“Don’t you know
They’re talkin’ bout a revolution.
It sounds like a whisper…”
- Tracy Chapman, Wooster School (Connecticut) ’82.
I was so far from home. It was my sophomore year at Wooster School (Connecticut) when my paternal grandmother died suddenly of a brain aneurism. The following year, I was again away from my home community when my maternal grandmother, a public school teacher who raised me in my early life, was fatally shot on her way to work. The mystery of her murder was never solved. The fact of death - natural, accidental, homicidal, justifiable - affects us all and we don’t get to choose when we will learn its difficult lessons.
The recent violent deaths of African-American boys and men in general and Michael Brown and Eric Garner in particular have forced us to reflect both personally and publicly not just on those deaths but also on our nation’s legacy of racial oppression. The basic facts of the Brown and Garner shootings and subsequent grand jury decisions are not in question: two unarmed, black males killed at the hands of the police with no grand jury indictment. The findings, holding no one responsible for these deaths, echo a painful, ongoing American truth: some lives matter more than others.
What is in question, however, is how we’ll respond from this point forward.
The bleak history of black life in America is well known - from slavery through emancipation through brutal lynchings and legalized discrimination to the civil rights era of the 1950s and ’60s with its promise of racial justice. But the past 50 years since have not lived up to that promise. The country has worked hard to project a façade of beautiful democratic ideals, but the ugly truth of its unreconciled racial history and its ongoing racial inequities has surfaced once again, demanding its due.
The protests and violence that erupted after the grand jury decisions in the Brown and Garner cases were more than a response to these particular cases. They were a wailing for all the lives lost because of the system’s failure. These acts of civil unrest captured the moral outrage of a wide range of American citizens who felt, once again, the degradation of a cherished democracy.
Some of us in independent schools no doubt took part in some of the protests and the march on Washington last December. But it still leaves us with the question of what we do within our school communities.
Independence is the cornerstone of our schools. Our freedom to shape the experience of our students comes with a weighty responsibility: to educate our students honestly This education has many aspects, but one of them is certainly to educate future generations who will not only serve the democracy well but who will also work to improve it. And this means, among other things, that we must teach our students to disrupt the systematic abuse of the very power that affords us our freedom.
Part of the critical thinking espoused by so many of our institutions demands that we teach students to think both individually and systemically about the world they experience juxtaposed to the fractured world filtered through the evening news. Each of us is developed by systems and at risk of perpetuating them. Unless we are determined to first understand, then disrupt the toxic patterns they imprint on us - white to see black as a danger and threat; black to see white as hateful and untrustworthy - we are bound to the American racism that has hurt our nation profoundly.
It is disingenuous and irresponsible not to teach our students this reality: the world is not a safe place for everyone; American life is not fair or just. As independent schools, we must also teach students that it is their responsibility to pay attention to and stand with those who have been ravaged by life’s unfairness.
All of our independent school efforts at diversity and inclusion, all of our focus on public purpose, all of our attention to global issues, all of our commitments to teaching both the heart and the mind prod us to be agents of social change.
We live in a time that still threatens black lives and the lives of other groups. As educators, we all must bear witness to this fact. We all must shine a light on the state of race relations in this country with the goal of pushing us onward to our democratic ideals. We need to both speak out for justice and teach for justice. To do otherwise would undermine our school missions and cheat our students. To do otherwise would be cowardice.