Tag Archives: social justice education

As School Begins: What James Baldwin Has to Tell Us

August 21, 2016

Guest post! Minneapolis teacher and writer, Julie Landsman, reflects on the upcoming school year, and what it means for teachers and students–especially those ready to confront racial injustice.

In words to his fifteen-year old nephew, James Baldwin wrote:

And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend, do not be drive from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from a sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.-

-“My Dungeon Shook,” 1962

It has been fifty-four years since James Baldwin wrote these words. What is all too remarkable and depressing to many of us who teach and write from a social justice perspective is that his words are entirely relevant today. After a summer of killings of African-Americans by police officers, and in reaction the killing of five officers in Dallas, along with the recent unrest in Milwaukee, students will come to us in the fall and throughout the year wanting to know: what led up to this? 

What is our history that underlies much of Baldwin’s references? Of all the years of my teaching and working with teachers, this year feels to be one of great urgency. It is an urgency to recognize the initial genocides our country was built on; how important it is to have truthful, unflinching discussions about the difference between the perceptions of, and the reality of, our past.

If we are good at what we do,  we educators will present students with what Baldwin cites in his 1963 “Talk to Teachers”:

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. 

If we are able, we will provide the space for students to ask questions and we will be ready to let them find the answers, let them disagree and argue. Teaching is a messy experience if it is done right. It may be that high school students will want to take part in direct action, conferences, letters to the editor, self-directed research projects, after what they have observed, absorbed, even participated in over the summer. Some of their work may have to do with what they observe about education itself, how classes for Advanced Placement are filled with White students and special education classes for behavior are filled with African-American males. Their questioning may lead a White student to ask why his Black friend was suspended for doing the same thing he did, and nothing was done to him for the same violation of the rules, the same walk down the hall without a pass.

More than ever, we must build time into our classrooms to listen, to allow discussion and to let these questions, fears, thoughts, interrupt our careful sequence of lesson plans; to let students work these things out together. If we are truly educating as Baldwin predicted in 1962, our goal has to be to provide the chance to examine the society in which our students are being educated. We do this without giving up a challenging curriculum that grows from these questions. At the same time as activists, we must examine the very texts and requirements we have been mandated to teach. We must become aware of whose perspective this curriculum is written from–who is chosen, who is included.

Again, from Baldwin’s “A Talk to Teachers”:

I would try to make him [my nephew] know that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger—and that it belongs to him. I would teach him that he doesn’t have to be bound by the expediencies of a given administration, any given policy, any given morality; that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything. 

What this requires of us is a rethinking about what we do with our students each day: the amount of time we allow students to talk, to lead and to even devise lesson plans . It requires that we think deeply about what is absent from our books, our videos, our YouTube clips– what is not there, what part of our American history that is “larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anyone has ever said about it” is not included in the pages of our texts, the literary anthologies we hand out in September.

We can start with something like Langston Hughes’ 1959 poem, “Theme for English B”:

“The Instructor said,/Go home and write/A page tonight./And let that page come out of you—/Then it will be true.”

Later in the poem, Hughes writes:

“So will my page be colored that I write?/Being me, it will not be white./But it will be/A part of you, instructor./You are white—/Yet a part of me, as I am a part of you./That’s American.”

To open our classrooms with this command, to write a page that will come out of our students–be they seven or seventeen–as a way of understanding who will be sitting before us for the nine months we have them, will be one version of listening.

There is no list of ways to create an educational system that is truly equitable. Yet, the voices of students are the closest thing I know to a beginning for this work.

Julie Landsman (www.jlandsman.com) is the author of three books on education: Basic Needs: A Year with Street Kids in a City School (Milkweed Editions, 1993) A White Teacher Talks About Race (Rowman and Littlefield 2001) and Growing Up White; a Veteran Teacher Reflects on Racism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2008). She is also the editor of many collections of essays stories and poems, the most recent being Voices for Diversity and Social Justice, A Literary Education Reader, with Paul Gorski and Rosanna Salcedo, (Rowman and Littlefield 2015) She is a retired teacher from the Minneapolis public schools, and consults and teaches seminars on education, writing, race and culture.