A Letter after the Letter to a White Boss
Dear White Boss,
I’ve wanted to write you all week and finding the time to collect my thoughts has been hard. Quite honestly keeping steady focus on any one thing right now is very hard. Many hours of the day I feel like the solid marble ball inside the pinball machine bouncing around, hoping I don’t fall through the hole at the bottom forcing me to restart. As you can imagine attempting to convey a message of hope and high regard for our organization to our staff during a time where yet another Black man is killed unarmed in our country is very difficult. I know the exact job I signed up for - in part I accepted the role because of you, and your leadership. And in this very moment, I am experiencing the everyday patterns of race play out with you and our organization no differently than everywhere else I’ve worked.
To put it simply, at a basic level, I think the Black people and People of Color in our community want to see the same boldness, innovation, and energy that this institution puts into anything else that it cares about into Black people, the struggle for racial justice, and diversity and inclusion. We just don’t do that here. Everyone else = Excellence; Race = Special. Here’s why that’s difficult – illuminating and attending the racialized experience to most (White) people reads as identity politics or special treatment for a group. And I get why one reads it that way. That would be true, if we didn’t have a legacy, history, and a beginning as a country founded on racial exclusion. Put differently, it is not bold to speak specifically to Black people or to do uniquely for Black people if you in fact believe in and understand what slavery, Jim Crow, and systemic racism does. If you understand each of those you know that the remedy or solution will require a unique, special, and specific approach. And yet our community collectively doesn’t understand this – I don’t think.
Together, we spent countless hours crafting the perfect letter - one meant to help our community understand where we are at and what we are about. But we missed. Our letter attempted to be universal regarding a problem and experience that is very specific. As such, some Black people felt like it was inadequate. I knew this in writing it, and don’t think I was moved to ask for more because it felt like exactly who we are; a place where race = special and everyone else = excellence. I knew we weren’t going to do special, specific, or unique in that letter. As I mentioned before, I knew at the time of writing, and even now still that the weight and gravity of what is going on and what it all means hasn’t hit me – I am still protecting myself, a Black man, from consuming it all.
I have learned in many ways that we are either afraid, unwilling, or possibly don’t know how to respond to our White teachers. Conversations yesterday suggested this. Because we haven’t made it an expectation previously that they do anti-racist pedagogy, teaching, or learning we must scaffold it and move cautiously. This is the same as saying that because we haven’t made it an expectation that you teach all of your students, include relevant and full histories, facilitate an inclusive classroom, and know how to connect across difference we have to scaffold it. Yet the latter to me is exactly what teaching should be.
A question emerges for me. Since this institution has diversified did it change how it engages its White faculty. If nothing had to change about how you taught when your classroom was all White students to it being a racially diverse classroom, you have implicitly said it is okay to keep doing what you were already doing. Yet, the very bodies in your classroom are different and have different needs. This week for me has been very telling about this institution as many of my perceptions, ideas, and understandings regarding who we are and how we get work done came to bare. Mostly, that as we try to move many things forward, we dance around people and accommodate a tradition that doesn’t serve the organization or all of our kids. I hear us say we can’t tell teachers what to teach, we have to be careful about how we frame, all the while our students of color are not being served.
I and students of color have experienced a lot. And I realize that I don’t share about all those things. Some are par for the course as a CDO, and I consider them mine to manage.
In this year I’ve had to manage a process and conversation about teachers using the N-word.
I have listened to students of color discuss having to do student teaching on identity-based units that are left to the last classes, when their peers don’t pay attention and their teachers don’t support them.
I have experienced board resistance to a proposed DEI mission.
I have entered and sat down at tables in the teachers’ lounge with my white colleagues and been unacknowledged.
In each of these examples, it is White people’s work to do better. To handle the truth, to treat students of color fairly. To demonstrate the value of everyone. Why aren’t more White faculty outraged at what is happening or at least expressing it? We have to stop implicitly asking our Black and People of Color community to flex, bend, and adapt to make this institution work for them. We must instead model, demonstrate, and expect that our White community do this work. What I think this means is that White people in our community have to share a larger part of the burden to get this right. White people must learn how to engage, and not have to be told by People of Color what to do. The tiredness being expressed in this current moment in our community and in the streets represents the very real dynamic for Black People that we can’t just show up do simply to our jobs or be, we must navigate around you and all implications of systemic racism as it all can have a real consequence on our lives.
As I close, I want you to know that I appreciate the care and concern you are showing me. I want you to know that I see you thinking and feeling hard in this. And, I want you to know that I think you have to be bold here.
Sincerely,
-Your Black Chief Diversity Officer