Leadership Lessons: The Long Road of Finding Success in DEI Initiatives

Spring 2021

By Varghese Alexander

leadership-issues-(1).jpgDon’t ask questions if you’re not ready for the answer.” I often interrupt my 9- and 11-year-old daughters with this reply when they ask me about how clean the dishes are or what I think about the sugary concoction they’ve put before me. My wife raises her eyebrows at my curtness, but I think my retort pays homage to my immigrant upbringing and my parents’ lack of bandwidth in applauding mediocre attempts. My mom made Indian breakfast from scratch every morning before an eight-hour shift as a registered hospice nurse—I’m lucky if I can get my kids up and dressed before breakfast closes on the weekends. Now, I find myself similarly short on patience.
 
What has changed since the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor? What have we seen in response to the Black@ movement besides well-crafted statements? Our schools have been avoiding questions like these for years. I am relieved that my daughters tromp around campus so happily. I am proud of the speakers we’ve brought in, the tutoring programs we’ve institutionalized, and how my colleagues have worked to learn how to pronounce every student’s name. It’s why I work to recruit other teachers of color and to create systemic opportunities that will be engrained into the culture of my school. But how has life changed for our students in the day-to-day? My colleagues want to help, but are they ready to do the work? 

Problems PD Can’t Solve

A colleague recently asked me in an email, “What does allyship look like for a white faculty member?” He was trying to navigate the gray area of allowing people of color to guide the conversation but not leaving it to us to do the heavy lifting. Although I hate having these kinds of conversations over email, I spent 45 minutes of prime morning time to respond. I appreciated his authenticity, but more than that, I wanted to document the moment.
 
I wanted to document that the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) report we created this past summer was never circulated among senior administration. I wanted to document the effect of the assumption that I would organize a socially distant Diversity Day that was not included in my contract. I wanted to document that this was the fifth hour of this particular week that I’d spent in conversations about DEI. I wanted to document my disillusionment.
 
In retrospect, I wonder if I should have responded with the question that I ask my children: “Are you sure y’all are ready for the answer?”
 
Teachers and administrators of color constantly have to demonstrate expertise and bite our tongues when parents ask to better understand our “teaching modalities,” questioning our work, our craft, our identity. We have accumulated advanced degrees and presented at national conferences, only to be reminded to wear a blazer in our own halls. Our expertise is discounted and our missteps magnified. And we brush it off because we see the bigger picture. We are trained to compartmentalize each of those acts as an isolated incident. This is the game for which people of color in our elite communities have steeled themselves. We are used to working twice as hard to earn half as much recognition, legitimacy, and support.
 
But how will my white colleagues respond if, after several months of reading, attending protests, and listening to the Nice White Parents podcast, they are not praised for their actions but only remembered for mistakenly calling a student of color by another student of color’s name in a moment of exhaustion? How will they respond as they come to understand that the actual work is not a checklist of books to read or conferences to attend? The only path is a long-term individual investment—one that might only impact, in the end, a small handful of students and colleagues.
 
As a math teacher, I bore even myself with my repetitive instructions to students: “How do you study for a test? No, not ‘reviewing your notes.’ No, stop watching videos. Do problems!” I try to reinforce the idea that watching a teacher do math is not “knowing” how to do math. Few teachers would disagree: Our students don’t learn to do the work of the discipline by watching us do it.
 
Around conversations about equity, however, most of us (myself included) have plateaued at watching clips and joining book clubs. We can be inspired by the merits of Ibram X. Kendi’s words, but we are less likely to use his lens of anti-racism to reflect on our own policies.

Doing the Work

The desire to quickly level-up and become a better ally reminds me of a visit from my mom when my oldest daughter was about 2 years old. Within a day of her arrival, I found my toddler at the kitchen table eating chicken curry by the fistful. After 25 years of avoiding the complexities of my mom’s recipes, I realized it would be on me to make this food for my daughter. So, I asked for measurements and a list of ingredients. All of her recipes come from years of practice, generations of traditions, and hours in any individual session. There are no measuring spoons. She can give you a grocery list and an order of tasks, but years of tinkering is what makes the food delicious and eventually fun to make. Until then, it’s work.
 
Striving for equity and justice is similar. The desire to provide a solution is honorable, but it is misplaced. This work will take time, it will be messy, and our first results will be a terrible facsimile of what we hope to achieve.
 
How will our white colleagues negotiate the reality that not only is there no checklist or satisfying conclusion, but that they come into diversity work at a deficit simply because of the color of their skin? Their expertise will be discounted, their missteps magnified. What does white allyship look like? It looks like working twice as hard, for twice as long, for half as much gain. Then coming in and doing it again.
 
In the words of Bryan Stevenson, we have to make our work proximate. In this context, my definition of proximate means sustained engagement with DEI issues and how they inform our pedagogy and culture. In its ideal, we need to know the diverse community immediately outside our bubbles. We need DEI directors to meet with every one of our faculty members, to process last month’s reading and this month’s curriculum, and to look ahead together to engage with the work next month. We need to look at book clubs through the lens of equity and vulnerability in order to push them into the realm of identity work. We need trained facilitation such as SEED groups in affinity and anti-racist spaces to allow us to engage with our colleagues and process issues at intersectionalities closest to our own.
 
Then we can take on frank and open debates as a whole faculty about the insidious ways these issues show up in our schools: from the mundane, such as how to proceed with conversations regarding the enforcement of dress code, to the deep and authentic outcomes for every student of color that enters our lives.

Working Twice as Hard

Throughout my career, I’ve been asked to write articles that haven’t been published and to lead committees to write reports that have never been shared. Surely, we’ve all had this experience. But when it happens with equity work, to the only three people of color in your school, you have succeeded in further marginalizing the marginalized group. By asking for expertise, and then tabling solutions, you make the linear problem an exponential one.
 
It is a dangerous task we are left to take on. When scrutinized, each policy often hints at a tradition that it was created to preserve. We face the added concern that if the changes we make are too big, our donors and alumni may feel that “their” school is no longer the same. Our price tags reflect that most of our schools were built with exclusivity at their core. The events of 2020 give us an opportunity for reflection, an opportunity to evolve, and the chance to assist this generation in correcting for the misconceptions of the last. I wish we would take it.
 
Working twice as hard and getting half as much isn’t a terrible outcome if you chose to immigrate to this country, short on connections and self-conscious about your accent. My parents had the luxury of choosing to enter into this fictional meritocracy. It must have been frustrating as hell for my dad to hide the fact that he had a master’s degree because interviewers did not hold one themselves. But if you are accustomed to finding your first job through a friend of the family or your next job by leaning on your alumni network, or are 30% more likely to own a home because of the color of your skin, then finding success in DEI initiatives is a terribly long road. Are our colleagues ready for that road? Maybe we have all been avoiding the question because we know the answer. 
 


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Recent Independent School magazine articles have explored similar conversations. Catch up on past articles, including:
Varghese Alexander

Varghese Alexander is co-director of the Klingenstein Summer Institute for Early Career Teachers and the organizer of Pipeline Collaborative, a network of schools and educational practitioners of color from across the country committed to growing the next generation of teachers at independent schools (pipelinecollaborative.org). In the fall, he will be head of mathematics at Windsor School in Nassau, The Bahamas.