LHS’ Role in Discussions About Race

Author’s note: I acknowledge that I am a white-passing individual who will never experience racism to the same degree as those with darker complexions. I wrote this article with the intent to raise an issue I have noticed within our community and outside of it, not to speak on behalf of Black students or darker-skinned Latinx students.

Towards the end of October 2020, I, along with many other LHS students, grew frustrated with the school’s dismissal of the ongoing racially-charged civil unrest in America. The COVID-19 pandemic, which undoubtedly has classist and racial implications because of its disproportionate impact on lower-income communities, was rampant. At the same time, BLM protests were raging across the nation. Only one of my teachers this year acknowledged the devastated state of American social dynamics and its effects on students. In class one day, she noticed that we, her students, seemed distracted. In an effort to help us gather our thoughts and voice our opinions, she set aside her agenda for that class period. We had an hour-long conversation ranging from the effects of remote learning on our mental health to our frustration with the lack of discussion going on within the school about the role Lexington plays as a predominantly white town amidst the insurgence of racial equality advocacy.

This past fall felt like the perfect opportunity for students to start tackling difficult discussions about racism in our community, analyzing the nature of racism not only in the greater context of American society, but also in our schools. Such action by the school would have enabled students to recognize racism and navigate it in real-world situations, a skillset known as critical consciousness. However, we continued to attend school with a “business as usual” mindset, shying away from these crucial conversations in the pursuit of political correctness and comfort. 

In reference to these concerns, I have been thinking a lot about a book co-authored by Dr. Daren Graves and Dr. Scott Seider, titled Schooling for Critical Consciousness: Engaging Black and Latinx Youth in Analyzing, Navigating, and Challenging Racial Injustice. The book initially touches on the history of the concept of critical consciousness. However, the bulk of its content is an analysis of the results of the duo’s four-year study that examined the impact of implementing various programs and practices on Black and Latinx student success.

Dr. Daren Graves is an Associate Professor of Education and Social Work at Simmons University and an Adjunct Lecturer in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has dedicated the majority of his professional life to researching and advocating for more race-conscious schooling. 

I conducted a short interview with Dr. Graves about Schooling for Critical Consciousness in late October to attain a better understanding of what we students should be doing in order to create a more active, race-conscious learning environment. I started off by asking him why schooling in particular is his domain of interest rather than another social outlet. 

Below is an excerpt from my interview with him. The bolded sections are the questions I asked, and the unbolded sections are his responses.

Tell me more about your background and why it is that you find schooling to be such a key factor when it comes to race relations and critical consciousness in general.

I think my relationship to schooling and critical consciousness comes from my Blackness. I come from a tradition where schooling and education were seen as the means to achieving freedom or affirming our humanity. So, I come from that environment and that’s who I am. More specifically, thinking about both of my parents—they met at college. My dad was the first in his family to go to college, and my mom’s parents and their parents went to a historically Black college in Ohio called Wilberforce. So on my mom’s side, they came from a long line of educated Black folks but did so in the tradition of historically Black colleges, so that meant Black folks made spaces to educate themselves because they were excluded from other spaces. So, both my parents were part of that wave of college students in the mid to late 60s when they started to desegregate colleges. 

My mom has a doctoral degree and my dad has a J.D. and an M.B.A, so I was born into a family that had super high expectations academically and that was part of the process of desegregating colleges. They had to storm into their president’s building to make it more equitable, even after they got in. My dad ended up moving from his mother’s house to his grandmother’s house so that he could go to a better school. So it’s coming from this tradition that tied schooling and resisting against the forces of racism and otherwise. 

What really happened for me was that through high school I was just living up to my parents’ expectations. Then when I got to Yale, New Haven’s a pretty African-American city. So I was hanging out with and seeing folks who were the same age as me—they could’ve been me—but because the quality of our schooling was so different (I moved to a suburb where it was a high-quality public school and plus my parents’ social capital from being so highly educated), I was seeing folks who looked just like me who didn’t have nearly the same opportunities as me. 

I was like, okay, that’s not right, and more importantly, what am I going to do about it? I think that’s when it clicked for me that I wanted to have a life trying to make schools more equitable, particularly for Black folks, but also in general, and to think about the ways that folks’ views on racial identity highly impact the way that they experience the world and schools.

In an attempt to gain more insight into the actual steps students and administrators should be taking to move the education system towards a more race-conscious and active approach, I followed up with this: 

I go to a suburban public high school. It is very well funded and has access to a large staff force under normal conditions, though this has changed due to the pandemic. When issues of race are raised to the administrators, they’re not as receptive to criticism as they let on. Many of their statements are performative and do little more than show solidarity with BIPOC. Part of that comes from the very fact that I live in a predominantly white town. Administrators and staff don’t want to feel complicit in an issue that their students and, what’s more, the entire society suffers from. They also fear offending us. What advice would you give to students who are trying to navigate uncooperative staff when advocating for schooling for critical consciousness, and what would you say to administrators who are dealing with this stigma?

Let me start with the administrators, then we move to the young folks. This is what I do with administrators and teachers. Even if we’re doing work with critical consciousness, it’s not like you can just say “Oh, okay, let’s just do critical consciousness.” A lot of it’s about having the right mind frame and framework to build off of that. A lot of the work that I do is trying to help teachers, educators, and administrators think about racism in ways that they can break out of their permanent crouching position. 

So, what does that mean? Oftentimes talking about racism, especially in the Boston area and even in the suburbs with the assorted racial history, people get scared that they’re going to be labeled the racist and they’re going to feel like it’s their fault. So, part of what I try to explain to folks is that it’s way bigger than just you. It’s a huge system that’s been here since before we got here and it’s going to keep going after we’re not, and so trying to help teachers and educators understand what race and racism are in a way that helps them realize that this is not about trying to find “Who’s the racist amongst us,” and really trying to just realize that there’s so much work to be done. Even if we all agree and lock arms together and say “Oh, let’s do it,” it’s still super hard to stop it. So, that’s the kind of work that I do. There’s also a lot of research that I can fall back on including some stuff from the book that shows that the approaches that I would be suggesting correlate with positive academic outcomes. 

The way that you’re doing it now...how’s that working? It’s obviously not, because everybody’s got some measure of an achievement gap unless you’re some magical unicorn of a school. So whether people do it or not is one thing, but it’s hard to argue against methods that are actually proven to get the results that you’re looking for, especially to reduce opportunity or achievement gaps, versus the way it’s currently going which is not working, and is basically the definition of racism. We keep producing the same outcome over and over again. So that’s the work I do with educators. I try to get them to really think about these issues in ways that make them less defensive and less nervous about engaging in the topic because they’re afraid they’re going to get some indelible racism stamp on their foreheads and then move from there to then start to talk about the racism and type of racism that they would respect to give them outcomes they’re interested in.

As for students…if young folks came to me and asked “What should we do?” I would have a stance of not trying to lead it myself, and really trying to facilitate a process for the young folks to do the work and make it meaningful, but I do think I would be steering the young folks towards the kind of research that I’m talking about. I think in general, when young folks organize a thing, there’s this sense of “Oh, they don’t know what they want, or they’re just too young.” They also feel like young folks just want things, but they’re not doing the work. 

I think it would be hard, for me at least, as both a teacher and a human being with a pulse, to be unreceptive if my students came to me with research and said, hey, this works. And so, I think that would be a helpful tactic. But who do you think the administration is most afraid of in this grand conversation? Parents. So we could do something that makes 133% sense, but if the parents disagree, the principal will feel a lot of pressure to do whatever the parents want, because especially in a place like Lexington, the parents wield a lot of power. So a lot of work would have to be done in terms of onboarding families to the whole process. It might have to be a parallel process concerning educating parents about these issues. That would be super grassroots, but that seems like a lot to ask of young folks. 

What should happen is for the administrators to be the ones to help bring the parents along. They should be doing work communicating with families. In a time when presidents are saying “diversity training is un-American,” it’s very politically fraught, but I think that the schools would have no choice but to think about how to communicate these things with families.

Following this conversation with Dr. Graves, I realized that the shift towards schooling for critical consciousness at LHS and across the nation is going to be much more gradual and difficult than I had initially anticipated. A lot of the time, we steer clear of conversations about sensitive topics like racism and the like because we are aware of the very real possibility of offending individuals and groups of people, and understandably so. When striving for progress, some are going to get hurt, and others are going to misspeak. But of course, the role that teachers will play in all of this is facilitating these conversations to not only minimize the impact that these mistakes have on the classroom environment but also to prevent them from happening as much as possible. That being said, we cannot continue to disregard the injustices happening in this country for fear of being politically incorrect. By averting these discussions, we only allow the damages to accumulate and for opinions to further radicalize.

Throughout this process, not only will we need to maintain a respectful and safe environment for discussions to be held, but we must also tread the line between being passive and being conscientious with nuance. However, there are a few steps we students can take starting right now in order to facilitate this movement. As Dr. Graves mentioned, we need to equip ourselves with actual research to prove to the administration and parents that shifting to a school model that breeds critically conscious students not only correlates with better test scores, but also a better quality of life and higher academic achievement in the long run. Research done by Dr. Graves and other professionals demonstrates that schooling for critical consciousness would work in favor of what the parents and administration value (academic achievement) and what we students strive for (securing a better future for ourselves and prosperity). This information is also widely accessible via the internet. We just need to look for it and present it.

by LINA JAAFAR