All of our kids, ready for life
Rise Up for Students is a blog advocating for racial equity and radical empathy in our schools, in Seattle and beyond
Love is not always “nice.” Sometimes love requires us to be honest when others don’t want to hear the truth. As parents, our love for our children demands that we both hug them and discipline them. As citizens, our love can be displayed both by the flying of a flag and by calling our nation to account when she misses the mark or fails to meet the needs of her citizens.
Read MoreOur traditional public schools are systemically inequitable — in Seattle, in Washington State, and everywhere else in the United States. Put another way, our schools are consistently producing inequitable outcomes based on race and family income, and it’s a form of systemic oppression.
We know this, most of us. But for most of us, that’s all we do. We know it. It’s mostly an intellectual idea.
So instead of idle knowledge, let’s consider for a moment what that really means — systemic oppression — and what it means for us as human beings.
Read MoreThis post is part of an ongoing Black History Month series written by Marcus Harden, a truly unsung hero of South Seattle, as he honors the living legacy of Black history in his community and beyond, and recognizes the people who are shaping the future.
Read MoreBiff Tannen is the President of the United States. Dolores Umbridge is overseeing our nation’s schools. What would you do if you knew you were the hero of the story?
Read MoreYesterday was Jackie Robinson Day — the 61-year anniversary of the day Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier by becoming the first Black player in otherwise-all-white Major League Baseball (technically Jackie was not the first ever, but the first since Moses Fleetwood Walker played a season in the big leagues in the 1880s, but that’s another story).
This year, I spent the day in Memphis with my family, and it turns out I couldn’t have commemorated the day any better.
Read MoreRecent pop culture has placed Black Women at the forefront of the conversation, showcasing their abilities to be beautiful, bold, brilliant, unapologetically rooted in blackness — and of course to be what they’ve always been: Heroes.
If you’re fortunate enough to be in the Pacific Northwest, there are three women who are the real-life embodiment of the Dora Milaje or the adored ones.
Read MoreFrom the streets of Seattle that many don’t even know exist, to finding himself at Washington State University (the one mistake we can’t forgive him for 😂), to becoming a teacher on the rise back home in the neighborhoods he walked, realizing that there was more and a call to his life.
Keith B. Wheeler now lives in the hope that he espouses, traveling the country and giving to others the gift that has been given to him, never stopping short of acknowledging his own flaws and blemishes, while making sure to point out that it's those things that make us unique.
Read MoreOn Martin Luther King Jr. Day we celebrate the life of a Civil Rights hero who believed in ordinary people’s ability to do extraordinary things. It’s an important day to reflect on his legacy, but too often Martin Luther King Jr. Day is tokenized schools. When we fail to engage students in meaningful conversations about Dr. King’s legacy and the Civil Rights Movement, we fail to help students understand their own place in the ongoing struggle for racial justice.
Last week I gave a talk at Lakota Middle School’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day assembly, and I asked students to consider five lessons from Dr. King. I also asked students to share their own ideas about how to bring people together to fight for racial justice, both in the world and in their own middle school.
Here are the five lessons from Dr. King that I asked students to consider.
Read MoreMartin Luther King Day is a reliable source for inspiration every January. It’s like the activist’s New Year’s. Just about everyone goes out — even lots of folks who wouldn’t normally — and things seem possible and fresh and worth dreaming about.
Particularly striking this year was the intersectionality on display at yesterday's MLK Day march from Garfield High School to downtown Seattle. “Black Lives Matter” was sort of the grounding principle of the event, but woven in seamlessly were protest signs and chants tied to Standing Rock and the #NoDAPL movement, opposing Muslim registry and urging resistance to Trump.
We will face another challenging year together in 2017. Unlike any I’ve ever experienced, I’m quite sure.
If you thought last year was crazy, think about the implications of this woman's sign:
Days before the inauguration, we have many, many people filling the streets of many, many cities advocating resistance to our President-elect. And not just because we want different things or have different political ideals. This resistance is being shouted into existence out of fear and shock and desperation and self-defense.
We’ve elected a leader whom a LOT of people — intelligent people — believe to be a fascist posing a serious threat to our “democracy.” A startling number of people believe he represents a force to be opposed, and I think there’s good reason to be scared. Trump is a bad guy in the Lord Helmet or Dr. Evil mold — stupid yet sinister. You can never really let your guard down.
I think that sentiment, the idea of “resisting Trump,” in some ways encompasses everything. It gets at the root of the issue for once.
An inequitable public school system is a symptom of an inequitable, racist system of government. Poverty and gross income inequality are symptoms of our savage, discriminatory capitalist system. They aren’t themselves the source of the sickness.
We know our systems are fundamentally flawed. To continue on this way is akin to tirelessly treating every individual symptom of a disease without ever acknowledging the disease that continually births the symptoms. We don’t worry too much about alopecia until the cancer is gone, you know?
So, I hope we continue to see and create this intersectionality all year long. I will not truly be free until all my brothers and sisters share the same privilege that I do. My liberation is tied up in everyone else’s.
Standing Rock and Ferguson, Flint and Charlotte, Seattle and Chicago and New York and everywhere else that someone has been resisting, these are the front lines. They are the front lines not of individual, separate wars, but of different battles within the same desperate struggle against American hate and blind capitalism.
It’s only appropriate today to refer back to someone who has talked much more eloquently about all this than I ever will:
The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral,
begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.
Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.
Through violence you may murder the liar,
but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.
Through violence you may murder the hater,
but you do not murder hate.
In fact, violence merely increases hate.
So it goes.
Returning violence for violence multiplies violence,
adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness:
only light can do that.
Hate cannot drive out hate:
only love can do that.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
From ‘Where Do We Go From Here?” as published in Where Do We Go from Here : Chaos or Community? (1967), p. 62.
Remember: Martin Luther King, Jr., was just a man. He was a man who lived an unusually bold, unusually brilliant life, and his work has made life better for every person in this country. I believe that. But he was also just a father and a son, a husband with a profession.
We’re all just people, and no one else can do this work for us. It may threaten our comfort and our safety and our lives, but if we are to live out the values that we all so fervently and social-medially supported yesterday, we will have to be bolder than we are used to being, too. We will have to use our fear and our discomfort as torches lighting the pathway to our courage. It will take everyone’s love to drive out this much hate, and everyone includes you.
Yesterday was a beautiful day, but it will be a hollow gesture if we don’t spend the rest of the year backing it up with more bold, loving action in the name of equality.
Resist Trump.
A year ago today, I was out in Ferguson.
Two years ago today, Michael Brown had been dead for a day, murdered on Aug. 9, 2014. A few weeks later, I wrote this. This seemed like a good time to take a second look at it.
I have read and heard and seen a lot of people saying a lot of different things about race in the wake of the Michael Brown tragedy — some compassionate, some ambivalent, some ignorant. This is something true:
I took this picture this morning. Then Lindsay told Julian about Michael Brown, about who he was and what happened to him. She told him about how most police officers are people to trust, but that sometimes they make mistakes. She told Julian that it isn’t fair, but that sometimes he will need to be extra careful as he gets older because of the way he looks — that he will have to be that much more careful to stay out of trouble, to stay away from what looks like trouble, to stay in after dark, because it’s a matter of safety. She told him about having called to check in with his uncle Spencer a few days earlier, about asking Spencer if he was safe in L.A. and if he was being careful. She asked him if he understood. Julian asked a question or two, Lindsay answered, and then it was done.
This is what all this means to me:
Some have argued that the Michael Brown shooting isn’t about race. Many others have at least wondered. As you may know, I am white. I can tell you from experience that it is a privilege to ignore race. It is a privilege to be able to wonder whether or not this tragedy is a racial issue. It is a privilege to not have to start poking tiny holes in your six-year-old son’s bubble of innocence and sweetness in the days before he starts kindergarten.
We had conversations about race in my family when I was very young, too, and most of them were also very direct. Most of them even acknowledged the presence of danger and the possibility of violence. I vividly remember getting a version from my dad in elementary school of what his dad had told him as a kid: that there aren’t many good reasons to fight, but that if he heard anyone using the N-word at school — or using any other slur, or using anyone’s race or gender to hurt them or make them feel small — he had better step in and put a stop to it or come home with a bloody nose for having tried. That might not exactly fit with Dr. King’s belief in non-violence, but the message was clear: This is important. Not only do we not tolerate hate or racism, we will actively fight it. It’s a family value.
There is a subtle-but-important difference between these two sets of conversations, though. My parents (also white, coincidentally) chose to have these conversations with me and my siblings. They encouraged us to choose to stand up against blatant racism and hate. But I was not the target in the hypotheticals. I was on the sidelines. The guns wouldn’t have been aimed at me, so the conversation was different.
Lindsay and I talked with Julian this morning because he won’t have a choice. Julian needs to hear this, because he cannot choose out of his skin color or his black heritage. I can choose into the conversation, choose to step into the conflict. Julian does not have that privilege. He is about to start attending public school in a district that has recently been under scrutiny for disciplining black boys much more frequently than any other group. He will be stereotyped, he will too often be seen and heard through a racial lens, and he cannot avoid it. He cannot choose a different path. Before long, he will be, say, 10 years old and tall for his age. Soon after he will be a teenage boy of color living in a major city. He won’t have the privilege of staying on the sidelines when a police car drives past the park where he’s hanging out with his friends after dark. He won’t have the privilege of deciding it’s not about race when he makes a mistake and gets caught. And Lindsay and I, as parents, don’t have the privilege of giving him an option. We don’t get to decide whether or not he’s ready, because he has to be ready, because he has to stay safe. Because someone will call him a horrible name, and someone will treat him differently — probably unintentionally — because of how he looks, and because at some point, someone will view this sweet, loving kid as more of a threat, and he needs to understand what’s happening if he’s going to stay safe. He has no other choice.
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