With four weeks down in the classroom, my blogging content decreases as both the gravity of the work and the humility from inexperience increase. Ever wondered how to perfect the “Wake Up, People!” dance from the old school Diet Pepsi commercial? The head-lolling and caffeine dependence also contribute to classroom struggles.
Another exciting part of new classroom work, however, comes with introducing content to students. While I am still learning the mechanics of basic questions such as:
- How do you get fifth graders to take a notebook out of their backpacks?
- When is our supply box not a basketball hoop for erasers and markers?
- How many ways are there to make a straight line not straight?
…I somehow still have the time to move past management into instruction. Last week was a dark blog-less week, so here I reflect belatedly on the implications of the March on Washington 50th anniversary for my students and for the United States. People of privilege in the United States still too often cling to the “promissory note” of equality which Martin Luther King Jr. said has been withheld from African Americans and other systemically oppressed social groups.
Fifty years later, the spirit of the March on Washington pushes for the freedoms students and communities deserve. MLK Jr. called appropriately for “freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia,” that monument to the Confederacy I visited over Labor Day weekend. How can freedom ring from such a place today? I have witnessed this fault line of freedom shown in at least three different ways in recent months, with students in low-income, minority communities standing uncomfortably trying to cross the precipice to claim that natural freedom.
Our Modern March for Jobs and Freedom in Three Parts
(1) Classroom Exposure: At the end of summer Institute, Corps Members had sessions explaining how to introduce multicultural education in a substantive way in the classroom. Students of color require both role models and a critical view of identity issues in the classroom. For example, it would be a disservice to my students to read the “I Have a Dream” speech and convey race issues as only two divided peoples deciding the time was right to come together.
The whitewashed narrative of the Civil Rights Movement runs with the narrative suggested in the Washington Post coverage of the 50th anniversary celebrations last week:
Many in the crowd were ready to celebrate the huge cultural shifts that mean many young people are more familiar with sharing playgrounds, classrooms and bedrooms with members of other races than with the bus boycotts, church bombings and fire hoses of King’s era.
The measure of racism as an individualized view of harmony by young people interacting with other young people of different races — the “little white boys and white girls” part of the speech — does not do justice to what Dr. Beverly Tatum describes as systemic racism. As a result, classroom exposure activities for the 5th graders involved finding quotes in MLK’s speech and then discussing how discrimination has changed but not necessarily gone away over time from the Civil War through the Civil Rights era and into the present day with high-profile cases such as Trayvon Martin.
(2) Student Actions: If the 1963 March on Washington addressed “jobs and freedom” and by extension racial inequality, then in 2013 the focus can be no less on the interconnectedness of these issues. Too often, and for me as well up to several years ago, do white Americans hide race in the language of lower socioeconomic status as though the issue will stay comfortably in the closet. Why must race remain prevalent? I could return to racial identity conversations, or I could cite to you that students of color even in the 5th grade are acutely aware of their racial identity when most white students are not. Race plays a part of their everyday lives and lifestyles.
Last week I saw the fault line clearly when attending a screening of Fruitvale Station, a film about the murder of the African American man Oscar Grant in a San Francisco BART station in 2009. The short biopic showed a man’s predictable life and choices grating against the daily restrictions placed on him by his social group. Even this week in Metro Atlanta, a black high school student faced another “accidental discharge” in a police chase based on false pretenses. Living in neighborhoods gutted of employment opportunities and created by broken promises of affordable housing, minority students face risks beyond their control every day.
The response to the restricted freedom of student actions too often comes from wise and well-meaning members of their own communities who suggest they ought to watch out and not get themselves in trouble. This “personal responsibility” argument is compelling, but does not regard the inequalities forced on these students every day which make students taking responsibility necessary but insufficient. Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow refers to the responsibility argument as “finger wagging.” Barack Obama himself has used the argument, possibly coming because such reprimands of minority community actions are a political strategy to address the privileged and oppressed at once.
What should receive more attention is the importance of encouraging student actions such as pride and strong education: reading frequently to and with students to promote health and opportunity in the real, technical terms of fluency and comprehension of texts which give greater access to employment. Freedom today, then, comes not only from liberating students to talk about oppression in American social history, but from fighting for the ways in which students will have a successful future.
(3) Social Conditions: The legacy of the March on Washington continues directly into the present day: not only should students be exposed to and receive the opportunity to fulfill its promise, but they ought to have obstacles removed to its fulfillment. Rather than simply celebrating the march, its same banners should still be taken up today as we continue to push the often-uncomfortable racial envelope in politics. If we still live in a country where white race-motivated militancy is treated as no more than awkward, we still have work to do. If we still live in a country where multiculturalism conversations get stuck and go no farther than affirmative action, we still have work to do.
The United States remains racially segregated, keeping people from low-income backgrounds hard-pressed to live functional lives. I encourage the reader to check out the book Chutes and Ladders for an ethnographic look at the challenges in employment, healthcare and transportation faced daily by millions of Americans. Or perhaps the reader knows this reality firsthand. Unemployment, creditworthiness, personal assets, college attendance, literacy, criminal justice and even sports are marked by a society where the accepted idea of freedom is not free.
I repeat: 50 years after the March on Washington, freedom is not free. I do not mean this in terms of fighting for freedom in the Armed Forces, but in terms of the concept of freedom. Equality does not grow on the branch of harmony and consensus — that is the outcome rather than the means. Equality grows on the branch of struggle and empowerment, the same virtues which drove those 250,000 marchers to fame in a hot August day in Washington, D.C.
