If Ya Don't Know, Now Ya Know.

I've always wanted to be the best teacher I could. To me being the best teacher means: "You only know what you know.", "Know better, do better." create tons of credit card debt by ordering every professional book you can find even though you don't have time to read them, and my favorite, "If ya don't know, now ya know (Mr. President)".

This last semester, I decided I needed to know more, do better and take a class that doesn't require me to buy more books. I mean - like everyone else in this country I watched the Black Lives Matter movement go from a low simmer to a rolling boil. For good reason. I watched in horror as black boys, women and men were slaughtered... "by mistake" and on purpose. I watched our president spew careless words not fully knowing the impact those words would have on our country. Or maybe he did. Maybe he was more cunning than he was stupid, but that's for him to know and us to guess about. I watched as white, Trump loving "patriots" stormed the Capitol building as police stood and watched. Not one "accidental" shooting there.

I watched as Covid killed more black and Hispanic men and women than white men and women. I watched as my young Hispanic kindergarteners who did NOT have the benefit of being in the classroom fell desperately behind my white students who had consistent adult support and plenty of preschool experience. I felt helpless and sad and just pissed. off. Because of Covid, the equity we had been working so hard for in our school was gone, and we had little to no control over how or if it would reappear. Our kindergarten team brainstormed ways to make on-line learning equitable and we dug into everything we knew as teachers. I'll tell you one thing, none of the hundreds of professional books I own covered equitable online learning during a pandemic. In the end, we were disheartened by our lack of options. But we pushed on, knowing we could only control our end of the inequitable cards we were dealt.

So I did all the things to make me feel like I could do something, anything. I marched and spoke at BLM rally's. I signed petitions and started watching the YouTube series The Next Question. The link attached is a crushing review of the systemic racism in our public school system. I found myself adding more black voices to all of my social media. I read Jason Reynolds version of Stamped From The Beginning" by Ibram X. Kendi, and then White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo. " I binge watched all 10 episodes of America To Me . All day, for three days straight.

After all the marching and reading and watching I did the hardest of all the things. I looked inward and recognized that I myself had a boatload of implicit bias and racism. I realized that most of what I thought I knew about racism was wrong and until I started working for change, I would have to put myself in that category where white fragility and racism reign. Reading and watching all of the things gave me the opportunity to learn about what I didn't already know. Even so, I felt blind about how to put these ideas into my 16th year of teaching. Encouraged by a close friend to take a class on Anti-Racism, I took a deep breath, held my nose and dove head first into my "How To Be An Anti-Racist Educator" class. I began to know what I didn't know. I began to internalize as an educator what I knew, what I was learning and at the same time wished I didn't know. I began to see that some of the practices I'd set up to acknowledge all children did not acknowledge their differences in a positive way. "Color doesn't matter kids! We are all the same inside!" This phrase, although well intended, was an accidental U-turn on the VERY bumpy road of acknowledging the differences between white, black and brown skin. I'm pretty sure I pictured a rainbow over my room and all little white skinned children when I said that. As if they were better than a room full of black or brown skinned children.

This series of posts is my final project for my How to Be An Anti-L class. To answer the first question guiding my thinking, "What did I learn that I want to hold on to?" Everything. And nothing. I want to remember how the word "race" was a social construct. I want to remember how slavery began and has traveled through time, insidiously morphing into different forms so that it masked itself and became unrecognizable to the average white American. And the nothing? Racism in all its forms and how it operates systemically in our country. Once the race puzzle is put together in your brain it is something that you can't unknow. Now, I see it everyday, everywhere.

My dog is crashed out on my couch. I wanna be him. Because now.. I know.

photo credits: Libby Bianchi

https://www.libbybianchi.com/