I was fifteen years old when I came to the United States from Iran. My knowledge of Black people and their culture was limited to what I had seen on dubbed TV shows and athletes at Olympic games, i.e very incomplete, twisted and inaccurate. I had very little knowledge of the Civil Rights movements and its protagonists beyond what I had picked up from news stories. Somewhere along the line I had heard of the Black Panthers and how they were a militant resistance group in the 60s that wanted to overthrow the government. I am Iranian and grew up with stories of militant resistance groups trying to overthrow the monarchy, and they were never portrayed as anything positive. In my two semesters of American history in high school and another two in college, no more was added to my knowledge. In 1982 I married my husband who is white of European descent. One of the first stories I heard about his family was that his mother had been involved with the Black Panthers in San Francisco. Having met Dorothy I could easily see how she could be part of a militant resistance movement. I heard about how in 1968 she was teaching English at a high school in San Francisco, and with one of her Black colleagues had replaced whatever was in the textbooks with writing by Black authors, literature much more relevant to their students. She was reprimanded and transferred to another school, but her colleague Welvin Stroud was fired. Welvin, a member of the Black Panthers started his own community school, the Martin Luther King Day School and invited my husband who was ten at the time to attend. In my mind, Welvin was a teacher and a community worker and did the militant resistance on the side. I never connected his activism and community service to his membership in the Black Panther Party. It wasn’t until the summer of 2018 that I read a children’s novel by Rita Williams-Garica called One Crazy Summer that I learned the rest of the story of the Black Panthers. A couple of days ago, I confessed to Ben that all these years, living with him and his mother, I never questioned that first story! This is what happens when you live in a world that is built on otherness.
As teachers we hear all kinds of stories about our students. Some are told to us by the world we live in: poor children, children of color, children who speak a different language at home, children who don’t learn the same way we have learned to teach cannot be held to the same expectations. Other stories are child-specific, told by previous teachers or even parents: This one is going to be tough! Good luck with that one! My least favorite day of back to school inservice is when we get our class lists and well-meaning colleagues try to prepare us for what’s coming. Test scores, reading levels, shorthand comments by another teacher don’t tell the full story. Nothing can tell the whole story except a deep personal investment of time and listening to the child and their family.
It takes a lot to resist the power of these incomplete and sometimes untrue stories. It takes a strong belief that there is strength and gifts in every child. It takes humility to recognize that I don’t know how to teach every child, and my methods and strategies may not suit all of my children. It takes integrity to realize that equity and equality are not the same, that to love and treat all students the same may require doing vastly different things for each student. It takes determination to learn their stories and constant reflection to make sure it’s the whole story.
We teachers are on the front lines of the work to dismantle systems built on otherness. We hold a lot of power. Power to encourage, power to inspire, power to uncover the true stories.
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