Backpack of Whiteness: Releasing the Weight to Free Myself and My Students

Internalized Racism

When I first read an article by Bivens (2005)—What Is Internalized Racism?—I felt my grandmother saying to me, as she often used to say, “Shashray you are on the right track.” Just as when my grandmother spoke to me, I grabbed hold to Biven’s affirming words that explained my own experiences internalizing “standards for what is appropriate or ‘normal’ . . . white people’s standards: Eurocentric at best, U.S. popular consumer culture at worst” (p. 43). Bivens (1995) defined internalized racism as follows:

The situation that occurs in a racist system when a racial group oppressed by racism supports the supremacy and dominance of the dominating group by maintaining or participating in the set of attitudes, behaviors, social structures and ideologies that undergird the dominating group’s power. (p. 2)

Bivens went on to emphasize that internalized racism is not victim blaming but the result of intentionally created structures and systems that

misname the problem of racism as a problem of or caused by people of color and blames the disease—emotional, economic, political, etc.—on people of color. With

internalized racism, people of color might, for example, believe we are more violent than white people and not consider state-sanctioned political violence or the hidden or privatized violence of white people and the systems they put in place and support. (p. 2)

Those in the field of psychology argue that internalized racism is learned by People of Color because inferiorizing messages are sent through every aspect of our society (David, 2013). Internalized racism is so damaging to people and society because it manifests in ways that are not always in your face, but embedded in what passes for normality. Young Children of Color are victims of it as well; for example, Baines et al. (2018) wrote about African American second graders consistently deferring to the only white student in their second grade class as the child who would know the answers to math problems. Delpit (2012) also wrote about children internalizing racism as she described the young African American student who insisted that multiplication is for white people. Thus, internalized racism is often times the silent killer because there are no obvious symptoms of it until it progresses to an advanced stage requiring tremendous emotional labor before it is brought to light and overcome (Pyke, 2010).

Women of Color: Invisibility and Silence

My experiences of invisibility are not anomalies in the field of education or in society in general. They are reflective of a racist society in which many Women of Color describe the degradation they experience. For example, the 2006 report from the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession (2006) focused specifically on the invisibility of Women Attorneys of Color in “a jarring wake-up call” (p. 7) that highlighted issues such as disproportionate salaries, being stuck in dead-end assignments, lack of racially aware mentorship, and the stress of being treated like second class citizens. Black teachers’ classrooms are stacked with students with “behavior problems” without any support from administration because we can “handle it.” The same issues of invisibility are heard across a range of professions: film-making (W. A. Smith, 2010), medicine (Swift, 2017), business, (A. N. Smith et al., 2018), and education (Dyce & Williams, 2015) to name a few. This invisibility is not merely the low percentage of Women of Color in these professions but invisibility borne of disrespect and micro- and macro-aggressions inflicted on the job and in society. Wilson (2012) specifies a few of many actions that communicate disrespect to include the following:

Critical race scholar, Patricia Williams (1992) captured the pain felt through this invisibility when she wrote as follows:

There are moments in my life when I feel as though a part of me is missing. There are days when I feel so invisible that I can’t remember my name, when I feel so lost and angry that I can’t speak a civil word to the people who love me best. Those are the times when I catch sight of my reflection in the store windows and am surprised to see a whole person looking back. (p. 228)

Strong Black Women Standing for Change: “We are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting For”

Bivens (2005) wrote about divesting ourselves from internalized racism and the invisibility imposed on us in an effort to enlist the allyship of white colleagues, though “practically speaking, people of color cannot force white people to notice, acknowledge or dismantle racism and the white privilege that results from it” (p. 44). However, we can draw hope and courage from Black women activists who came before us and who surround us now. Their work provides models as we learn to stand up for ourselves. June Jordan’s (2007) poem to South African women rings true across the world as we recognize that, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Alice Walker (1983) who helped us think about the term “womanism” to give visibility to “the experience of black women and other women of color who have always been at the forefront of the feminist movement yet marginalized and rendered invisible in historical texts and the media.” She made visible what feminism did not—our Blackness—reflecting the typical invisibility of the experiences of Black women in media, texts, and society as well as in sociopolitical movements. Although there are multiple articles debating the differences between Womanism and Black Feminism (Collins, 1996), both movements address the fact that feminism was and is largely a movement for and by middle class white women without attention to the oppression of Black women or the racism (Hayat, 2014). As a result, many Black women recognize that they cannot rely on solidarity with whiteness and must stand themselves if change is to occur. The concepts underlying Womanism and Black Feminism were pioneered by strong Black women throughout history including activists of the last 50 years (to name a few) such as Nora Zeale Hurston, Margaret Sloan-Hunter, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Ruby Dee, Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Lorraine Hansberry.

Strong Black women have always courageously entered dangerous spaces to stand for change and act as elders. In the education of Black youth, for example, some of our important elders dealt with white supremacy head on like Septima Clark, calling out the inequalities of pay between white teachers and Black teachers prompting her to work for civil rights, and Mary McCleod Bethune, best known for starting a private school for African American students in Daytona Beach, Florida, and co-founding United Negro College Fund (UNCF): also, elders such as Claudette Colvin, Dinah Nash, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Height, Ella Baker, and Nina Simone—and numerous women today including Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi, founders of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement. In addition, the work of contemporary educators such as Lisa Delpit, Beverly Tatum, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Joyce King have had a particular impact on me and other Black educators who have been able to reclaim ourselves and our heritage by standing with them. Black women continue to be catalysts in overturning inequities in education, economics, history, race, culture, gender and politics, reminding us that we will be seen and we will be heard. Ella Baker’s (1969) words spoken over 50 years ago ring true today: “The system under which we now exist has to be radically changed . . . [which] means facing a system that does not lend itself to [our] needs and devising means by which [we] change that system” (n.p.).

Partnerships as Eldering

Finally, my work draws heavily on King and Swartz (2016) and their discussion of the African culturally informed principle of inclusion which looks at previously marginalized Peoples as “substantive participants, not as objects or token figures” (p. 31) and eldering as one way that learners can experience inclusion as an emancipatory pedagogy. Eldering requires a view of learning/teaching partnerships as those in which knowledge, power, and authority are a shared, basic expectation of PDCRT dyads. Thus, inspired by King and Swartz, I draw on the principle of inclusion in this article, with a particular focus on “eldering.” This allows me to name what I experienced—that partnerships are those in which a person’s place or presence is “not an attempt to have power over [the other] but to share the power of knowledge with them” (p. 33) and that “gaining knowledge is a communal experience—an outcome of mutual exchanges that assume [that every learner] . . . can contribute to everyone’s learning” (p. 37). Embracing an inclusion/eldering stance that drew on my experiences as a Black Woman and Educator, I was able to shed boulders and, in the process, to see eldering qualities in my own interactions.

Boulders of My Own Schooling

As a child, I raised my hand and white kids were called on. I was ignored, when they were praised, I was invisible. Looking back, I know I was smart, I was gifted, but that was rarely acknowledged by my teachers. In school, I learned that the era of Christopher Columbus was the age of exploration instead of learning that it was actually the age of domination, enslavement, genocide, and take over (Baines et al., 2018; McCormack, 2018). Why wasn’t I being told/taught the truth? Why wasn’t I taught to question the histories I was told? My teachers had the responsibility, just like educators today, to teach truths beyond those created by oppressors. But they did not. Their own schooling simply taught them to perpetuate what they learned, the same colonized, sanitized, Eurocratic versions of history (Baines et al., 2018; Battiste, 2013). As a result, my school experiences taught me to believe that I did not fit and that the white people in my life knew more, brought more to the table, and deserved more. Schooling taught me that my being, my narratives, and narratives of those who looked like me played no roles (or played token roles) in the development of knowledge that guides our world.

I remember that I was never exposed to a book that mirrored my lived realities (Bishop, 1990). The memory of that boulder—being invisible—remains strong and shows how enduring boulders can be. Back then, I was mortified to be absent from the texts that I read, but now I recognize it as a racist reality—an intentional omission guided by Eurocratic practices (King & Swartz, 2018) handed down from the time of colonization. In fact, nothing in my schooling existed as a mirror for me until fifth grade when I had my first Black teacher, Mrs. Smith, someone I saw every day and who helped me identify my place in the world and gave me a sense of belonging, of mattering. Mrs. Smith was like a mother to me. She taught me, loved me, scolded me but, most important, she looked like me, knew I was smart, and made that clear to me and to my classmates. I was not invisible in Mrs. Smith’s class.

In middle school, I was chosen to attend a prestigious school that everyone tried to get into because of its academic rigor, innovation, and its teacher–student relationship (all adults were on a first-name basis) in a friendly, collaborative light. Theoretically, the first-name basis was to build closer relationships between teachers and students based on mutual trust and respect for student voice rather than on assigned authority. However, the attempt to create space for student voice was still on white terms and focused on white student voice. There were no mirrors for Students of Color in this school, only windows through which we were expected to look out and assimilate to whiteness. The school was typical of liberal institutions that profess progressivism but do not interrogate the Eurocratic nature of curricula, policies, and practices (Kohli & Pizarro, 2017). For example, the school stood on the belief that students cannot truly learn about themselves unless they learn about others, but that rarely meant learning about Black histories beyond enslavement and the Civil Rights movement. We did not learn about African contributions to the world’s knowledge long before Europeans claimed that knowledge as their own (Kendi, 2016). We did not learn to interrogate society’s practices as racialized. I respected learning about someone else’s experience, but what about my community, my heritage? And what about the white students who also learned nothing about Black genius (Boutte et al., 2017)?

I continued into high school at the same school and in survival mode. My high school experience makes me think of Beverly Tatum’s (1999) iconic book, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? This book pretty much sums up my experience. There were a small number of Black students in our high school, and we were stereotyped. People assumed I was from a majority Black area of the city, from a single parent household, and that I struggled academically. People’s assumptions about me were based on false information and stereotypes. This added to the erosion of my confidence and communicated that my experiences were less valid than those of my white peers. My high school counselor at the time said to me “Your GPA is a great way to determine how well you will do in college, I suggest that you look at other options besides college.” Graduating from high school my GPA was a 2.8. My GPA my first semester of college was 3.5.

The Boulders of University-School Hierarchies

I entered the teaching profession thinking that these negative experiences—the boulders of my schooling—were behind me and had been released, let go. However, I did not recognize the impact they had on my own confidence and ability to stand up for myself when confronted with white dominance (overt and covert) in my professional life. One way this came to light was in my experiences with universities. Too often, relationships with predominantly white institutions are some of the heaviest boulders that weigh down Black teachers’ backpacks. Like McIntosh (1988) who wrote that her schooling gave her “no training in seeing myself as an oppressor” (p. 2), we have all been raised to see universities as places where brilliance and intellect dwell. We are not often raised to question knowledge, attitudes, and expectations from professors. These power dynamics often cause Black school-based educators to shy away from university partnerships. They have been burned in the past by researchers who cannot see the white-embedded beliefs that guide their actions, exhibiting characteristics of entitlement, for example, expecting that Black children and families are theirs to be “studied.”

I slowly came to the realization that I was succumbing to university-school, white-Black hierarchies because of widely communicated messages that university professors know more than classroom teachers, particularly when the teachers are African American. I also found that white professors often expected me to be representative of all Black people when they tentatively brought up race in their classes. Professors would speak on Black issues and turn to me to back up their thoughts. Whether I agreed with them or not, it really did not matter. What they thought was presented as carved in stone, and I let it stand because of my well-taught and internalized perceptions of whiteness and universities as right.

I had, however, an awakening that opened me to the pervasiveness. It happened when a white professor began coming into my classroom as a part of what was supposed to be a collaborative research model. Instead of partnering as an observer, she observed my students and took field notes without sharing them with me. I was left wondering what she observed (and concluded) about me and my students. We were supposed to work together to bring to the fore culturally relevant teaching aspects that were committed to privileging Students and Teachers of color. She took pictures of my students engaging in conversations that connected to their communities and everyday lives: pictures of students that trusted me to cultivate a positive mind-set of trust, love, and a safe space for learning. Instead of dialogue about cultural awareness or understanding about was happening in my class, there were more notes taken. I was even asked if she could use an image in a book she was writing. Did she use her field notes in her work too? At the time I thought it odd but I didn’t say anything. In retrospect, I came to understand her ongoing practice of taking from me and my students, of representing us through white lenses—a Black teacher and Black children—reflected both common practice for white academics and the power and centeredness of whiteness. Once I recognized how uncomfortable I felt I asked for the notes, to which I only received some.

The reality is that such interactions and the patronizing, condescending comments that usually accompany them from white educational “authorities” are aggressions (macro- and micro-) that add to our learned feelings of being policed, inadequate, less capable, less intelligent, and just wrong. Convinced once again that I lacked worth, the boulders of internalized racism and self-doubt weighed heavily. Eurocentricity and internalized racism prevailed; the Afrocentric principles of eldering and communal learning which require shared power, shared knowledge, and shared authority were absent and I blamed myself. After all, she was the university professor—and white—and she must know better than I. Internalized racism was rising to the surface again.

Gradually and painfully, I began to recognize that I had learned to doubt myself from my childhood schooling and a society that degraded and devalued Black bodies and Black brilliance. I began to see, feel, and name the realities that hooks (1992) writes about: Although we are devastated when we are viewed as Others, ignored, and made invisible, we are also enticed by whiteness because it masquerades as a hand of the promise, attention, and reconciliation. I knew I had to do something. How could I teach my students about racialized histories and the brilliance of Blackness when I seemed to always have to justify my own being?

Colleagues of Color

I will never forget that day I began to awaken to my own internalized racism. On that day, I saw my Blackness as “the seasoning that was needed to livin’ up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (hooks, 1992, p. 366). I finally acknowledged to myself and others that I felt exploited and I needed to say something about it so that I would no longer assign unearned authority to whiteness. This is where my partnerships with PDCRT Colleagues of Color held me up and pushed me forward. Members of my PDCRT cohort met to share the progress of our work as we gathered from across the country. I sat there wanting to center my Blackness in all its beauty and brilliance, wanting to share the feelings of exploitation. But I was fearful. Would I be able to explain my feelings? Even now it’s daunting, a shadow that follows me. If I call out whiteness in this essay, what will happen to me? How will I be challenged? Will white educators take it reflectively or get angry and shut down? Or will they ask themselves why I had shut down? Speaking to people who might be afraid of what Black freedom would look like is a kind of trauma. But I soon found that I was in the company of true elders, colleagues who were committed to and respected that we were sharing power and knowledge, I told the story of my lost self, of the internalized racism and academic elitism I had bought into so destructively.

Oh how emotional the freedom was when I shared the truth. At that moment, I realized that I had been a victim of systems of silencing for a very long time. All of the exhaustion from the emotional labor that Black women constantly carry and endure came to the forefront. I was tired of expressing that I was affected and hurt and being punished for it while those who abuse, misuse, and mistreat are enabled to do so by systems that support white dominance. It was painful to realize that I had been deferring to boulders of whiteness from childhood and that, as a teacher with a graduate degree, I still succumbed to it. And I was silencing myself to shut out the pain, experiencing what W. A. Smith (2010) called the “taxing impact of racism” (Pizarro & Kohli, 2018, p. 3) carried with us wherever we go fostering doubt and producing anxiety as we struggle “for racial justice in highly racialized contexts” (p. 18).

That day, I created space for emancipation as I was honest with my PDCRT Colleagues of Color who understood every emotion, pain, and reality I was feeling. It was their support and reaffirmation of our commitment to each other, our students, and OUR BRILLIANCE, that gave me courage to name the largest boulder in my backpack as the supremacy of whiteness. I heard my colleagues empathizing with the torture I felt trying to reject the dominance of whiteness while vestiges of it kept pushing to the surface. Once I knew they understood that agony and the emotional labor required working within and beyond whiteness, I was able to move forward with greater freedom as a teacher, better able to partner with other educators in the work toward racial freedom.

Dismantling the Boulders of Whiteness in My Teaching: School-Based Relationships/Partners

Dismantling boulders of whiteness by recognizing internalized racism at work in my life allowed me to further dismantle those boulders with students and colleagues in educational settings. I was learning not to settle for the pain that comes with realizations of white dominance, but to use it to fight back and as a tool for sculpting a masterpiece from the boulders of oppression. In my case, that masterpiece began with co-creating eldering relationships with my administrators and my students. In this section, I share ways that those eldering relationships supported me as a Black teacher in centering Blackness in my kindergarten and related arts classrooms.

Centering Blackness in Kindergarten

I thought about Mamie and Kenneth Clark’s (1940) Doll Test Study in which young Black and white children, asked to choose the pretty doll, the good doll from Black and white dolls, consistently chose the white doll. Reflecting on my own experiences in school and seeing our youngest scholars not embracing the beauty of their skin or recognizing their intelligence broke my heart. I wanted my students—my classroom partners—to gain a positive consciousness of self by sharing knowledge and power about the genius and beauty of Blackness. The sad reality is that, even 60 years after the Clark’s first study, findings remain consistent as we see that racism and stereotypes remain prevalent (Akwei, 2018; Cooper, 2010; Davis, 2007; Planas, 2011). The world over Black children is trapped by others’ negative perceptions of them communicated from the time of European colonization.

In my classroom, I vowed to counter those messages and bring Eurocentricism to light so my students could recognize and push back against it. I wanted them to feel the power of emancipation that comes with standing up for what is right, the same empowerment I felt when sharing with my PDCRT colleagues. I would not teach African American history beginning with slavery, nor only in February, it was embedded in my curriculum every day. I would not allow my knowledge and heritage to lay dormant; it would be alive and normalized for my students. With these convictions, my personal movement toward change, unencumbered by boulders of self-doubt, began in my kindergarten classroom.

My kindergarten curriculum during participation in PDCRT was filled with Africa and African American histories and contemporary events. The students and I gained knowledge through our “communal experience” (King & Swartz, 2016, p. 37) as they continued to teach me that “even the youngest learners are knowers who can contribute to everyone’s learning” (p. 37). Together, we “re-membered” (King & Swartz, 2014) African governmental structures from which other governments were designed. I taught the song “Lift Every Voice” (Johnson & Johnson, 1920), and we talked about why it was written and how it became the national anthem for Black people. We expanded on the work of African American artists such as sculptor Woodrow Nash and painter Kehinde Wiley. We traced the history of the different genres of African and African Diaspora music and how they have influenced the world politically and socially. Students learned of African explorers who reached faraway lands much earlier than European explorers. We learned about precursors to dance of today in the great Black dancers such as Bill Robinson as well as the humiliations he endured. My test for myself was unapologetically and steadfastly reimagining and reclaiming self and beauty in Blackness. This mattered for my white students as much as for my Black students who would learn to see the beauty and accomplishment of Blackness as well as the pain and brutality inflicted on it.

In addition to my partnerships with children, other eldering partnerships played a key role in making this work possible. For example, my principal and I often engaged in conversations about the importance of incorporating Black history as foundational to the curriculum. I was given enthusiastic support to do whatever was needed to be successful. My confidence was further buoyed through relationships with my PDCRT family all over the country. I looked forward to our monthly virtual meetings because they kept me pressing forward. As supportive partners do, they applauded my work and challenged me to continue to grow. Our book talks and reports of what was happening in our classrooms let me know, “Shashray, you are on the right track.”

Centering Blackness as a Related Art

The end of the kindergarten year brought meetings with my principal to discuss faculty placements for the upcoming year. Our conversation reveals a partnership anchored in mutual respect and shared power. “So, Mrs. McCormack what would you like to teach next school year?” she asked. That was music to my ears. I remembered conversations with her a few months earlier as I shared how much I wished our school-wide curriculum would include more Black history. In our conference, I reiterated that wish. Because of the work I had been doing in my kindergarten classroom, my principal had observed me in my element. She communicated this to our district’s Diversity, Equity, Poverty (DEP) department and, as a result, I initiated the first ever position as a Teacher of African American History as a Related Art in kindergarten through Grade 5. DEP was so impressed with what was going to happen in my classroom, I was given a grant to purchase books for my classes. Ultimately, close to 400 students had the opportunity to take my class over the next school year. Students studied with me for 45 min a day for 6-week periods. Students and their families were affected in ways that affirmed us all. We could not have imagined how lives would be changed by this virtually unheard of opportunity. It was indeed a year of, as Shonda Rhimes (2015) put it, saying “Yes!” with exciting results. In the sections that follow, I share a few of the units of study that I developed and taught for this program supported by my partnerships—eldering relationships—with the children, my administrator, and PDCRT colleagues.

Doll test

I wanted to be sure the children understood how easily racism is internalized so I showed them videos of the Clark’s Black doll, white doll experiment. The shock on my students’ faces was clear when they watched both Black and white children choose the white doll as the smartest, most beautiful, and the one they wanted to play with. I asked the students to write their thoughts about why the children in the video reacted as they did. One response in particular pointed toward the sophistication of young children in understanding issues of power and racism. He wrote,

Why do the Black person like the White [doll better]? . . . I think . . . the black people think the white people got more money and they got more power so the black people says the white doll is good enough to beat them.

Grandpa, Is Everything Black Bad? After discussing the doll experiment, I worked to counter messages of negativity about Blackness. I started by reading the book Grandpa is Everything Black Bad? (Holman, 1998). Prior to reading it, I asked the students to list what came to mind when they thought of the word “black.” It saddened me that students listed just about everything negative: Black is bad, ugly, dirty, dark. Listed with those negative connotations, they also listed the names of Black people, including themselves. The pain of hearing students say that their very being was negative, fueled my teaching even more. I refused to allow my students to believe that their existence was negative or a “problem.” Using my teaching fuel—Grandpa, Is Everything Black Bad?—and music, we talked about how Black is beautiful and the children wrote their thoughts which I recorded on the whiteboard (Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Students’ responses after discussion following our reading of Grandpa, Is Everything Black Bad?

Black is gold : “Black is Beautiful.”

Music was a mirror and window that I continued to use to engage and connect learning opportunities to Black history, community, students’ lives and current events. I developed a 6-week-long unit on Building Black History Knowledge Through Music and Shaping a Political Consciousness: How banning the Djembe gave birth to American Music. I decided to use music as foundational to this unit because I see music as communal. I see it as instrumental in our efforts to build a better life in our communities. It feeds into our emotional lives and has a history that shapes justice movements and solidarity. In spite of these powerful contributions of music, however, children do not always recognize its role in shaping political consciousness. I wanted them to know that the music they listen to is more than just music.

We started our unit with an understanding that African American history began with the brilliance and gifts of African people, that African history is essential to understanding American history. Students were taught that their stories and the history of education is influenced in many ways by African culture. We connected this to the importance of music in their lives but also to a history of music in Africa. They also learned that music was a way that African people who spoke many languages communicated when they were enslaved together far from home. I introduced the djembe drum as a way that African people who had been enslaved would communicate and often plan their escape. The students learned that when colonizers recognized what was happening, they banned the djembe drum and drumming. We then explored how pattin juba took the place of drums: hums, field hollers, work songs that portrayed the unbearable conditions enslaved Africans had to endure, ultimately becoming a part of spirituals still sung today.

These conversations about music led to discussions about the activism of Nat Turner and John Brown, minstrel shows, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment, Reconstruction, Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow, and Black Codes. Our music talk included conversations about the Blues, the Great Migration, Jazz and the Harlem Renaissance and ultimately to how these genres of music and sociopolitical issues gave birth to Hip Hop and its influence on the #BlackLivesMatter Movement. We created timelines (Figure 2) so students could identify important aspects of the music as related to historic sociopolitical events.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Classroom timeline of the history of music through a sociopolitical lens.

Teaching an African Worldview

Perhaps the most powerful element of my teaching, freed from my previous dependence on whiteness as the root of all knowledge, is my explicit exploration of African worldviews with elementary school students. I drew from King and Swartz’s (2016) emphasis on the communal nature of teaching and African worldview to help my students understand that “the good of all determines the good of each [and that when we] seek the good of the community, we also seek our own good” (Gyekye, 1987, p. 20). Figure 3 depicts elements of an African worldview that my students and I explored as they came to understand Afrocentric ways of thinking that represent a worldview that predates the Eurocratic center governing every institution in which we live and play.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Teaching an African worldview.

Again, partnerships with my administrator, PDCRT Colleagues of Color, and students—defined by shared knowledge and authority—kept the fires burning through this opportunity to teach African American history as foundational to every child’s knowledge base. The enthusiasm voiced by families who learned with their children, and accolades from the district and my principal, all worked together to let me know that I was supported as I stood for change.