Too many people, it seems, want to look at the many tragic events of the past year as isolated incidents, but it strikes me that, as teachers and as citizens, if we are to make sense of who we are as a nation right now, we must step back and see these events not as isolated, but as part of a larger system.
In short, if we are to be honest with ourselves, we must connect the dots.
And so…
When a young black man is killed by a self-appointed neighborhood vigilante and the killer is not convicted…
When a white police officer shoots an unarmed black teenager six times and is not even indicted for use of excessive force…
When a white police officer chokes an unarmed black man, causing his death, and is not indicted on any charges…
When a twelve-year-old African-American boy holding a toy gun is shot by a white police officer within two seconds of arriving on the scene…
When the unemployment rate for African-Americans is double that of white Americans…
When African-Americans are arrested for marijuana possession at three times the rate of white Americans despite having nearly the same usage rate as white Americans…
When the governor of Pennsylvania can cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the budget of the School District of Philadelphia, disproportionately affecting over one hundred of thousand of children of color and exacerbating the per pupil spending gap between Philadelphia and the majority white suburbs…
When those cuts can leave Philadelphia schools without nurses, causing the death of a young African-American girl...
When the net worth of the average white family is six times higher than a non-white family…
When marketing of sub-prime loans are targeted toward black families, continuing decades of systemic denial of the acquisition of property — and thus wealth — for black families…
When the percentage of black Americans living in poverty is more than twice the rate of white Americans living in poverty…
When every national economical, social and educational crisis I can think of disproportionately hurts African-Americans comparatively to white Americans, then the anger and frustration we are seeing in the protests is put into a context far greater than a single precipitating event. When we step back and understand that the rate of racial progress in this county has been haltingly slow at best, we understand why many people are demanding to be heard when they — when we — say that America must face that we nowhere even close to being a post-racial society, that the structural racial inequities and injustices of our nation are far from over.
And when we think of the responsibility we have as educators to help our students critical analyze our nation and our world, we must not be afraid to, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has written, “reckon with our compounding moral debts,” so that our children can build a better world than the one we have left them.
And when we examine structure after structure, statistics after statistic, we must understand why it is imperative that we say, over and over again, that #BlackLivesMatter.
We simply have to connect the dots.