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Kelly Wickham Hurst is the founder and executive director of Being Black at School, a data-driven policy and advocacy group that also works with teachers and administrators to develop more inclusive curriculums and classrooms. She had previously worked in public schools in a variety of teaching and administrative capacities for 23 years.
Hurst recently wrote a popular Twitter thread on some of the common hurdles white teachers face when talking about race and equity. Today, raceAhead has adapted that thread into a Gif essay, with Hurst’s permission.
“I get a lot of the same questions,” she tells raceAhead. At the heart of the matter, she finds, is an issue that all inclusion professionals must grapple with: Majority-culture people either forget or don’t know that the world is designed for them. “When thinking of systems in the United States that have persisted, it seems that many people fail to recall that they were all built for white people and that all other people of color groups have fought, even up to the Supreme Court level, for ways to be included,” she says.
This is a different way of thinking about equity work. “At what point are we going to be accountable to people of color in ways that systems are solely accountable to whiteness?”
Read on for Hurst’s thoughts, in Gif essay form.
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Some Students Are More Magic Than Others
Much of the content I use is standard in each school, and I often ask the same questions to get my finger on the pulse of an American school. It’s pretty much the same: Talking about racism is hard. We don’t do a very good job of it. In fact, schools have avoided it.
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One thing I have to mention to teachers: We all got into a system that was originally created for white children AND we all read theorists and the pedagogy of white men who studied white children. These are facts. So, if you got to read any theorist in undergrad who wasn’t white…
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Then, I move into developmentally appropriate behaviors of middle schoolers. Quick sidebar: Middle school kids are my JAM. They process aloud, have no filter, and they’re figuring things out. In front of us. They say the funniest things.
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They also tell us heartbreaking things. They’re tender AND brutal. They’re learning AND a bunch of know-it-alls. When we explore a little bit of our knowledge around what we know to be true of this age, we agree those kids are MAGIC.
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And yet… Schools and the adults in them rarely allow this magic for any child who isn’t white.
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What’s been really getting to me is the incredulity of these facts. The ways I have to work SO HARD to get teachers who should already know developmental stages of the kids they serve. I see light bulbs go off when I say it as if they forgot that students of color are also… kids.
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I’m not sure what to do with this. It’s just a constant response. People talk to me during breaks or after a workshop. Some have thanked me for reminding them.
Which means, perhaps, that we need to make this a part of DAILY LIFE in education.
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It shouldn’t come as a surprise to me but it does. When I ask—“What do you recall about adolescent development from your learning?”—it is as if no one has asked them or reminded them of it in years.
When I ask what theorists of color they’ve read…
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This isn’t to shame them. I’m reporting on a continuous phenomenon I witness everywhere.
And that is so depressing to me. That what I’m asking is such an anomaly. That collectively we don’t talk about pedagogy and application more often.
— Kelly Wickham Hurst
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Ellen here, again. In addition to making inclusive leadership development “part of DAILY LIFE,” says Hurst, one answer is to find ways to give people the information they need in a way they can take it in, early and often. “Create space for your teachers [or in this case, leaders],” she says.
In her most recent training, “I spoke for an hour and then they had the next hour to learn on their own.” Over 100 people were scattered all over the building watching videos, listening to podcasts, or reading. “It was information they were ready for, and they were able to process it in multiple ways. It leveled the way to enter the antiracism work.”
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
On Point
Puerto Rico hit by 6.4 earthquake early Tuesday morning The quake killed one man, injured at least eight other people, and destroyed buildings in the southern part of the island, according to the AP. Power outages are widespread. Worse, aftershocks are continuing, and seismologists don’t know if the shakes will stop or get worse. The event has retraumatized communities still reeling from hurricanes past, and destroyed a beloved ancient rock formation called Punta Ventana on the southern coast.
AP
It’s Zora Neale Hurston’s birthday and we all get a gift The editors of Zora, the Medium magazine for women of color named for the famed writer, have compiled the Zora Canon, their list of the 100 greatest literary works ever written by African-American women. It was clearly a labor of love and a long overdue corrective. “This list is an exciting one: an accounting by Black women writers for Black women readers of the voices to listen to and value; of the voices that show us ourselves, interrogate ourselves, and, most importantly, value our consciousnesses,” says Kaitlyn Greenidge, author and New York Times contributing opinion writer. Share with joy.
Zora
Female mayors are more likely to experience verbal and physical harassment than their male counterparts A recent study finds that 79% of mayors in the U.S. report being the victims of harassment, psychological or verbal abuse, and 13% report physical threats. The study, published in the academic journal State and Local Government Review, found that gender was the trigger for most of the abuse: “Female mayors were more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to experience psychological abuse and almost three times as likely to experience physical violence.” Younger mayors were less likely to be spared, too.
New York Times
Big Law takes on diversity in blockchain A new report, backed by several Big Law firm partners and other executives compiled recent data showing that people of color and women are underrepresented in the blockchain industry, among blockchain conference speakers, and in blockchain-related academic fields. It’s still early, they say. “Radical action can be taken to embed and support diversity and inclusion practices and culture at the outset of the industry so that rules are not overlaid with implicit cultural biases that exclude.” The report was published by the nonprofit group Diversity in Blockchain, and sponsored by the law firms Linklaters and Crowell & Moring.
Big Law Business
On Background
Time to retire these diversity practices Janice Gassam, the founder of a diversity consultancy, has put together a pretty spot-on list of outdated ideas that need to be left behind in the last decade. They point to some common pet peeves I hear often. Boilerplate and mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) trainings be gone, she says. Not assessing your DEI efforts, stop that. But also, she says, go deep. Acknowledge that what happens in the world affects your employees. “Some companies may feel like it’s better to stay out of politics, however, politics are inextricably linked to how we live our lives and our experiences in and out of the workplace.” If you see something, say something.
Forbes
A nearly extinct language lives on in Brooklyn It’s a scenario almost too improbable to believe. Seke, which means “golden language” is spoken in five villages in a remote part of Nepal called Mustang, close to Tibet. There are 700 speakers left in the world, 100 of them are in New York City. But 50 live in the same Flatbush apartment building. What is lost when we lose our words?
New York Times
Remembering a groundbreaking bias experiment: No Blonds Allowed In 1969, a Maryland school tried a controversial but effective experiment for National Brotherhood Week: Turn the tables on discrimination. On February 17, 1969, students arrived at Cabin John Junior High and were greeted by signs directing blond ones to side doors and were forced to use segregated drinking fountains and cafeteria tables. Worst of all, dark haired students, acting as hall monitors and enforcers, quickly became brutal. The experiment got national attention and parents protested. “[T]he message that blondes are inferior, undesirable persons was broadcast over the school’s public address system and circulated in a one-sheet newspaper,” reported the Washington Post at the time. While the experiment ended early, it had a big impact.
Washington Post
Quote
“Even seasoned educators can be confounded when confronted with student’s reactions to racial justice content, resistance to learning, microaggressions towards others, and/or aggressive comments or behaviors. Some instructors report freezing up in the face of emotionally charged moments in the classroom. Others, wary to ‘shut down’ dissenting views, are hesitant to challenge flawed logics embedded in student’s claims. Still other instructors adopt a paternalistic approach to teaching racial justice. In a thought-provoking essay considering teaching white students who are resistant to learning about racial in/justice, one instructor noted she had ‘retreated into didactic, inactive, unengaged pedagogy…’ and another confessed to ‘sarcastic needling as pedagogy.’”
—AmieThurber, M. Brielle Harbin, and Joe Bandy, "Teaching Race: Pedagogy and Practice"
