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This year, I came into Chicago the same way I came out of it: trust first.
This principle applies for any number of situations, but the stakes increase when planes and anxious New Yorkers get involved. On the way into Chicago, my original flight got delayed several hours, but an earlier flight out was delayed to the time slot I originally had on my ticket. I rushed through a couple gates and made it safely there. On the way back, I thought I’d outmaneuver nature by hopping on an earlier flight only to have our plane sit on the O’Hare tarmac for an hour and the LaGuardia tarmac another half an hour. But our plane said that, if we had waited 30 seconds more on the O’Hare tarmac, we would have spent another hour on that tarmac. Making it to NYC later sounded fine by comparison.
Things get delicate when we’re 30,000 miles up in the area, but trust we must.
In Chicago, the EduColor team met up for our third annual summit, a fortunate collection of some of the best and brightest educators and education organizers in the country (and internationally!). I generally appreciate this collective because it serves as a corrective to so much of what we experience in our schools for doing what we do. With what little hair I have left on my head, I know this organization was created for the express purpose of letting it down. In a school year with so much uncertainty, I have a vested interest in the growth of EduColor as a source for inspiration and love for myself and so many others, many of whom replicate it into their own spaces. This includes any number of school systems and administrators who’ve seen the work and try to carbon copy the vibes.
Detractors will say what they have to on and offline. We been getting to this movement. Everybody mad.
Our current school systems show us what not to do in our space. Systems get skeptical of us, so we imbue trust. Systems don’t believe in our worth, so we don’t ask folks to explain themselves. Systems throw rubrics at us, so we work from where we are and build from there. Systems want us to wallow in our flaws, keep apologizing for ourselves, and keep pounding us when we make mistakes, so we make amends and squad up where we must. Systems create press releases to clean up culpability, so we expose the hurt and lay our stories bare. Systems kick us out and turn off the lights behind us, so we keep a light on, all night if we must. Systems call us difficult so we elevate the critical and still elevate the best in each other. Systems don’t want us to belong, so we move people to imagine an organization called home.
We do lots of learning along the way and still do, me first and foremost. We have a culture unto itself, transcendent because we have folks who came before, ascendant because we’ve spurred so many folks after us.
But our pedagogy gang is way strong. That’s the work, too.
These are the folks that give me courage and hope. I tend to disagree with so many people who believe that we don’t need hope because they’ve defined hope as a passive action. The hope I speak of looks so much like the strengths and values so many of my #EduColor colleagues embody. The focus on students, the introspection, and critical analysis of their classrooms and the world around it matter in too many ways. We’ve had an outsize influence on the race and education conversation on very few resources, which means that the energy we’ve embodied so far can hopefully mobilize millions to do justice by our students and their communities.
When asked about EduColor, I say “EduColor is an organization dedicated to race and social justice issues in education. Our work includes supporting, amplifying and resisting in the way of pedagogy, equity, and agency.” The elevator pitch took three years to come up with and provides comfort to outsiders who don’t get why educators of color would need an organization that specifically caters to their interests. It serves as a rebuttal to the idea that our expertise and viewpoints are only accessory to the larger education discussion. We do so with the utmost humility that we’re never actually done the thing we’ve envisioned, but we’re trying to get there from our individual and collective selves.
But trust first. In ourselves and each other.
What’s it like to see your purpose, walk in it, and travel alongside others whose steps have also been ordered? In our best rendition, this is us. For us. About us. By us.
Feet firmly on the ground, aspirations sky high.
This post was originally in Medium.