Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time. Everyone in this room is in one way or another aware of that. We are in a revolutionary situation, no matter how unpopular that word has become in this country.
10/16/1963, An excerpt from James Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers”
A letter materialized in Speculative Literacies with Dr. Ebony Thomas by Mimi Owusu, Parker Miles, Chris Kingsland, and Anna Almore
12/9/2021
Dear Teacher,
Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time.
Every week, there has been something that makes teaching feel unsafe, whether it is the persistent fight to remain alive in the midst of a global pandemic; school shootings, like Oxford High School, incited by white rage and permitted by white supremacy; or curricular violence enacted through literal erasure or Virginia school boards’ suggestion to burn books with Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ-centered content. Each day, y’all awaken and hope that there’s not just one more thing. We are exhausted, unsafe, and unheard.
Yet you still take on this monumental labor to teach.
And real talk: for those of us with minoritized identities and bodies, we occupy a unique space and time in the education world. Our realities may be shared but they are not the same. For everyone who white supremacy has deemed unworthy, unlovable, and unseen, let us be clear that this nightmare has lasted a lot longer than two years.
When will it end?
How does it end?
What if it doesn’t end?
These questions are as ambiguous as they are maddening. We ask them rhetorically even though we are desperate for answers. The gravity of our current conditions demands a level of urgency that renders us hopeless in the face of our uncertainty.
What if we choose to see our uncertainty about the end (if there is one) as an indication of its infinite possibilities? In the end, a nightmare too is a dream. If we have lived through one version of a dream, who is to say we cannot live another? Create another? Endure another? In the end, whether people choose to accept this or not, we/our world will never be the same. We have forever changed; thus, the change we seek to create must be unrelenting.
This piece is written by those of us (forever students and teachers) who love. y’all. fiercely.
This piece is written from a place of empathy that says, “it is impossible to fully know the depths of all that you have survived this year, but you, your heart, and your desire for something new is fully legible to us.” This piece is written from the deepest belief that, as teachers, we are some of society’s most influential future makers-- we cultivate the minds of the students who will quite literally shape the future.
This is a piece about our children. All children, and especially, Black and Indigenous children. We say “our,” not to claim possession but to name accountability. This is a piece for the children and once-children who were never imagined in the creation of schools and schooling. We write this piece to affirm what has always been true--you, your hopes/desires for yourselves, matter.
This piece is a journey. We invite you to move through this piece alongside us with the hope that it will take you to/through wherever you need to go. Connect your phone to our bluetooth so the soundtrack of your life fills every inch of your portal. Sit with it. Bask in it. Leave it. Revisit it. Breathe life into it.
“America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way-and this [Black] child must help her to find a way-to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.”
— James Baldwin, A Talk to Teachers (1963)
We recognize the enormity of such a calling. This is labor. Unpaid labor. Yet, it is the type of labor that our ancestors did because they believed in themselves and more importantly, believed in us. They too, in the face of white supremacist patriarchy must have asked the same questions:
When will it end? How does it end? What if it doesn’t end?
They also must have wondered about the possibilities, which is evident in the ways that they prepared for the future we live in the present.
Where is our power? Where can we build? Where can we love?
We speak their names, those who we know and don’t know, to remember that this labor is not in vain. We walk this journey carrying them with us as our guiding light.
Before you were conceived, someone/something dreamt of your existence. Say their name(s).
Someone/something called you to teach. Say their name(s).
Someone/Something keeps you grounded. Say their name(s).
Someone/something inspires you. Say their name(s).
Someone/something energizes your soul. Say their name(s).
Someone/something is on your mind. Say their name(s).
We name our village and surround ourselves in our community care because the stakes could not be higher.
We are living in precarious times. Teachers have returned to classrooms in the midst of a pandemic, in the midst of a “war” on teaching children about racism, in the midst of large-scale systemic failure. As if a global pandemic and climate crisis were not enough to shatter our spirits, our country faces the largest mental health crisis it has ever witnessed.
And yet, with the return to schools, we are left with hollow words from politicians and administrators. Policy has laid out that teachers are expendable, that the economic prospects of the United States hold more significance than human lives. Children in masks must return to school under the guise of “learning loss”: a lie that covers the truth of their parents’ need to return to work to keep the ugly beast of capitalism churning.
Yes, we get a barrage of reminders to slow down -- take things slow and take care of yourself -- but the work is no different. We aren’t just teaching the way we used to -- but with masks. There’s more for us to do than “return to normal.”
In fact, it’s near impossible in that we have been asked to return to normal in a world where normal is fucked. Normal is a white 18-year-old going free after murdering two people and injuring another at a rally started in support of Jacob Blake, a Black man shot and paralyzed by police officers in Wisconsin. Normal is the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd at the hands of police officers by firing shots into her apartment and kneeling on his neck. Hundreds of unarmed Black humans have been killed at the hands of police. These events weigh on us along with the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by the politicization of health by our former president. Even today, women across the country wait to see if the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court will put women’s lives in danger by effectively banning a woman’s right to choose.
Our students, too, face the most precarity of their young lives. Every child growing up in the United States has practiced active shooter drills since kindergarten, and we can only hope that we will not face the same terrifying situation as Oxford High School, Stoneman Douglas High School, and the many other schools, businesses, and places of worship where places of community and comfort have become victim to gun violence. To our students, lockdowns and active shooters are normal.
Many of us spent a year, and others most or all of our lives, struggling to survive. Yet when administrators and politicians talk about what students need, they talk about “learning loss.” The year away from classrooms has left students behind. Behind what? How accurate this assessment is but so violently misconstrued. Society has left children behind because they need to “get better” without asking what our children need to feel whole. These children are hyper-surveilled and pathologized rather than loved and cared for as humans. This is especially true for our Black and Brown children, as we’ve seen their histories and voices being erased from curricula across the country, their bodies reduced to data points on standardized tests.
The work of teaching is more than the Common Core or the SAT or college-readiness. As James Baldwin reminds us, “The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it--at no matter what risk. This is the only hope society has. This is the only way societies change” (p. 679). When we teach, we are composing selves: composing for understanding, for dialogue, for persuasion, for solidarity, for action, composing against dominant narratives to manifest new realities (see Garcia & Mirra, 2021).
Bluejeans Friday is no replacement for the deep exhaustion of the myriad weights we carry on our shoulders. But we have done this before and we need to do it again. This country needs our Black and Brown people, who are all educators, and our white allies, to do this labor. In the words of our co-conspirator, Jenise Williams, “your work and contributions were valuable before you became ‘essential workers’ and heroes.” We have always been the makers of change. Educators, you have had and will always have the power.
“It is your responsibility to change society if you think of yourself as an educated person. And on the basis of the evidence the moral and political evidence-one is compelled to say that this is a backward society.”
— James Baldwin
Despite all this, to spite all this, we must dream. Let us first be clear about what it is and means to dream. Dreaming is not aspiring to minoritized students’ success within the strictures of our American schooling institutions-- that is surviving. The trademarked, respectability-laden visions of Black capitalism are not necessarily dreams either; Black Girl Magic and Black Boy Joy are just two of the ways that our dreams, as Robin DG Kelley writes, “have been utterly coopted by the marketplace (Kelley, p.7). As ever, we turn lemons to lemonade (now, under neoliberalism, for a tidy profit). But to dream toward freedom is an altogether different project. We must turn lemons into a whole new world.
To create that new world, educators—instructors, aides, paraprofessionals, specialists, researchers, coaches, administrators, fathers, aunties, play cousins, volunteers—must seed dreams that verge on the surreal. Here at the end of the world, with fires burning at every turn, our dreams are a salve of shimmering (im)possibilities. We utter blasphemes against the capitalist sensibilities of American society, instead privileging healing and wholeness, community and coalition, rest and unabashed joy. Make no mistake: we will meet resistance. Resistance from those who shrank and dismissed their dreams to survive the psychic blitzkrieg of their own schooling. Resistance from those who would foreclose free futures so that they can more efficiently hoard wealth. Resistance from those who realize that what we dream of changing is not only the future, but the present. But we combat this resistance with bold affirmations and bolder refusals. We combat it by dreaming alongside the children who are our wards.
This is a generation of children enduring unfathomable tragedies at every turn. Yet they are a generation staging walkouts, advocating for their mental health, reclaiming the value of their labor, and critiquing American imperialism and the global crises it fuels. IRL and online, they dance and learn and remix and play, brilliantly navigating dangers, as tricksters do. I expect and hope that their dreams are wilder than ours, lucid with glitches, grasping at radical possibilities with digital prostheses. Gen-Z embraces their cyborgified existence not as sci-fi dystopia, but as cosmopolitan opportunity to rage at the machinery of violence and the algorithms of oppression; it is little wonder that they gnash their teeth. When, inevitably, our shared dream teeters on the ledge of a nightmare, be not afraid to gaze within or into the abyss. We already live in a nightmare; the fever dream is just the body ridding itself of pathogens.
As you move through this project, today and some other day, we invite you: look closely at where we and our students are, then, let go. Come and dream with us. Come and dream for us. Come out and play.
So here we are, teacher.
At the end of the world, again, and again.
You’ve stood at the precipice many a time, leaning your body carefully over the edge wondering how you keep yourself and your students physically and mentally safe. And, teacher, you did it and will continue to do so.
As you go into this next season of teaching, we ask you to do something that may feel impossible in this moment: breathe in and remember the spaciousness of your lungs and blood pumping through your body as a road map to locate your power and autonomy. You are here, in your body, alive! Too often, the anxiousness and frustration of navigating hostile systems betrays our presence: we forget that we have power as the people. It may feel small, but, as adrienne maree brown whispers in our ears, “small is good, small is all.”
Close your eyes if you feel comfortable, or set your gaze on an object of affection and breathe this mantra with us:
“Small is good, small is all.”
“Small is good, small is all.”
“Small is good, small is all.
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower overflows with poems that serve as sweet salves for those of us navigating this terrifying moment of education. Her protagonist, Lauren Olamina, is forced into fugitivity, being on the run, when she is faced with an unprecedented challenge. Pause with me: Have you ever felt so overwhelmed by not knowing what to do in the face of a challenge at school? Have you ever closed your door, turned the lights down and stared at the wall until your eyes cross? Or have you ever found yourself weeping in the corner of your classroom that no one can see from the hallway? Us, too. We’ve been right there.
And yet, like Lauren, we somehow miraculously find the power to do something: we somehow manage to find the right words to comfort a grieving child. We someone manage to catch the disillusionment in our colleagues’ eyes and make them smile—even if it’s fleeting, even if it’s a smile with tear-soaked cheeks. We somehow find the courage to disagree with our administrators, or defy the mandates they receive to cruelly control our children’s bodies and minds.
When have you somehow managed before?
It is that place of experience we extend a hand, asking for your own overworked palm to come walk with us. To where, we are unsure, but we know in between your experiences and your dreams are the teachers we need for freedom. Lauren offers a poem in these trying times, one we think may also remind you of the power in and outside of yourself. She writes in Earthseed:
Your teachers
Are all around you.
All that you perceive,
All that you experience,
All that is given to you
or taken from you,
All that you love or hate,
need or fear
Will teach you—
If you will learn.
[Change] is your first
and your last teacher.
[Change] is your harshest teacher:
subtle,
demanding.
(Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower)
What have you learned about your relationship to change? What have you learned about yourself as you navigate this constantly changing environment?
Take your time and don’t gloss over a single detail. Name your strengths. Yell them aloud if you need to. Make them known. Make them known. Make them known.
And so, teacher, your power is in your story.
How will you share this with your students? Grab yourself a piece of chart paper, your favorite journal, a fresh Note page, a voice memo, a sparkling ideas Google Doc and play, dream, and courageously name the truths that must animate your classroom from the place of your power. Not from a curriculum. Not from the lies of this nation. But from your source of power that transcends the anti-Blackness, colonial logics that trap us daily. It is from this place a new curriculum map emerges. One that will help us chart the stars towards freedom.
The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white…To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around. What societies really, ideally, want is a citizenry which will simply obey the rules of society.”
— James Baldwin, A Talk to Teachers (1963)
What myths about survival and thriving in this country must you make clear as you think about your own practices of survival and thriving? What would you want your students to understand about the ways of the world?
What lessons from your ancestors would you share?
From your place of power, what personal stories must (yes, must) pepper your lessons?
What paradoxes of education (or the schooling system) would you unapologetically name?
What role do children in play rebuilding this nation? What role do teachers play? And why? Why? Why! Why?
Won’t you come practice with us?
Baldwin said, “The paradox of education is precisely this-that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.” Your power and your presence and your persistence can not only pave the way for more just futures, but it can also, at the intersection of those three dynamic qualities, help us all practice freedom right here, right now.
What can you practice tomorrow? Small is all.
What can you practice in your next unit? Root this in your story.
What can you practice with your colleagues? Root this in your presence.
What can you practice with your families? Root this in your power.
Citations and inspirations in the genre of Black Studies…
“Perhaps the function of communication, referencing, citation, is not to master knowing and centralize our knowingness, but to share how we know, and share how we came to know imperfect and sometimes unintelligible but always hopeful and practical ways to live this world as black.”
— Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science pg. 17
Baldwin, J. (1998; 1963). A Talk to Teachers. In Collected Essays. Library of America.
brown, a. m. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press.
Butler, O. E. (2021). Parable of the sower. Thornwillow Press.
Garcia, A., & Mirra, N. (2021). Writing Toward Justice: Youth Speculative Civic Literacies in Online Policy Discourse. Urban Education, 56(4), 640–669.
Givens, J. (2021). Fugitive pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the art of black teaching. Harvard University Press.
Imarisha, W., brown, a.m., & Thomas, S. R. (Eds.). (2015). Octavia’s brood. AK Press.
Kelley, R. D. G. (2002). Freedom dreams: the black radical imagination. Beacon Press.
Lorde, A. (2007). “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Crossing Press.
Love, B. (2019). We want to do more than survive. Beacon Press.
McKittrick, K. (2021). Dear science and other stories. Duke University Press.
Quashie, K. E. (2021). Black aliveness, or a poetics of being. Duke University Press.
Ransom, K.C. (2021). There Are Children Here: Examining Black Childhood in Rosenwald Schools of Pickens County Alabama (1940-1969). ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.