Renowned antiracism scholar Dr. Ibram X. Kendi and NEA President Becky Pringle challenged MTA members to keep up the fight for racial and social justice during the recent Ethnic Minority Affairs Committee Conference.
The conference, whose theme was "Overcoming 400 Years of Struggle — and Still We Rise," featured uplifting presentations, a panel discussion and workshops to help meet educators’ need for self-discovery and empowerment.
It was held virtually over two weekends so the demand for workshops could be addressed. Offerings also included a morning session hosted by empowerment expert Maria Milagros, a panel Milagros moderated on ethnic minority leadership within the MTA, and entertainment by comedian and former Worcester educator Orlando Baxter.
The conference opened on Friday, Dec. 4, with EMAC members and MTA leaders greeting the audience in diverse languages. EMAC member Shauna Lee Manning, the Northeast director of the NEA American Indian/Alaskan Native Caucus, invited participants to learn more about ethnic minority activism in the NEA.
Workshops the following day and on Dec. 12 focused on helping educators fight back against systemic racism in the U.S., as well as on the challenges that educators face as they seek to push back.
"Two thousand twenty has been one hell of a year," said EMAC Chair Sharmese Gunn, addressing an audience of more than 500 people over Zoom. Gunn said the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic crisis and political turbulence made the year "twice as daunting" for people of color. She named the victims of high-profile racial killings — Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd — and noted the passing of Black heroes such as U.S. Representative John Lewis.
"Four hundred years of struggle — we have seen this before," Gunn said. But as an antidote to despair, she called for action. "We lead by example," she said. "Get involved — have your voice be heard."
Pringle quoted from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s final speech: "Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. And let us move on in these powerful days of challenge, to make America what it ought to be."
The speech resonates today, the NEA president said. "In a year when individual and collective crises rocked the nation, public school educators have been called to rise, even while we continue to do our most important work, holding open the doors of opportunity for every single one of our students," she said.
Educators "continued to stand in the gap for students when COVID-19 closed our schools," she said, and the pandemic forced America to see students "caught in the digital divide."
The pandemic has forced the nation to face the truth, Pringle continued. The nation "saw students and families who don’t have enough to eat" and families "living in marginalized communities for whom those inequities are a reality," she said. She urged fellow educators to keep up the fight and get others involved so that students "get what they need, when they need it."
MTA Vice President Max Page thanked Pringle and said the MTA "looks forward to years of battling right alongside you." He noted that the MTA had just celebrated its 175th anniversary. With 117,000 members working in Massachusetts public schools, colleges and universities, he added, the MTA "is a union of education workers committed to the proposition that we have an obligation and the capacity to build a more just Commonwealth."
Then Page introduced Kendi, whom he described as "one of the leading public intellectuals of our time."
Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a CBS News contributor, the 2020-2021 Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the author of several best-selling books, including How to Be an Antiracist. One of his earlier books, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, making him the award’s youngest winner ever.
In a wide-ranging conversation, MTA President Merrie Najimy and Kendi discussed the essential work of educators in creating antiracist curricula, safe spaces for all students, and antiracist unions.
Kendi’s central message in How to Be an Antiracist, Najimy noted, is that the opposite of being racist is not in simply being not racist, which allows people to hide behind neutrality, but rather to actively push back against racism, making someone antiracist. "We must become co-conspirators," she said.
"There is an all-out attack on public education right now," Kendi responded. "When someone does nothing, then the status quo persists."
He pointed out that "there was a time when slaveholders wanted people to do nothing — because to do nothing in the face of the status quo of inequality is to allow that status quo to persist."
Further, he said, we have to recognize that our society of racial inequities and disparities "is not because there is something wrong with Black or brown or Indigenous people. It’s because there is something wrong with policies and power."
Najimy said that to become antiracists, educators have to question "our pedagogy, our discipline, our practices that set up our students of color to feel alienated."
Kendi added that systemic racism is embedded in funding models for schools and campuses, as well as in standardized testing, reflecting the historical policies and practices of the "conjoined twins": racism and capitalism.
Standardized tests in the U.S. were created and popularized by eugenicists to "prove" that Black people, women, poor people, and other oppressed groups were of inferior intelligence, he explained.
"By the 1960s, eugenics had become politically and academically unsound," Kendi said, so the messaging had to switch. He said that the assertions of genetic inferiority were replaced by: "These kids are scoring at a lower level because they are coming from broken homes. They are taught in broken schools, with broken teachers, and they have broken parents." The fault, he stated, was still being placed on individuals.
"All the while," he continued, "what if the tests, created by the eugenicists, were the problem?"
Najimy noted that in Massachusetts, score disparities on tests are used to justify privatizing public resources. "Charterization, takeovers, MCAS," she said. But she told the audience that she often hears that high-stakes tests can’t be eliminated until there is a replacement. She went on to pose the question, "Should we just replace the MCAS with something else — or do something different?"
Kendi responded that standardized testing is based on something that has never been proven: the theory of general intelligence.
Intelligence can’t be measured the same way as a person’s weight, he said, adding, "What I’ve been arguing is that intelligence is as subjective as beauty."
As to the question of providing a replacement, Kendi offered up an alternative: "Instead of trying to test students based on how much they know, why can’t we test students based on how much they have a desire to know? That’s not bound by class, or race, or gender. In my college classroom, I want the kids who have the greatest desire to know."
Bringing back joy and hope is central to the fight for equity in public education, Kendi and Najimy agreed.
"I just believe — and know — that in order to bring about systemic change, we have to believe that the ‘impossible’ is possible," Kendi said. "And the ‘impossible’ has happened time and time again — particularly when people have organized together in this country."
For more information about the 2020 EMAC Conference, visit massteacher.org/emacprogram. To view videos, visit massteacher.org/tpl.
