Right now I'm also reading White Like Me, a provocative book by Tim Wise that breaks down white privilege into seven component pieces: belonging, privilege, denial, resistance, collaboration, loss, and redemption. He doesn't do himself any favors (in my view) with an overly casual style embedded with sarcasm, but he does hit all the important parts of how to recognize the ways in which white privilege has defined society, and our responsibility to continue working on the problem without being overly academic. This of course has me thinking about TBS; how can we become an anti-racist institution? The TBS middle school has done some important work around "othering" in the last few years - by race, gender, language, and a number of other ways people create "others" - and we've even had teachers publish about this work, and we provide financial aid to a number of students via the A Better Chance program, but are we educating our students to become anti-racist activists? This does remind me of a story told to me by one alum, now a junior at a local Catholic high school; when he complained to the head coach of his football team about an assistant coach's use of homophobic language during drills, the coach refused to address the issue, and so the student quit the team. I admire his stance and his willingness to take direct action, but that action was also limited to himself, rather than societal change. And, the TBS mission specifically charges us "to engage a changing world." So, where are we doing it intentionally, and where are we not, and can we make this one of the defining aspects of the TBS program?
On a tangent but related, just in case you've never seen it, please watch A Class Divided.
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