I have to start my response to the work of Sonya Douglass Horsford with a short rant that speaks to my experience with the quote, “even on issues of race and equity, white allies are the experts, taking up space in the margins with what they believe the education of Black and other historically disenfranchised children should look and feel like.”  I thought instantly about the dynamic in the school in which I teach.  My school, like many majority white schools, has taken a half-hearted attempt at equity and inclusion.  I was asked to join the committee, and as the only teacher of color in the middle school, I decided to do so.  During the committee meeting, which only met TWICE, I was forced to listen to the high school history teacher talk for about 20 minutes about how he teaches about redlining.  This is the white who also spearheads the social justice club, the mindfulness meditation club and has written a book on meditation in schools.  I could not believe the lack of self-awareness that this man shows on the regular.  

Further, in a classic case of interest conversion, the school has not at ALL shifted programming that has proven to harm the few students of color in our district, such as tracking and lack of teachers of color.  It is true that “those closest to the problem are closest to the solution,” as stated in the article, however, from my experience in a white-dominanted school, many “allies” have no real interest in any type of solution.  

In the second article, about integration in schools, I was really taken with the idea that resources should be redistributed “with less concern on the ‘separate’ and a greater focus on the ‘equal’…”  In fact, the focus on Brown vs. Board of Education reminded me of the fact that the NAACP did not originally focus on schooling at all, but instead began as an organization committed to ending lynchings.  It was not until white donors pushed to fund equality in schools that the NAACP even set its sights on the integration of schools.  As an educator, I think about this a lot.  In my heart, I feel that education, especially the education of the oppressed, is the pathway to true change, but at the same time, I worry that this is a false narrative.

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