We’ve adopted a resolution that matters.

The North Shore NAACP Branch, like so many regional school committees across the State, has formally adopted the anti-racism resolution that was adopted by the Massachusetts School Committee Association in July 2020. The resolution calls on school districts to offer professional development on diversity, equity and inclusion for its staff; hire a diverse teaching staff; and for curriculum to include the history of racial oppression and works from diverse perspectives. It was crafted by Massachusetts Association of School Committee member Denise Hurst and Ludlow School Committee member Jacob Oliveira

In the wake of the death of George Floyd, community sentiment in many jurisdictions called for tangible steps to ensure that issues of racial profiling and racial injustice were dismantled.

One of the ways in which bias operates in education is that it can make the struggles and realities of some groups less visible, or educators/textbooks publishers/material producers can choose to highlight only very simplified versions of historical facts.  For examples teaching African American history beginning with slavery and ending with a Civil Rights era focus about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. without providing a greater understanding of the deep economic and historical factors that shaped racism as we currently know it in the United States.

It is necessary to consider that there are age-appropriate ways that we can help children understand the struggle for civil rights and equal access that has been the keystone of the Black experience in many parts of the world, but also focusing on how this works in our local context in our country.

The system of racial oppression and hierarchy has a very deep, complex and far ranging of roots and impacts. It is so complex that we have created entire disciplines to help to unpack how far reaching it is and many of us owe a debt of gratitude to those scholars who have been trying to help us to understand how deeply entrenched it reaches are, including most recently looking at the works of Isabell Wilkinson in Caste and Ibram X Kendi’s How To Be an Anti-racist and Stamped From The Beginning.

Especially for young children, the ways educators share accurate historical depictions needs to be simplified, but not so much so that it becomes inaccurate, whitewashed or misleading. The existing lack of appreciation for being culturally responsive in the ways we approach educational equity needs to be addressed.

By adopting the Anti-Racism Resolution, school districts are pledging to be culturally responsive in the ways that they provide equitable educational opportunity while also being sensitive to the way the curricula incorporate racial oppression discussions by Black authors and from different perspectives to give them more accurate accounting of history. As children become old enough to have an understanding and appreciation for these levels of complexity, the approach varies. For younger children it can mean teaching history in a way that celebrates the contributions of people of African descent without only focusing on slave narratives for example- but instead, helping them to appreciate that all people including people of African descent have contributed in meaningful and tangible ways to the great discoveries, innovation and wealth around us. 

Many of our local heroes in the North Shore and families who owned estates and properties benefited from the free labor of African descendants as well and therefore their wealth was derived from the labor of enslaved people who have long remain unnamed and unacknowledged for contributing to their gains. This is slowly being corrected in some of our North Shore communities and for that we are deeply grateful and humbled to watch it unfold. 

Finally, there has been some fear that this is an attempt to revise history or to create a new kind of hierarchy where we are privileging the realities and histories of people of color and particularly those of African descent. It is important to know that rather than thinking about hierarchy, it is more accurate to acknowledge that we have silenced and ignored contributions of people of color, indigenous peoples and those of African descent because they were not centered in terms of the curriculum and what we now want to center is a more holistic truth-telling of our histories and realities. No specific group of people elevate over others, but favoring accuracy, truth as the science, documentation and data confirms, reconciliation and understanding that we have long overlooked those who did not have the power to insist that their story be made part of the whole fabric of education. 

In my work at the Aspire Institute at Boston University, we often are fortunate to work with school leaders and teachers who are actively trying to do this work in a way that is thoughtful, which includes educating themselves on how best to approach working with children of diverse backgrounds in a way that is loving and equitable. Even in communities with low levels of racial diversity, educators are taking on the important work of ensuring that a fuller, more holistic picture of how our society has been formed, along with its common challenges and opportunities, is recognized and understood by our future leaders -our children. I believe we are capable of this.  We can do so while uplifting all people and in acknowledging our common human dignity to be recognized, included, and welcomed, no matter our ethnic and cultural lineages. I believe we are capable of being deeply humane and transformative, while being the voice of the voiceless who seek a more accurate portrayal and inclusion in our social history and curricula.

-Written by Dr. Kenann McKenzie, an Education Advocate, Consultant and Professional. She is the Vice President and Education Chair of the North Shore NAACP Branch; she is an incumbent Ward 2 School Committee Member in Beverly currently running for her second term; Producer of the Podcast “The Aspiring Spirit”; and she is the Director of the Aspire Institute at Boston University, its primary goal is to support the Pre K-12 educational sector with professional development and technical assistance based in a social justice, community-engaged framework.