'us'

I saw a quote several months ago and can’t remember the exact words, but it was something along the lines that when we identify ourselves (‘us’) through labels we commit violence, because by doing so, we, in turn, label others as ‘them’.

At first I was taken aback and dismissed it as a bit extreme. However, it was enough of a brain irritant that I have been pondering it ever since and grappling with how this person came to that viewpoint. I thought about it a lot this past week during the readings and discussions in class. Then I wondered if/how that may apply to how I label myself and the resulting impact on my relationships with others. I wondered what divisions or violence I create when I use…Female. Heterosexual. Married. 3 children. Lutheran. US citizen. Caucasian, not of Hispanic origin. 45-55. College educated. SpEd Teacher. Union president. Employed. Omnivore. Gay rights supporter.

In America’s nascent years, labels defined who had certain inalienable rights and who didn’t. By labeling those who had rights, the ones who didn’t match those labels fell into the ‘them’ category…one vote, 3/5 vote, or no vote at all. The violence committed: alienation from the system that was supposed to provide life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It stands to reason that the education system, serving as the ‘feeder program’ to full participation in society, may have been viewed very differently depending on the lenses a person’s birthright afforded her/him.

As a student I went to fully integrated schools since kindergarten. I saw the historical and legal transgressions as something from the past and not relevant to the present. I couldn’t wrap my head around the struggle for civil rights or the rise of organizations like NAACP, AIM, NOMAS, and others. It annoyed and scared me when riots broke out in my home town and the courthouse was vandalized. But then again, I also didn’t have a clue that my town had red-lined neighborhoods with differing curfews depending on the color of your skin while I was growing up. I was unaware that Aaron had grandparents at his home who were born into sharecropper families and worked as small children. Wright’s parents were held in a Japanese internment camp. Jonita’s parents went to a mission school in Montana and Jonita was in town living away from her birth family as part of a different mission program. These stories were revealed as we went to school together. At school, I had the benefit to see myself reflected in the teaching staff and the reading material and come home at the end of the day. I bought into this system that said “anything is possible”. It wasn’t a question for me. However, many of my classmates didn’t have the same benefit.

This systematic alienation through US history was driven home saliently for me, as a young adult, when I attended the 90^th birthday party for Isabel, a tribal elder. As we talked I learned that she liked the shirt I was wearing, that she had grandchildren I worked with, that she was 14 when Chief Joseph died, and that she remembered him walking around Nespelem. That conversation turned out to be an all-out challenge to any residual thinking I may have had about history as something disconnected to the present. On that day, Safeway birthday cake on plastic plates collided with tule mat houses and tepees, the US Calvary, and Nez Perce people trying to make their way to Canada. My world was rocked in a way it hadn’t been before…and opened up.

How does that relate to education today? Many students that are in the education system now, go home to families who were educated in a way that sold them and/or their loved ones incredibly short, sometimes for generations. The legacy of pain and alienation is very present and real. We have an opportunity in this.

I don’t believe our school system will ever get rid of categorizing people by gender, race, age, free & reduced lunch, or special needs. It is how we try to measure where we are succeeding and where we aren’t. But, if we can shift the ‘us v them’ paradigm to simply ‘us’, we might be able to create a system that can increase our success rate for all. I am not advocating a melting pot ‘us’. I believe that model strips away uniqueness and demands conformity at a high price.

As a teacher, I need to be authentic about who I am and aware of my own blind spots that my experiences bring to working with a diverse community of students and families. I need to make sure my materials reflect the students who are in the class, as well as expose them to different cultures and new ways of thinking about the world around them. I can’t do this with ‘drive-by’ culture lessons of Native Americans solely in relationship to Thanksgiving, African Americans during Black History Month, Mexican Americans during the week of Cinco de Mayo, or ‘Christmas around The World’. These methods usually present culture and diversity as separate from the rest of the curriculum…which just changes the way alienation is packaged. I believe diversity needs to be interwoven throughout the curriculum, in the staff, and a natural part of the educational conversation whenever possible to best serve students. The process and conversations surrounding diversity won’t always be easy if they are approached with honesty, but they are potentially very fruitful.