is supervising a class of in-person students who are working on the necessarily different in-person lesson, and no one is there to support the online students doing a different online lesson unless you hire twice as many teachers. No one can supervise 16 students in a classroom and 16 students online simultaneously.
There are proposals wherein online students are meant to work independently, with no teacher-led instruction, supervision, or assistance. That’s not even worth considering as a national K-12 model. That model will work very well for some students in some classes– heavily weighted to older students– but for every student? Of every age? In every subject?
There are proposals wherein all students meet onsite for four days and then everyone is home for ten. The thinking goes that the ten days at home will be enough time for those who were infected to show symptoms and isolate. Given that families of color will be disproportionately impacted by the ensuing suffering and death, this “solution” is also not worth considering. It’s especially trying my patience that people are not considering how many of those infected people will be teaching staff and how difficult it will be to replace 10 STEM teachers in a single district during an era wherein it’s difficult to find even one. Unsurprisingly, the national shortage in STEM teachers also has a disproportionate impact on communities of color— the exact demographic that will see the most teacher infections and deaths if we hold in-person classes.
The hybrid model posits that the online portion is made up of “online activities”– recorded lectures, educational games and videos, online worksheets. Who will create these? How will we fund their creation or pay for existing EdTech products? Educators need to be creating these materials and creating hybrid structures for them right now. We need access to professional development right now. Instead, funding is being cut, and– you guessed it– communities of color are always disproportionately impacted by budget cuts.
Pictured: The word “EDUCATION” stenciled in red on a yellow wall, partially covered by graffiti. (Photo: Harvard.edu)
BUT AT LEAST THE HYBRID MODEL IS SAFER, RIGHT?
LO– and let me be perfectly clear about this– L. The cornerstones of the hybrid model for 2020-21 are maintaining social distancing and sterilizing classrooms between classes. Both are completely, laughably impossible.
Even if students could be convinced to maintain social distancing– and they will not reliably follow the rules because they are children— there’s just not enough square footage in most classrooms to allow for it unless we break classes up into thirds or even, in higher populated districts, fourths. It’s not physically possible in most schools.
Students in a classroom on Hempstead, NY. (Photo: CBS2)
And remember that students spend a great deal of time outside the classroom in passing periods, at lunch, on their way to and from school, in the bathroom. Social distancing for the 50 minutes they’re in my classroom does not matter if they’re on top of each other everywhere else. If you think students won’t sit in each other’s laps, draw on each other, share food, or kiss each other, you have never met a teenager.
In addition to the impossibility of enforcing social distancing, there’s not enough time between classes to sterilize the desks, equipment, door knobs, window ledges, and other surfaces, and even if there were– even if we shortened every class by 15 minutes to make that time– schools have been so inadequately funded prior to the proposed 2020-21 budget cuts that teachers have been forced to purchase basic equipment like pencils and paper out of pocket. So who will be paying for all this disinfectant? Have masks and gloves been purchased? Hand sanitizer?What happens when a classroom supply runs out? Where is this funding coming from when schools are so strapped for cash they’re sending out pink slips?
There will be no social distancing and the classrooms will not be sterilized, period. Oh, the states will protect against liability by wringing their hands and saying, “But we told you that you had to have social distancing and sterilize classrooms!” But they have no current plans to provide enough equipment or funding to do so. Instead, they’re telling us, “Do more with less.”
Students will get sick. Teachers will get sick. And some will die. The families who will be protected from this are the ones who choose to keep their students home full time, and without state and federal subsidies, that will become more and more weighted to the wealthy.
When those students and teachers get sick, when death begins to stalk our schools, will we shutter them all and send everyone home, moving to online education anyway, but without preparation? Or will we see that the burden falls much more heavily on people of color, and continue to see that as a “manageable risk”?
That brings me to the bottom line.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Do you think the people in power don’t already know everything I’ve said here? If white people died in equal numbers, the risk presented by returning to in-person classes, either full time or in a hybrid model, would be considered intolerable. We’re considering in-person classes to be a “manageable risk” because the bulk of the suffering and dying will be done by BIPOC children, families, and educators.
Does your school district claim that “Black lives matter”? Here’s your chance to prove it.
Keep the school sites closed. Flood schools with increased federal and state funding for everything I’ve discussed above, plus partnering with special education teachers to create safe solutions for students with disabilities. It can be done. But we have to start now.
Anonymous 18th c. painting. Unless otherwise indicated, all art posted here is from the BBC collection, “The Black Figure in 18th c Art,” curated by by David Dabydeen. (Pictured: A Black man in a red waistcoat and vest with a white high-collared shirt. His hair is in a stylish queue. He looks directly at the viewer with a penetrating gaze, his forehead lit as a symbol of intelligence. He stands before a rich reddish-brown background.)
My fellow white people: The protests you are witnessing now– that you have been witnessing for years– have a long, storied history in American patriotism. What you’re witnessing is a 21st century Boston Tea Party.
It’s important to understand that police brutality is not new– it’s just newly on video Black people have, for generations, spoken about police brutality and most white people have minimized or outright denied the problem. Now we have the video evidence to prove Black people were correct all along.
It’s important to understand that this cannot be solved with “just obey the police and you’ll be fine.” Again, we have the video evidence to prove that that is not just untrue, but cruelly, horrifically untrue.
“Portrait of Ignatius Sancho” by Thomas Gainsborough, 1768. (Pictured: A Black man with lightly powdered hair gazes off to his right, his face illuminated. He wears a green waistcoat with gold buttons, a gold-trimmed orange vest, and a white high-collared shirt. He stands before a brown background.)
Black Americans have been victimized by violent oppression and police brutality for generations. We have the video evidence to prove that we should have believed Black people when they told us about their own experiences. These are undeniable facts.
We have allowed the violence and brutality to happen, even encouraged it, and continue to do so. These are undeniable facts.
When Black people stage nonviolent protests, we respond by ignoring the reason they’re protesting and denouncing the style of protest. We excoriated them for taking a knee. We excoriated them for using a Broadway stage to speak politely to the incoming Vice President. We excoriated them for wearing shirts. We excoriate them regularly for writing articles, books, and even social media posts. Statements as mild as “Black Lives Matter” and “Please Stop Killing Us” draw howls of indignation from white people. We have made it abundantly, indisputably clear that nonviolent protests are not only ineffective, but hated and ridiculed.
“A Black Servant,” Anonymous. 1760-1770. Source: medievalpoc.com (Pictured: A Black boy holds a full wine glass in his left hand and an empty plate in his right with a red serving cloth draped over his right arm. He’s looking straight out and slightly smiling, as a small back and white dog sits on the table, looking up at him sweetly. The dog’s front paws are on the plate, giving the impression that the dog wants the boy to stop serving at table and play. The boy wears a blue waistcoat with a red collar and a blue vest, both with tan buttons. He wears a high-collared white shirt with a vertical ruffle.)
We aggressively minimize Black oppression by smearing and defaming every victim of a police murder. “He was no angel,” we say, as if a Black person needs to be perfectly angelic to earn the right to live. As if we ourselves live up to that standard. As if perfectly angelic behavior protects unarmed Black people from being murdered by law enforcement. It didn’t protect Aiyana Stanley-Jones. It didn’t protect Botham Jean. It didn’t protect Ahmaud Arbery. We work so hard to smear innocent murder victims we point to the misdeeds of family members and even wholly unrelated people.
Think about this: The violent oppression is real. Nonviolent protests have been ignored, denounced, and mocked. Reports of police brutality have been met with stony silence, victim-blaming, and deflection. When American colonists began violent protests against the British, most of their ire centered around financial aspects of British rule they deemed unfair, like taxes and trade policy. American culture has enshrined “taxation without representation” as the centerpiece of British tyranny, and modern Americans passionately revere the bloody war we fought in protest as the pinnacle of patriotism. Yet white Americans angrily denounce protests over the murder of unarmed American citizens by our own police.
“Not all white people,” right? Most of us seem to fall into two distinct groups:
The white people who valorize a bloody war against “the tyranny of taxation without representation” but denounce and mock all Black protests against police murders, no matter how mild or nonviolent;
The white people who valorize a bloody war against “the tyranny of taxation without representation” but denounce and mock Black protests against police murders that include property damage.
We can do better. We must do better. This revolt is a fight for justice against tyranny.
Is there any more obvious example of “tyranny” than the murder of unarmed citizens by police? “Taxation without representation” pales in comparison.
“Study of a Black Man,” Sir Joshua Reynolds, c.1770 (Pictured: A young Black man gazes off up and to his right, his face illuminated. He looks determined, resolute, and radiant. He wears a white waistcoat and a white high-collared shirt. The background is a cloudy blue sky.)
These aren’t “terrorists.” These aren’t “thugs.” These are Americans using the time-honored tradition of protest to fight against tyranny. These are Americans demanding that we live up to the promise of “all men are created equal” and “liberty and justice for all,” promises we have, for generations, failed to keep.
Black people cannot do this alone. If they could, it would have been over long before we were born. This is a problem made by white people, and we need to solve it. It starts by seeing these protests as a cry for justice. It starts by listening and believing Black witness, Black truth. It starts by examining our complicity, our failures, our willingness to believe the racist lies we were taught. It starts by understanding that there’s no difference– none– between throwing tea into Boston Harbor and throwing a brick through a Target window. The only difference is that these people aren’t fighting unjust taxes. They’re fighting for their lives.
Bitter Gertrude 