From Education Week Teacher Blogs Classroom Q&A with Larry Ferlazzo
Teachin’ It!
Felicia Darling
Teachers College Press
1234 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027
www.tcpress.com
9780807761588, $32.95, PB, 208pp, www.amazon.com
Dr. Sawsan Jaber, Denise Fawcett Facey, and Felicia Darling “wrap up” this three-part Classroom Q&A series with their thoughts.
Racism is ubiquitous. It happens every day through small, almost invisible acts, in our classrooms, in our parent-teacher conferences, in our tenure-review meetings, and in our faculty meetings. Also, racism does not just happen. We do it. In any given day, white colleagues interrupt colleagues of color during meetings; leaders take up the ideas of faculty of color less frequently than those of white faculty sitting at the table; teachers have lower expectations for students of color; students disproportionally use words like “aggressive” more frequently on teacher evaluations of Black women; and Black students are suspended more frequently than white students for the exact same behaviors.
We are the agents of racism. Therefore, the responsibility for disrupting systems of inequity falls directly on our shoulders. When a colleague says or does something racist, we have to speak up. While the specific thing we say or do does matter, what is most important is that we say or do something. If we do nothing, we are complicit in the racist act.