As an urban educator, I find myself dealing with issues of race and class a lot with my students. Sometimes — and often in the best moments — it’s explicit. Some of the most powerful conversations I’ve had in my ten years in the classroom have been around those issues. In the worst moments, it is the unspoken undercurrent in a classroom, unnamed and corrosive, as people fear talking about thing that they cannot necessarily resolve. And after ten years, I still struggle with these issues, and perhaps all I have learned is that we cannot allow race and class to be unspoken. We have to have the hard conversations, even when they become uncomfortable. And while I cannot say that I’ve always had them — I have shied away from too many, I think — I continue to try. Ten years ago, when I was a student teacher, I had a teacher in the high school where I student taught tell me to “go to the suburbs and teacher your own kind.” I didn’t, and my life is richer for it… and with any luck, there are a few student of color who are better off for my being in their lives as well. In the end, issues of race and class remain some of the most difficult ones to talk about.
Tonight, I found an old essay by Henry Louis Gates from a 1998 PBS Frontline special called The Two Nations of Black America: Are We Better Off? It demands a read. It is historical, challenging, powerful and all of us who teach African-American students, whether we are in the cities, the suburbs or the rural communities, should read it. We should read it with our students, and we should talk about it — even when the conversations are difficult. I quote Dr. Gates’ final paragraph:
Dr. King did not die so that half of us would make it, half of us perish, forever tarnishing two centuries of agitation for our equal rights. We must accept our historical responsibility and live Dr. King’s credo that none of us is free until all of us are free. And that all of us are brothers and sisters, as Dr. King said so long ago–white and black, Protestant and Catholic, Gentile and Jew and Muslim, Gay and straight, rich and poor — even if we are not brothers-in-law.
I hesitated to quote any of this piece because one paragraph cannot sum up the richness and complexity of his essay. The full text really must be read.