Issue Six: Community
noun. a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.
Picture: The words of Dr. Martin Luther King describing The Beloved Community inscribed on the wall at the Dr. Marin Luther King Memorial in Atlanta, GA.
Check-In:
I spent two days last week in Atlanta, GA in community with equity officers across the country. The attendees represented a variety of states, communities, and inter-sectional identities under a common goal of building equitable school systems. The storytelling, support, and resource sharing filled my bucket and inspired me to continue to elevate the importance of and impact of the equity officer role in the K12 education space. This was happening at the same time three members of the LA City Council including its president, Nury Martinez, were recorded saying racist remarks. The community that I felt with the equity officers is hard to come by. White supremacy has kept minoritized communities in opposition to each other and the result is everyone oppressing each other through words and actions.
In the book, the Sum of Us, Heather McGhee talks about how racialized practices in the United States hasn’t just hurt Black and brown folx but have hurt white folks as well. What I also gleaned from the book is that when communities come together, there are glimmers of hope. I saw that glimmer last week. In my interview with Stephanie Hawley, she shares the power of community building. I also understand that in the words of Pablo Freire, we must be conscious of the oppressed not becoming the oppressor. We are still looking to build the Beloved Community dreamt of by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and we won’t get there when we keep fighting each other.
#mondaymotivation: “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. . . .We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.”– Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Interview with Leader of the Global Majority:
Stephanie Hawley has been the Chief Equity Officer of Austin Independent School District for three years.
Mary: What has coalition building looked and sounded like for you in Austin?
Stephanie: One of the things that I did when a new superintendent came on board in 2020 is I asked if we might have an equity advisory committee. And that gave me a formal way to build a coalition. And that’s the committee that pushed for the equity audit.
Stephanie: And I always say coalitions win elections, coalitions push policy change. And there are a lot of times when I can get beat up and bruised at the senior level for trying to make recommendations to support policy change, to support students because what I’m recommending is disrupting power or questioning power, which is not allowed in hierarchical organizations. So, I let our coalitions push because coalitions win.
Stephanie: Every day of the week, even on Saturdays and Sundays, I’m always connecting people who are doing the same work, who don’t know each other. They’re on one side of the city or one side of the county. I meet them and encounter them, and I’m like, “oh, you got to meet so and so.” And I think that’s a way to build coalitions that’s a lot less formal, but there’s nothing more empowering for people than to meet people that help them realize their power.
Stephanie: I find that people find their power by building relationships and building those collaboratives and those connections with like-minded people. Because the worst way to do this work is as a lone ranger.
Stephanie: Even community activists, I say, white supremacy just waits for you to come up the hill with your plastic knife and you’re going to take it on, and you will not win. You have a better chance of getting with people who are as committed as you are and as focused as you are and approaching it in that fashion. Trying to transform a system by yourself is dangerous. And that’s why collaboration and community building are so crucial.
You can hear more from Stephanie when “Leading Within Systems of Inequity in Education: A Liberation Guide for Leaders of Color” is published in April 2023. Let me know if you would like to be interviewed and/or recommend someone to be profiled in this section.
What I’m Reading: The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee.
About the author: Heather McGhee is an expert in economic and social policy.
Book Audience: Everyone!
Book Overview:
The Sum of Us ends with the question, “Who is an American, and what are we to one another?” This question perfectly summarizes the journey McGhee has taken us on throughout the book. Unpacking public pools, housing, healthcare, education, climate change, employment, and other areas of society gives us history lessons and present-day lessons along the way. It is clear that one of McGhee’s goals in this book is to unveil the myth that there’s a zero-sum game in gaining racial equality in the United States. The fear felt by white Americans was that they would have to give up something for minoritized communities to have equal access and opportunity. Each chapter skillfully unearths how structural decisions have kept many communities suppressed including white ones.
The parts of the book I appreciated the most were the examples of coalitions developed despite the beliefs around a zero-sum game. In Chapter 4, “Ignoring the Canary”, McGhee talks about the activism of residents of redlined neighborhoods in the 1970s that led to Congress passing the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). In Chapter 5, “No One Fights Alone”, the fast-food workers that were part of Stand Up KC demanding a $15 minimum wage, made it known that cross-racial solidarity was an explicit part of their strategy because they understood how racial divides have been used previously to divide workers seeking better wages and work conditions. In Chapter 10, “The Solidarity Dividend” she shares the story of Lewiston, Maine whose immigrant population has brought economic prosperity and connection to an aging community.
What this all means for us educators are clear in Chapter 7, “Living Apart”. McGhee shares the work of Amherst College psychology professor Dr. Deborah Son Holoien that confirms that “racially and ethnically diverse educational experiences result in improvements in critical thinking and learning outcomes, and in the acquisition of intellectual, scientific, and professional skills. The results were similar for Black, white, Asian American, and Latinx students”.
McGhee ends the final chapter of the book by bulleting out five discoveries that she believes are needed for prosperity in the United States. The fourth and five discoveries resonated with me the most. The fourth emphasizes the fact that communities do need each other and finally that we need to be honest about our history to create a new story, together.
McGhee weaves together history, statistics, and personal stories in a way that kept me engrossed and constantly wanting to learn more. One of the speakers during the equity officer convening last week said, “whole children come from whole communities”. McGhee shows how creating whole communities was never the goal but there are glimmers of hope for us moving forward.
I tried a new writing style for the book overview this time. Let me know what you think.
Next Book: Ratchetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success by Christopher Emdin. You can find a full list of my book recommendations here.
Resources:
· REST! The latest Fakequity blog post talks about the need for naps and breaks. Also, Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry, has a new book out, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto.
Wait! One Last Thing!
· I’m running the NYC Marathon on Sunday, November 7th, and raising money for the New York Urban League (NYUL). NYUL has been supporting Black New Yorkers for 100 years and it continues to support them through advocacy, employment, and education services. It will host its annual HBCU College Fair on Saturday, November 12th at Riverbank State Park which is one of my favorite events. Any donation for my fundraiser is greatly appreciated!
If this is your first time reading, please go back and read my Introductions post.
Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think. If you like it, please share it with your network!