Friday, March 4, 2016

Where are the POC? Celebrating Diversity on SOL


In my early years of teaching I used to attend what we dubbed "important library meetings" on Friday afternoons. The "meetings" took place at the local tavern. It was PD at its finest: drinks and appetizers, real talk about the issues that mattered to us rather than the waste-of-time agenda items of school-wide meetings, reflection, relaxation, revolution... in short, of the teachers, for the teachers, by the teachers. A few weeks into the meetings, I turned to my colleague and good friend Wil and said, "TWO."

"What, missus?" Wil replied, straining to hear me over the tavern music and chatter of teachers let out of school on a Friday afternoon with one or two beers inside them. (Wil called everyone "missus" or "mister," a relic of his childhood in Haiti.)

"The number of POC in this entire bar," I noted. We burst out laughing. Asian English teacher, Haitian math teacher. 

Thus began an unofficial game Wil and I played at the rest of our Friday gatherings. Two. On a rare day, THREE.

Although we taught at an urban public school with a diverse student body (33% Black, 5% Asian, 26% Hispanic/Latino, and 36% white), we could count teachers of color on one hand. We included ourselves in the count. 



On day 2 of my first ever Slice of Life challenge, my heart unexpectedly leaped a little when I happened upon a blog written by a POC fellow slicer. I immediately texted Kim and Natasha a POC #SOL alert: "I just clicked on a blog written by a POC and it's not one of us." 

Kim responded right away: "NO. Which one?"

During our prep period today, I shared with Natasha that I have found myself making an unofficial POC #SOL list. I do this at other places too. Each summer at the Shakespeare in the Park festival at the Boston Common, I find myself noticing when I see a POC. How is it possible that there are so few POC I can count them? Last summer I did this on the Cliff Walk in Newport, RI. The previous fall, I did it at the Marginal Way in Ogunquit, Maine. Where are the POC? 

If I, a middle-aged Asian woman who is not afraid to speak her mind, walk around with thoughts like these, what do our young people, who can go through their K-12 years with none to very little exposure to teachers who look like them, think and feel? 

EIGHT. (Number of blogs written by POC I've clicked on so far on SOL...)


14 comments:

  1. Thank you for today's blog. I did not have a teacher of color till I reached college. I used to say if I had died before college, I would never have had an "academic" teacher of color. I know we all have so many different teachers in our lives who have helped us gain the tools to understand our society or better yet this thing called life. Yes, the numbers of us are low. Yes, there is an urgent need for an increase.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The comment you shared with me in person made me laugh so hard. You know, the one about the time you toured a college campus with D. and doubled the population of the POC that day. :)

      Delete
  2. As I was reading your post, 2 thoughts kept cycling through my mind: (1) It's refreshing to hear you and others at school speak openly and frankly about the issue of diversity; (2) How many of our fellow colleagues in the teaching realm are POC and male?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Jason, in our school there are currently no male POC teachers in a core subject area. Shameful!

      Delete
  3. Over the past few years I have become more and more aware of how NOT diverse the town where I live and teach is. Our staff, like our student population is overwhelmingly white. The staff is also overwhelmingly female. I think more and more how limiting this is for all of our students, and truly for us as adults as well. The only way to truly understand the world is to MEET the world; people of all kinds of ethnicities, cultural traditions, and backgrounds. We need to hear each other's stories and see each other as people and realize that different is GOOD, not scary. And that in the end, where it really counts, we are all human.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Mindi, I so agree that learning about the richness of many cultures and traditions is worthwhile for EVERYONE. I wonder if there is a way you and other like-minded teachers can shake things up a bit so that your students can think about the world beyond the one they are most familiar with.

      Delete
  4. I wish someone would make this post the center of one of our PDs.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ariel, I thought the SAME thing about your entry!

      Delete
    2. I wish there was a like button for these comments!

      Delete
  5. As the Anglo mom of two African American males, I am keenly aware of how few male POC AND professional men my sons have encountered. It breaks my heart. Thanks for bringing up this important issue!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Carol, keep bringing your concerns to the attention to anyone who will listen: school committee, administrators, teachers, PTA, community advocates.

      Delete
    2. Yes, Carol, be the squeaky wheel to get your sons what they need. In solidarity.

      Delete
  6. I read some article recently about stepping outside of the white gaze. By that, the author stressed doing the things that we love without worry or fear about what people will think. I find that refreshing but amazingly difficult to attempt. I tried it today when I took E to the Children's Museum. Eventually, I was able to believe that we were just a mom and a toddler at play. Nothing more. Nothing less, and we had as much right to be there as anyone else. Felt kind of awesome. But, still, we were one of only three other Black families.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That is powerful. Museums and other venues need to do more to reach out to populations they don't see as frequently as their mainstream audience.

      Delete

I'd love to hear from you! Please leave a comment below.