2021 MD Family Engagement Summit: Keynote

Dorothy Stoltz:

On behalf of the Maryland State Department of Education, Division of Early Childhood and the Maryland Family Engagement Coalition, welcome to the 2021 Maryland Family Engagement Summit. Next slide. I’m Dorothy Stoltz, Director for Community Engagement, Carroll County Public Library. I’m co-chair of the Maryland Family Engagement Coalition. Our other co-chair, the wonderful Keri Hyde, who many of you know, Executive Director of Ready At Five, is unable to be here for the kickoff but she hopes to join us later. I’d like to thank our others per partner, the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium or MAEC, who is helping with tech support today. I thank you, Nikevia Thomas, Mariela Puentes and Kate Farbry. Next slide. Today’s theme is Building Back Together: Re-imagining Family Engagement. In 2016, the summit started as a one-time event with funding from the W.K Kellogg Foundation. Due to popular demand, we extended the event for what we thought would be one more year, but each year interest has soared.

Dorothy Stoltz:

For example, in 2018, summit registration closed within 20 minutes. Now, we’re excited to be offering what has become an annual event. This is our sixth annual summit, and today we have almost 1000 educators and families registered. Next slide. For closed caption, please click on the CC button on the top of your screen. American Sign Language interpreters are available. Please use the Q&A to ask your questions, but for comments, please use the chat box. Next slide. Today’s agenda will include very special welcoming remarks, which we’ll get to in a moment, then our exciting speaker, Dr. Graves, and we’ll finish this morning with a Q&A and a wrap up. This year, family engagement is more important than ever as we learn about community, how mental health and keeping up when spirits. I think we are learning how to give help wherever it is needed, how to nurture understanding in ourselves and others, and expand our confidence no matter what the events of life. Next slide.

Dorothy Stoltz:

Now, finally, it is an honor to introduce Maryland’s new State Superintendent of Schools, Mr. Mohammed Choudhury. With just over 30 days on the job and a lot of important work to do, Mr. Choudhury has joined us today because he also recognizes the importance of family engagement to children’s kindergarten readiness and how it contributes to a successful educational journey right through high school. Let’s please welcome Mr. Choudhury.

Mohammed Choudhury:

All right. Everyone can hear me fine? Great. Thank you, Dorothy. Really happy to be here. I know you guys have been this… When I discovered that there was an organization dedicated to making a family and community engagement a just embedded normal active part of the work we do, especially in our early ed space, I was very excited. Family engagement is not a add on, it is crucial, especially families who have been historically left out at the table. It’s absolutely crucial that we constantly come back to this and empower families to be able to partner with us, to be able to accelerate student achievement each and every day. My name is Mohammed Choudhury. I’m the new State Superintendent of Schools. I’m really excited to be here. As a teacher and an administrator, I learned that student achievement depends heavily on strong and authentic partnerships with parents and guardians of the students we serve.

Mohammed Choudhury:

One of my favorite things was the parent-teacher academic partnership model, being able to open up our classrooms and create spaces in which families can come in and share in the learning and giving them the resources to continue that at home. That is one of the things that I always look back to in terms of how family engagement should truly be done. It’s because of your dedication to improving the skills and knowledge of vulnerable children, and improving outcomes for all children. That’s what’s going to get it done at the end of the day. You guys are on the ground. You guys are doing the work every day and it’s our job to lift any barrier from MSDE to be able to do this work. I have dedicated my entire career to achieving more equitable education opportunities for children.

Mohammed Choudhury:

Education truly changed my life. MSDE and the division of early childhood are committed to building a more equitable system. This is a long journey, but we have moved forward in many regards. I’m proud to have learned recently that the Division of Early Childhood work with the Mid-Atlantic Equity Consortium to launch a training of the trainer equity model and all staff at the division were trained and then, last week, we also committed to rolling out this training as well beyond our staff to school sites across the state of Maryland. We are very excited to launch this initiative. We continue to support the education community. Our goal with the 2021 Maryland Education Family Engagement Summit is to help you recognize and meet the needs of all students. On behalf of MSDE and the Division of Early Childhood, thank you for helping to promote positive outcomes for all children and students.

Mohammed Choudhury:

Positive parent child relationships and the benefits of family engagement is everything. Absolutely. As someone who has only worked in high poverty school system, I came from a 90% Title I school system in the San Antonio Independent School District. We often say, “Well, one of my least favorite things in education is that, well, children are not learning because families are not engaged.” Actually, children are not learning because one, the system is not designed to ensure that they are learning and, two, the system is not designed to ensure every family has an entry point to the educational system and experiences of our child. We often have designed a system that tends to rely on people’s social capital to be able to engage, and that’s not okay, and we should do everything we can to be able to completely re-conceptualize what family engagement empowerment looks like.

Mohammed Choudhury:

It’s my privilege to introduce our keynote for today, Dr. Daren Graves, Dr. Graves is an Associate Professor of Education and Social work at Simmons University and Adjunct Lecturer of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. We are honored to have them today with us. Please help me welcome Dr. Graves and enjoy the summer, and thank you for having me and being able to speak and make some brief remarks today.

Daren Graves:

Thank you so much, Superintendent Choudhury. I should just let you give the keynote because I think you and I are right on the same page in terms of how we’re thinking about the issues, how we’re thinking about families. I’m hoping what I’m going to be saying next is he was very much going to compliment the exact spirit of what you were just saying. Thank you very much for your remarks and thank you all so much for giving me the opportunity to speak with y’all. I mean, it is always an honor and a privilege to speak with educators and folks who work with young folks and folks who work in schools, and after this year, even more so. I don’t say this lightly.

Daren Graves:

I really, really thank all of you for all that you did, especially during these last year and a half under the craziest of circumstances. In the work that they were going to continue to have to do moving forward, I really thank you as a parent, as an American, as a teacher educator, I’m humbled by the work that y’all do and honored to be in front of you, also. Thank you all so much. Let me see if I can share my screen so I can get it started. I’m going to try and talk at us a lot. I mean, that’s my job is, I guess, to talk at you, but I will also show at least one video to break it up and I think it’ll be important for us to watch the video.

Daren Graves:

I think it’ll help say some things better than I can, but let me see if I can share my screen and we’ll get started here. Oh, it says that somebody else is sharing right now. I guess I need someone to stop sharing so I can start. Thank you so much, appreciate it. All right. Here we go. Yeah. I think the context for this talk, at least from my perspective, is this overdue conversation we need to have about schools. In my estimation, as the slide says, we’re really overdue for re-imagined the imagination of school. Here we are in the fancy new 21st century where, in a lot of ways, schools still operates like in a 19th century schedule, preparing students for 20th century jobs.

Daren Graves:

I feel like we’re overdue by at least 21 years to think about how school needs to be different. I think the two big public conversations we’re having, especially the COVID situation, and then the big conversations we’re having about race and equity in our country, I think have really been the kind of impetus that we need to really think about what school needs to look like moving forward, and I think all of us as educators have recognized that when we had to deal, especially with pandemic and virtual learning. We really had to think about what a school needs to be, what do we need to keep, what needs to go, what new things need to come in. I’m operating from that context, in that we have the times, both between COVID in between this national conversation we’re having about equity, I think, has really catapulted us into this place where we need to think about how school needs to be different for our students and prepare them for the world that they’re getting into, and around the social issues in particular.

Daren Graves:

I know a lot of us as educators, rightfully so, place a lot of hope in young folks in terms of them being in the position to hopefully move our society into an even better place. I’m totally in that camp, and because I’m a teacher, educator, a parent, et cetera, I know that that’s not going to happen magically either, that we, as the adults, especially in schools have a lot of work to do to position our young folks to be able to do that. I’m thinking about what schooling needs to be, what kinds of things we need to be doing in school moving forward, and then thinking about the kinds of ways that we need to be engaging families to help realize that vision.

Daren Graves:

I want to switch gears real quick, because I think what I want to do is to start to help us think about issues of race and racism. I know that’s hard to talk about, and I know that these days, politically, it’s really tough to talk about, but I think it’s important and I think I want to help us talk about it in a way that’s way less about assigning blame and trying to root out the evil people amongst us, and way more about understanding how these complex concepts like race and racism actually operate so that we can actually do the work to make it not such a powerful and pernicious force in our society. When we talk about race, there’s no way to talk about understand what race actually is without talking about history, without thinking about history.

Daren Graves:

One thing I would just say, because I’m going to show us a quick movie clip, and I think it’s about a 10 minute movie clip, but I think it’s really important. One of the main things I want us to walk away from in this conversation is that race is not somebody’s skin color. Race isn’t just somebody’s nationality either, but it’s a thing that operates powerfully in our history and today. I’m going to stop sharing this screen for a second. I’ll come back to this, so that’s a preview, but I want to share a video for us. This will give you a chance to stop hearing my voice for a few minutes and to learn a really important and obscure part of our history.

Daren Graves:

I’m going to take us back to the turn of the 20th century. As is part of the history of the United States, we were going through one of our many different iterations of immigration, ways of immigrants coming to our country. At that time we had lots of folks coming from places like Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, East Asia in particular, and a lot of wrangling around how, if at all, these new groups of immigrants fit into the United States, into our society. That’s where I’m taking us. I’m going to let the video… Wait, I think I messed this up. Let me stop. I’m going to let the video speak for itself. I customize the audio. Great. Customize. Here we go. Here, this is me sharing a video. Sorry about this. It’s just supposed to be a clip. One more second. I really apologize. Something happened when I… Sorry. Why is this doing this? One more second. I’m really sorry about this. Yeah. Had this already to go. Here it is. Yes. Now, I’ve got it ready. Sorry. Now, I will start sharing again. Thank you for your patience.

Narrator:

By 1910, a new term was entering popular culture to describe the transformation of Europeans. The phrase came from the title of a Broadway play by Israel Zangwill. “God,” said Zangwill, “would melt down the races of Europe into a single pure essence out of which he would mold Americans.”

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva:

When the Irish, when Germans, when Italians were coming and they didn’t speak the language and they didn’t know the culture, the idea was they will assimilate into American-hood. They will become American, which in the American tradition, has meant white American. But, that melting pot never included people of color. Blacks, Chinese, Puerto Ricans, et cetera, could not melt into the pot. They could be used as wood to produce the fire for the pot, but they could not be used as material to be melted into the pot.

Narrator:

Whiteness was key to citizenship. In 1790, Congress had passed an act declaring that only free white immigrants could become naturalized citizens. After the civil war, naturalization was extended to persons of African descent as well. But, it was the white citizen who had clear access to the vote, sat on juries, was elected to public office and had better jobs. Whiteness was not simply a matter of skin color. To be white was to gain the full rewards of American citizenship.

Pilar Ossorio:

In order to be a naturalized citizen in this country, you had to be categorized as white or black, and almost everybody who tried to naturalize all but I think one case that went to Supreme Court, all of them were people trying to be categorized as white, so the court had to make decisions about who was white and who was not.

Narrator:

Courts and legislators had long been in the business of conferring racial identities. In the south, to enforce Jim Crow segregation and laws against mixed marriages, courts had to first determine who was black under law.

James Horton:

And here’s where it really gets interesting. You got some places, for example, Virginia. Virginia law defined a black person as a person with 1/16th African ancestry. Now, Florida defined a black person as a person with 1/8th African ancestry. The Alabama said, “You’re black if you got any black ancestry, any African ancestry at all.” But, you know what this means? You can walk across a state line and literally legally change race. Now, what does race mean under those circumstances? You give me the power, I can make you any race I want you to be because it is a social political construction.

Narrator:

In 1909, American Courts had that power. That year, the U S Court of Appeals in Massachusetts ruled that Armenians, often classified as Asiatic Turks, were legally white. If Armenians could be designated white, what are the other so-called Asiatic races? Filipinos, Syrians, the Japanese? Could they also petition successfully to be designated white by the courts and thus become Americans? In 1922, when Japanese businessman, Takao Ozawa, petitioned the Supreme Court for naturalization, many in the Japanese community believed his was the perfect test case.

Mae Ngai:

Takao Ozawa came from Japan, went to the University of California at Berkeley for a few years, then moved to Hawaii where he had a family and he applied to become a naturalized citizen in 1915.

Edith Takeya:

My father wrote his own brief and everything, and he was really devoted. He wanted to become an American citizen and nothing would stop him. He was determined.

Narrator:

Japanese growers in California watched Ozawa’s case closely. By 1920, a series of Alien Land Acts prohibited many non-citizens from owning or leasing land. Without a legal designation of whiteness to make them citizens, Japanese immigrants could not have the full protection of American law, no matter how long they lived in the country. In his brief, Ozawa argued that his skin was as white as any so-called Caucasian, if not whiter, but he made a much more important second argument.

Mae Ngai:

The second argument was that race shouldn’t matter for citizenship. What really mattered was a person’s beliefs.

Narrator:

“My honesty and industriousness are well-known among my Japanese and American friends. In name, Benedict Arnold was an American, but at heart, he was a traitor. In name, I am not an American, but at heart, I am a true American.”

Edith Takeya:

The articles would come out in the paper. I thought, “Ooh, what did he do?” I thought only bad things came out in the paper, and I was kind of ashamed and that was a child. It was just the way we were brought up. I didn’t have any oriental friends. My neighbors were all Caucasian and so he was so determined to get us, well, when the time came to be American citizens.

Mae Ngai:

The Supreme Court ruled that Ozawa could not be a citizen. They said he was not white within the meaning of the statute and therefore not eligible to citizenship. The court said, “Well, he’s not white because he’s not Caucasian and Caucasians are whites.” He did everything right. He learned English. He had a lifestyle that was American. He went to Christian Church on Sunday. He dressed as a westerner. He brought up his children as Americans. He did everything he was supposed to do and yet he’s told that can’t be a citizen because he’s not white.

Narrator:

The court ruled that according to the best known science, Ozawa was not Caucasian, but of the Mongolian race, but the court would not be bound by science in policing the boundaries.

Narrator:

… the court would not be bound by science, in policing the boundaries of whiteness. Only three months after Ozawa, the court took up the case of Bhagat Singh Thind, a South Asian immigrant and US army veteran, who petitioned for a citizenship on the grounds that Indians were of the Aryan or Caucasian race, and therefore white.

 

 

Matthew Jacobson:

And he makes the scientific argument, having learned something, actually, from the Ozawa case, that he is Caucasian. He gets scientific authority to speak on his behalf, that in fact, South Asians are included in the Caucasian race.

Mae Ngai:

So here, the court was in a bind, because they were presented with so-called scientific evidence, that Indians were Caucasian. And the court solved this problem by saying that it didn’t matter what science said, so-called science. They actually said, white is not something that can be scientifically determined, but white is something that is subjectively understood by who they call the common person. The common man.

Narrator:

“It may be true,” reasoned the court, “that the blonde Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity. But the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them today.” The same court that used science to determine whiteness in Ozawa three months before, now refuted its own reasoning in Thind. “Thind might well be Caucasian,” the high court said, “but he was not white.” The justices has never said what whiteness was, only what it wasn’t. Their implied logic was a circular one. Whiteness was what the common white man said it was.

Pilar Ossorio:

The court often decided who was white and who wasn’t, based on whether they just felt that the person would politically fit well into the kind of society that we were trying to build. And sometimes, it was pretty explicit, that this is what the court was doing.

Mae Ngai:

There was widespread racial views, that Asians were undesirable. That they threatened to contaminate the American society. Basically, that Asians are too different, that they can’t ever really become like the rest of us.

Daren Graves:

So I’m going to stop sharing there, and go back to my PowerPoint, if you don’t mind. So that brings us back to this point. Right? And what I want, there’s two, there’s a lot here. And there’s three big things I want us to think about. Right? One is the importance of understanding history, as a way of understanding race. Okay? We can’t understand how race works, without going back and understanding the circumstances that have created the groups that we’ve come to understand, that are part of our society today. So that’s one. Two. I want us to understand that for longer than not, the assumption about race is that people of different races were actually by, scientific, right? The science was that, people of different races were people who were biologically distinct. Okay? And that most of the science of that time, by the way, the top scientists at that time, was about looking for the Asian clavicle, or the Negroid hamstring, or whatever it was. Trying to find, right, the things that made people of different races, biologically distinct.

Daren Graves:

It wasn’t until the 1960s, when we started to be able to map our DNA, that we realized that there is no biological determinant of a race. Right? There’s definitely things like skin color and facial features, right, that we might utilize to help categorize people into certain races. But when you do a genetic test, there’s no black gene. There’s no white gene. Right? There’s no, there might be more genetic difference between me and another black person, than there is between me and a blonde hair, blue eyed, white person. Right? It’s pretty common. Right? And so, we’re all mixed up genetically. And so, there is no biological basis for race. The third point I wanted you to understand, which is at the very end of the piece, which is what this middle picture is referring to, is the notion of thinking about race from the perspective of a set of powerful ideas. Right?

Daren Graves:

And at the very end of that piece, we heard the historian talk about the notion of Asians being thought of as basically culturally unassimilable. Right? To move them from a biological argument with Ozawa, to a cultural argument with Thind. Yes, maybe the science says you might be related. But look, you are so culturally different than us, that you cannot be considered white by this court. Right? And it really coincided, I think, with this picture in the middle, with this… There’s these powerful ideas about Asian folks at the time, is Asian folks who were there as a threat to society, people who were there to take, and take back to their own country. Right? People who can never really be Americans. We have to worry about them. Right? Because of the different culture, the language, et cetera. Right? Religion.

Daren Graves:

So we want to think… And so, there’s that. So there’s this notion of race for Asians, for example, being a set of powerful ideas that we layer on top of people. Okay? And that then have huge impacts on their material lives. So in this case, for Asian folks, right, it meant that these… Not only did Ozawa and Thind lose a measure of getting citizenship, right, through the courts, all other Japanese and Indian Americans, or anyone who was Japanese and Indian descent in America, lost their citizenship. And by the way, there was actually a ban on Asian immigration from that point until about 1965. And the racial requirement for citizenship wasn’t even listed. It lifted until 1954. Okay? So what that meant for Asian folks, is that for many Asian folks, that means you couldn’t even become a citizen in this country until 1965, for many people. For many Asian folks. Okay?

Daren Graves:

So race is a set of powerful ideas, that then has real material impacts on folks. Okay? So you want to think of race as a social contract. And they said this in the video. So you need to understand that things like race, and gender is another example of this, are a set of powerful ideas, right, that lead us to believe in really essential differences between people. Right? And these social constructs create what I call common sense. And I’m putting in the quotes because they’re problematic, but common sense understanding is about people, that can then make things like discrimination or disparate outcomes between, by race, seem either natural, or mundane, or maybe at worst, something even earned by that minoritized group. So you want to think of race as a category of people who are regarded as socially distinct. Right?

Daren Graves:

As a result of these superficial characteristics. Right? The superficial characteristics help us put people in categories. But what the problem is, is that then when we put people in categories, we started layering all these powerful ideas about who they are, who they aren’t, on top of them, that then starts to impact how both individuals and institutions interact with these groups. Okay? Historically and now. Okay? So you want to think of race as something that happens. Something that we make real, not something that we just are. Right? So race isn’t something that happens because you’re born with some set of genes. Right? We want to think of race as something that we make real. And the way we make it real, is by the ways in which we don’t reflect on the powerful and problematic ideas that we put on top of race.

Daren Graves:

And then, we start treating people in specific ways. And again, part of the, a big problem with this, especially those of us who might be thinking about terms like race and ethnicity. Ethnicity is something more concrete. Right? Ethnicity is something that’s bound by language, or nationality, or specific cultural features, right, that we can really hold onto. Race often involves taking whole groups of very diverse ethnicities, nationalities, et cetera, and trying to shoehorn them under this category called race. And then, erases all the diversity amongst these different ethnicities and cultural groups, and makes them like, “Oh, they’re all the same in these essential ways.” And those problematic ideas are at the heart of how race works. I really hope that makes sense.

Daren Graves:

And what does this mean about racism? Okay? So one thing we want to make sure we do before we move forward, is to distinguish between some terms that get used interchangeably, which I think are prejudice, racism, discrimination, and racism. Okay? So we just want to think of prejudice as an opinion or a judgment. Right? Prejudice lives inside our minds. Right? We don’t do prejudice to somebody. It’s just something that we have. Okay? So it’s an opinion or a judgment. Discrimination is a behavior. That is something that we do to people. Right? But it’s a behavior that’s usually, that you can, that where we treat people differently because of things like race, or other identity categories. Right? So prejudice is an opinion. Discrimination is a behavior. So where does that leave us with racism? Okay?

Daren Graves:

We want to think of racism as a system. Okay? Yes. Racism is a system that is informed by different prejudices and subsequent discrimination. Right? But racism is a system that goes. Okay? And this is really, really, important. I really don’t want to understate this note. I will break this out even further, moving forward. I know that racism is a hard word for us to think about. And it’s a high stakes word. Right? And it’s a super high stakes word, when it gets applied to any of us individually. Right? And that creates a scenario where then it becomes really high stakes and risky, right, to even talk about racism. Right? Much less in our schools, or in our schooling system. Right? And what I’m hoping that I’m going to do over the next few minutes, is help us realize that racism is a system that we were born, that all of us were born into, that none of us were the creators of. Right?

Daren Graves:

And so, none of us are the prime movers of this system. We were socialized into a system, that’s fairly powerful, that goes. Right? And that it’s a system, that we are going to need to all work together to make it stop. Okay? And so, let me just say this real quick, because I want to, I don’t want to, I want to make sure that I’m orienting us the right way. So in that regard, we need us all of us to be in this work to make racism stop. My goal, and our goal, should not be to permanently alienate, especially people who are doing this, who might be implicated in this unwittingly. Right? We need, this is not about finding the racist amongst us. And hitting them with the scarlet racism letter, and getting them out of here. Right?

Daren Graves:

That’s not like… We are all implicated, yes, with different levels of power and privilege. But we are all implicated in this system in different ways. And we are all going to have to do some work, whether in our own little corners and together, to make it stop. Okay? So in that regard, the high stakes conversation about racism should be way less about who amongst us is the racist. Right? And way more about, what are we all going to do, right, to make this stop. Okay. So I want to make that clear. So, and I want us to make that clear so that we can talk about racism, right, in our schooling context, in ways that, yes, should get us worked up because we don’t want that to be happening in our schools. But not turn into this search for the person who’s doing this, or that people who are doing this. Right?

Daren Graves:

It’s just, it’s a waste of time and energy, because we need that time and energy to be put into disrupting the system. So we want to think of racism as a system that confers privilege and produces outcomes, disparate outcomes on the basis of race. I talked a lot about the system part of it. And, but I also want to talk about this disparate outcomes on the basis of race. In this definition, you can see that I’m not talking about whether people have evil intentions, or doing things on purpose. Right? What we’re talking about, is if year after year, after year, after year, after year, after year, after year. That’s the systematic part. Right? We see disparate outcomes on the basis of race. Right? That is our flag to figure out whether racism is happening. Right? Racism can happen, even when we’re all super oriented in the direction of anti-racism. Right?

Daren Graves:

We all have these great intentions. Racism can still happen. Okay? And so, I want us to think about it, not as where is the evil in our system, and more about what do we have to disrupt in our system? Right? So that we can, we don’t have these same disparate outcomes on the basis of race. And by disparate outcomes, that can be something as obvious as things like test scores, and other quantifiable metrics. Right? And also, I’m talking about things like seeing groups of people, families. Right? Experiencing the same spaces in completely different ways. So some of these disparate outcomes are also qualitative in nature as well. Okay? So we want to think of racism as the system that produces disparate outcomes on the basis of race. It’s a system that’s rooted in history. Right?

Daren Graves:

It’s rooted in some of these powerful ideas. And then, the outcomes. The material outcomes they produced. Okay? It’s a set of actions, beliefs, policies, practices, a whole bunch of things operating at once, to make this system happen. Right? And from a critical race theory perspective, racism really should be seen as normal and expected. Right? And that’s another hard one to swallow. But what we’re saying by that, is not that we, again, that we expect things to be evil and terrible in the world. Right? But that what happens, is that because these issues are so… Because race itself is so dynamic, that the ideas around it and the circumstances are so dynamic, the ways that racism pops up in our lives, changes over time. Right? So we want to think of the notion of anti-racism, as not a destination, but more as a ongoing process. Right?

Daren Graves:

Because what a diversity training would look like in 1980, looks different than what it looks like in 2000, then looks different, what it looks like in 2020, and so on and so forth. Right? So this notion of it being this normal and resilient system, is not that because there’s always evil in the world. And then, it’s just, and that we just expect bad things to happen to people. But that one of the conditions of humanity, is that we have problems. Right? Seeing people, and not putting them into these categories. Right? And that creates these dynamics that happen in different ways over time, that we have to constantly, both individually and collectively, be working on. Right? And so, for example, in the movie that I just showed you, the conceptions of Asians back then, were as of the yellow threats. These threats to society that are there to threaten the very fabric of the US. Fast forward to modern days. A lot of east Asians are considered model minorities. Right?

Daren Graves:

The kind of minorities who are doing… It was also problematic by the way. Very problematic. But the minorities are doing it the right way. Right? And so, over time, right, the idea, who is included, in what group, and how they’re regarded, and who we need to be thinking about changes. And therefore, and that creates new ways in which racism pops up. And therefore, new work that we have to do individually and collectively, to stop it. I hope that makes sense.

Daren Graves:

We also need to understand that racism happens in a few different domains. And I think this is a really important tool for us, moving forward, because I think this explains a lot of the disagreement that folks are having in our lives, or online, or wherever, on the news, about whether racism is happening or not. Okay? I think, oftentimes, when people think about racism, they think about it in this interpersonal domain. Right? Is the person doing something to somebody else? Are they mean? Are they doing it on purpose? Are they doing it for an irrational racial reason? Right? That is, I think, the most clear idea that people have about racism in general. Right? So when I think people hear the word racism, they think of people using a slur, or people discriminating on the basis of race on purpose. Right? That kind of thing. Right?

Daren Graves:

People may be saying insensitive remarks, et cetera. Okay? That’s one level. But there’s, according to, there’s a lot of different ways that these different domains of racism popped up. But I love this 4 I’s conception, right, which thinks about four different levels that racism, and other isms can happen on. One is the individual internalized level. Right? That’s to what extent are we, again, from our different levels of privilege and perspective, in which ways are we absorbing these powerful ideas about race? Right? That’s one. That’s a really powerful one. Right? Interpersonal. It speaks to what I was saying before. How does that play out in terms of when we were interacting with other people directly? So that’s the interpersonal. And then, we’ve been talking a little bit about the institutional level. Right?

Daren Graves:

Which is not necessarily about people doing things to each other, but the ways in which policies, laws, practices, are set up, and then produce these disparate outcomes. Right? And then, the last one, which you’ve been talking a lot about from the very beginning… To me, the most powerful one, and why it’s on the bottom of this pyramid, is the ideological domain of power. Right? That’s the one. That’s the domain of powerful and problematic ideas, that when you’re not reflecting on them, and then make all of these other levels of racism seem mundane, normal, justified. Okay? Let’s see. Let me see. And then, so by the way, so I think by the way, before I move on, I think this is why there’s lots of disagreements about whether racism is happening. Right? So I think some people, when they think about racism, they’re saying, “Oh, I’m only…” They’re thinking about this level. Right?

Daren Graves:

Whereas other people, right, did the person do something on purpose that was discriminatory or prejudiced? Right? And then, other people might be thinking about either institutional issues. Right? Over time, saying we just keep seeing these disparate outcomes. Some people might also be thinking about this ideological level, the powerful ideas that we’re not combating as we think about race. So I think if we only, if we don’t understand that racism can be happening at many different levels, I think we will be in positions where we will never be able to see the ways in which other… We might not be able to bridge a gap, right, in terms of whether people are seeing racism is happening or not. But I would definitely urge us to understand that it’s happening at these many different levels.

Daren Graves:

So how does that look? So for example, right, these were two captions. These were two… Again, this was just mundane things. Right? These were two captions and pictures, from when Hurricane Katrina hit. You may not… I hope you can… The top photo, we probably categorized them as a black man or young man. The bottom photo, we probably categorized them as white folks. Right? Two white people. In the top picture, right, they’re both engaged in the same activity. But trying to survive. In the top picture, the black man is described as looting. Right? And below, the white folks are described as finding bread and soda. Right? And so, what happens is, I think this is where the ideological domain. Right? If you don’t, if you’re not reflective about it, can then, you can produce, in this case, somewhat mundane, but problematic renderings of what’s going on. Right?

Daren Graves:

Two people, again, two groups of people engaged, basically, in the same thing. But one’s described as a looter, and one described as a finder. Right? And so, and I think there’s a lot of it has to do with some of the powerful ideas that we would get layered on top of black folks. It’s previously black men, criminals, dangerous, super predators. Right? And so, these are just captions. Right? So these are just captions. But what happens if you’re the police officer, and you come across the looter, versus coming across the finder? Right? See, that’s where some of this can really play out, in more spectacular and horrible ways. Right? So it’s, again, to the extent, we’re not understanding how the ideological work. That we’re just letting it happen… We’re letting it watch over us. Then it produces these outcomes where we’re seeing similar people in completely different ways, that can have life altering impacts on them.

Daren Graves:

Go to the next slide. So let’s think about institutional racism real quick too, and housing. Right? Because the institutional racism is a big piece of why we’re seeing a lot of what we’re seeing, in terms of the disparities today. Right? So for example, many of us may have learned about the notions of red lining. This is a map here, by the way, I think. This is an old map of Baltimore, where, back in the day, back in the thirties and forties, they started to, the government was designating different communities as more or less worthy of either government or private investment. Right?

Daren Graves:

Those that were deemed worthy were more in the green end. And those that were not, were colored red. Right? And these… And you can’t really see this slide on the graph. But it basically shows that the higher, the more black people that were in the neighborhood, the way more likely it was that it was going to be red lines. Right? And the red lining really created this scenario, where both… That those communities themselves, right, were not invested in it, could not thrive. And therefore, the people within them could not thrive-

Daren Graves:

Thrive, and therefore the people within them could not thrive economically. As the redlining was happening, at the same time, the suburbanization of America was happening. A lot of white families were moving out of the cities, into the suburbs with these new government plans that we’re going to subsidize and make it super easy for folks to buy houses and then subsequently accrue wealth through the ownership of their house. What happened is, black folks and other folks of color were both locked out of moving into the new suburban neighborhoods through housing discrimination, and the neighborhoods that they were allowed to live in were divested from, at the same time. Which then, now, when you walk into our different cities, whether it’s Baltimore, whether it’s Boston, or whatever, and we see neighborhoods that look like completely dilapidated and so on and so forth, if we don’t know the history, we don’t think about the institutional pieces to it, we may think of it as what’s wrong with the people in this community? Why don’t they take care of it?

Daren Graves:

Or, at least thinking, all these people just want to live together, because they want to be with folks who are like them. Whereas, when you understand the historical nature is that they’re not living together because they want to be with each other, this is what they were allowed to live historically, and then once they were locked out of the wealth growth that happened for many middle-class folks by virtue of buying into the new housing at the time, then what it really meant is that a lot of black folks and other folks who were made to live in the city were locked out of easy opportunities to recruit wealth over time just through home ownership. By the way, this is still an issue today.

Daren Graves:

On the right-hand side, this is a report from May of this year, and this happens in a lot of different cities, including Boston where I live, where either the value of people’s homes will change when the race of the person has changed or they’ve done a lot of things in Boston where people will play with either people’s names or their voices, and try and convince people that there are different races. Suddenly, apartments are either available or not available, or they’re available at different prices. A lot of the discrimination around race and housing is still going on. These systemic issues are playing out in our family’s lives.

Daren Graves:

These circumstances are shaping the kinds of things we’re seeing in terms of our schools and our parents and, our families and their engagement and what it looks like and where they live and where they’re allowed to live, or they can live these days. We’re seeing that the historical perspective are still having major impacts today. I just want to make that part clear as well. Let’s think about these. I want to think about the ideological and the institutional domains as it relates to our parents and families real quick, because I think that that’s where a lot of the work needs to be done. In terms of the ideological domain and parents, we need to think about what kinds of assumptions and stereotypes that we all need to fight through or reflect on as we interact with our parents and families. Schools, in a lot of ways, because of some of these issues that I was raising before that have entrenched a lot of communities into poverty or working class situations, and therefore the school funding piece. If you’re in a low income neighborhood, the school funding, we all know that piece.

Daren Graves:

It causes a cyclical problem and then that leads to us problematically maybe thinking about those communities and those families through a deficit lens, like they don’t care about their schooling or they don’t care about their communities. That’s the problematic part of it. School cultures and practices can often… Some of the folks who are in the communities, in the families, have lots of authority and respect in their communities, and the second they step across the threshold of the school, because that isn’t recognized by the school, they’re stripped of that authority and that expertise. We really need to not create a scenario where families and community members feel a sense of loss, especially over their own children just by walking into the school building. I hope that makes sense. I think a lot of that has to do with the powerful ideas that we layer on top of people, that either falsely problematically lead us to believe that the parents are either more or less interested in their children’s school. I know a lot of parents who have problematic relationships with schools, for sure. I don’t know.

Daren Graves:

I haven’t met the parents who don’t want their kids to get a good education. What that looks like, different things. But, sometimes you hear these things like these parents just don’t care about their kids’ education. I just haven’t met those parents yet. I’ve met parents who had really struggling interacting with the institution of schools, but not that they don’t want their children to get all that they want out that they can out of life. In terms of the institutional domain, this is what I’m saying. I need you to think about how some of the structural inequities of the past and the present are impacting parents and families and communities relationships, or engagement with teachers in schools. We need to think of like the ways in which those housing inequities of the past are impacting people’s wealth today. We need to think about, by the way, the ways in which these schools and in these communities are often some of the most stable institutions in those communities.

Daren Graves:

They’re often sources of employment and, otherwise for communities of color and women in particular. But then, questions about how much power that those folks might have within the institutions. That’s another way to think about the institutional domain as families and parents. Come on now, work with me. We need to think about what kinds of school-wide policies or practices that might have disparate impacts or outcomes for specific groups of parents. Thinking about the ways in which some of our so-called behavior management systems, or some of our assessment systems, the ways that those systems that produce disparate outcomes like black boys being disproportionately pushed out of class, or certain groups of students doing systematically worse on tests are being funneled into special education or so on and so forth. That can produce, unintentionally, this dynamic where now we’re dealing with the parents of those kids through the lens of all the problems that they’re causing for us, either behaviorally or otherwise. We need to think about the ways in which those policies and practices might be producing those outcomes rather than, again, seeing that as a function of the students or the families themselves.

Daren Graves:

In terms of thinking about racism in our schools, what does this mean for all of us? It means a few things. One, we just need to think about that colleagues and other folks that we’re working with are maybe operating from very different definitions of racism than you are. We should expect that. Once we expect that, we should try and do the work of trying to come to some common ground about what it means when we’re talking about racism, or at least very much doing the work that you can’t explain to other people what you mean by racism. In my case, that would be more than just mean people doing mean things on purpose. We need to help colleagues see racism as a big system that was turning wall before we were here but it still has impacts today. That means that none of us are the architects of the system and the prime movers of these systems, bu we all have work to do to make it stop.

Daren Graves:

I’m hoping the four I’s framework will then help you understand how people might be talking about racism across each other, because there might be thinking about different domains, and helping people think and helping us all think about the different domains that racism could be happening in. The last thing I would say is this notion of this “Gotcha” racism game that happens out in social media and beyond, I think is problematic on a lot of levels. It’s basically just tiresome and will eventually backfire. This notion that racism is happening to me is telling me that the sky is blue. That’s not the deal. The big deal is what are we going to do, focusing on what we need to do to disrupt the system. Yes, we need to identify when it’s happening, but if the game is just, “Oh my gosh. Racism.” That’s it? That’s not enough. It should be expected because we have a lot of work to do ongoing throughout time, and a lot of our energy should be focused on rather than finding who amongst us is the racist to thinking about what we need to be doing moving forward.

Daren Graves:

Let me just give you a few different types of ideas about the kinds of things that, I think, families could be advocating for and working for, and you could be working in relationship with families to advocate for. That might actually work to help disrupt racism. I’m going to start with some K-12 stuff real quick, and then I’ll move into some early childhood ed stuff, and then I’ll talk a little bit about some of the virtual learning and I’ll probably be done by that. In terms of the K-12, I think in the realms of curriculum, there’s a lot of really interesting work that’s being done around ethnic studies. Ethics studies, really, like it says here for those of us who don’t know, it’s a critical and interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with a focus on the experiences and perspectives of people of color within and beyond the U S.

Daren Graves:

There’s a lot of research, including some research in Stanford, that are showing that when we give students access to those multiple histories, to those multiple stories… I’ll come back to this later, but those multiple stories, that it actually helps them with their GPA, that they actually improve academically. Again, this is not just an exercise in political correctness or just making students feel better about them. This is about actually producing the outcomes that we’re looking for moving forward. I put that out there as an example. There’s a great movie, Precious Knowledge that you can look at to help you learn a little bit more about it. I have another resource right there from Berkeley about what ethnic studies can look like and I’ll come back to this at the end in the second as well. There’s also some great work being done in disrupting racism in the STEM sector of K-12.

Daren Graves:

We see a lot of disparities in terms of math and science and where students are placed, and a lot of black students, brown students, poor students who are not getting into the higher level science and math courses by the time they into their high school. I would put forth the work of The Calculus Project by Dr. Adrian Mims up here in Boston. It’s a wonderful project that’s really about rather than assuming that students can’t make it and hack it in calculus, starting in eighth grade with a really targeted approach, particularly at the students who we don’t think can make it, and then doing a whole combination of curricular work within the school, getting high school and college tutors of similar backgrounds to come work with the students. It really produces outcome where in school districts, where before the calculus project, they might have 2% people of color in their AP calculus class to ones where they have 30 or 40% of students of color in their AP calculus class.

Daren Graves:

It’s a really cool concept that’s about being intentional about targeting the students that we’re not seeing in those classes and doing the work both, inside and outside of school to get them there. Science Genius, you can look them up as well, there are another great resource that really tries to blend the teaching of science with some of the popular culture types of things that young folks are into that really helped young folks who, again, may not traditionally see themselves as scientists move into that science world. I don’t have time to show this video clip, but also what to think about in terms of thinking about relationships with family and community, I would be remiss not to mention the name of Dr. Karen Mapp at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who is an amazing resource and an amazing researcher in terms of thinking about how to build relationships with communities. I think the gist of it is that we often in schools create the spaces for engagement. We create the terms for engagement for families.

Daren Graves:

We’ll say, “Show up at this time, because it works well for our schedules, and if you’re there, you’re engaged and if you’re not, you’re not.” I think Karen Mapp and others are really helping us think about, this is what I think Mr. Choudhury was saying in the beginning, how do we actually partner with families in this regard? How do we put families in the position where they can offer their own spaces for engagement? In other words, we need to really be in partnership with families to think about what it is they want for their students in terms of their education, and also thinking about the way you let them define the ways that they can be engaged. That may look really differently for a lot of different, good reasons, rather than us saying, “If you show up to the parent teacher conference you’re engaged or not.” That kind of thing. Hope that makes sense.

Daren Graves:

The work of Walter Gilliam in terms of this thing about early childhood space, and this is really important because I think some of the work of the learning or the unlearning of race and racism needs to be happening both for our children and our adults in the early childhood space. Walter Gilliam, there’s a lot of amazing research about this, has found that sadly that in early childhood space, we’re seeing that black children are more highly surveilled, for example. They’re more likely to be monitored for their behaviors by the folks who are working with them. They’re definitely more likely to be experienced suspensions or expulsions. Now, man, the suspensions or expulsions in early childhood, that’s a real tough pill to swallow for any child. I don’t care about the disparity, even if it’s just the disparity and race is a problem, but early childhood students getting expelled from school, that just doesn’t feel right to me. It doesn’t seem equitable. These are young children. We’re trying to mold them.

Daren Graves:

I’m not sure about what’s going on in Maryland so forgive me for my ignorance, but I know of places like Connecticut, for example, they’ve started to ban the expulsion or suspension of kids in early childhood, so that might be a policy thing to consider. The point is that these suspensions and expulsions and behavior management stuff that happens in the early childhood space has huge impacts as we, I’m sure, all know as school children moving to the K to 12 space, both because of the perceptions that follow them into the space, the ways in which the things that happened in the space that put them on certain trajectories in school, and then from school, of course, trajectories into life beyond that. A lot of this is informed, by the way, for example, for black children in particular, there’s research that’s been published by the American Psychological Association that shows that black children are often seen by, especially like other white people, as four to six years older than they actually are. They did these experiments where people would guess the age of these young black children and they would, on average, I think, guess almost 4.5 years older than they were.

Daren Graves:

I think some of thar really impacts the ways in which we might, in the early childhood space, be policing the bodies of different students as we are seeing them through different eyes, different lens. We also need to think about things that are happening in an early childhood space around the adults as well. Thinking about some of the disparities around who’s in positions of power either in terms of the school itself or the running of the school, the ways in which employees of color may be assessed in terms of their work differentially is another thing to think about, but just in general, just not being reflective about the powerful ideas that come to define different races will help us see students and staff through those problematic lenses. We have a lot of work to do to be reflected individually and collectively about those ideas to us and not then see people, whether it’s our staff or our students, engage in mundane activities and then being punished because we’re just seeing it differently than we might see for white students or white staff.

Daren Graves:

There is a really great resource, by the way, on the NAEYC website. It’s one called Journeying Together: How Our Program Addresses Race and Anti-Bias Education is a wonderful actually conversation between some early childhood educators around some of the work that they did or doing to try and help students remember and learn about the Tulsa race massacre. I put it out there. I would take notes on this one, write that one down because it’s a really honest and amazing conversation amongst educators about why they do the work, the challenges that they’re facing along the way. I think this is a wonderful and honest rendering of thinking about how to do this work, especially in the early childhood space. I’d also give you just two more resources. Neither of them know I’m doing this, but I will unabashedly give a shout out to the book, Planting the Seeds of Equity, which is a wonderful book for educators, especially for those who are interested in some of the younger ages.

Daren Graves:

And then, embracerace.org, it’s just an amazing website that is really, really geared towards thinking about the nexus of parents, schools and these conversations about race. There’s so much there in terms of articles and videos, webinars. That’s another great place for you to look for some more ways that this can look and how the conversations can happen. I only have a minute left so I just want to say a few things. This is about the virtual learning and the digital divide, some of the issues we need to think about. Obviously, the COVID moment has helped us realize that we’re going to have to be doing some of this work more virtually for one reason or another, and also hoping that that shift in modality doesn’t reproduce racism disparate outcomes. We’re going to really need from a family, especially from the family level, more advocacy to combat things like disparities in schools, access to technology.

Daren Graves:

We’re seeing that schools need more wifi, they need more laptops or Chromebooks. They need access to high speed internet to be able to make this work. Students need access to these technologies as well and they also might need access to high speed internet in their own space. We saw this during the pandemic. Those of us who had students who had access to high speed internet had a way different education than those who did not. We also need to think about when we do have this learning from home situation that, for some students, I’m sure a lot of us know this, being at home for a variety of reasons, it’s just not conducive to their learning, whether it’s technology or because of variety of family and contextual situations that makes it hard to just concentrate and have a quiet space to do the work. We also need to see the opportunities that virtual learning can provide. There are ways in which this virtual space, you can use technology, by the way, to help connect students with their communities or other experts in their communities virtually in ways that we may not be able to do it as easily when we try and do everything in person.

Daren Graves:

By the way, there’s been some features of the virtual learning. Some of the asynchronous learning that we can do, some of the live documents, Google docs, Padlet, things like that, even using the chat box as a way to get people to participate. We need to think of some of these teachers that have made learning more accessible and equitable for students. There’s a lot that there’s a lot to think about there as well. I think I ran out of time, so I just want to thank y’all so much. This is my contact information. And then if you’re interested, my co-author and I, Scott Seider, we have a book out called Schooling for Critical Consciousness. It focuses more on the high school level, but it gives some great ideas about how we can help students make sense of these systems that are out there and then position them to do something about it. I want to thank you all very much. I’m going to stop sharing my screen and just relay my gratitude to all of you. If you’re saying something in the chat, I’m sorry I missed it, but thank you so much.

Nikevia Thomas:

Thank you so much, Dr. Graves, we appreciate your keynote. I’m going to share my screen. My name is [Nikevia Thomas 01:11:36] and I’m one of the MAEC staff. One second. Now is the time to share your questions in the Q&A. If you have any additional questions, please slide over to the Q&A tab and type in your questions and we will be asking.

Nikevia Thomas:

Questions. And we will be asking questions in a couple of moments. So I’m going to stop sharing my screen now so I can get access to the questions. Sorry. Okay. So Dr. Graves, one participant wrote, awareness is great for mindfulness, but what suggestions or approaches should be taken to engage families in their children’s academic success? How can educators use this information to impact the students when the parent or family is not engaged because of some of the same issues you mentioned?

Daren Graves:

Yeah. Thank you so much for this question. And I hope I’m going to give a decent answer to this. I think we need to recognize, especially these parents that you’re talking about, these are parents as students themselves by virtue probably of their race and their class and maybe other things who have had basically a violent experience with school. And by violent, I mean maybe not physically … it might even be physically, but emotionally for sure. Psychologically for sure. Maybe even spiritually. Right? And so if that’s your relationship with school as a student and now you’re a parent and now you might even be going back to that very same school that you were at where you have all these horrible memories, places that you might’ve been just miseducated or undereducated or whatever. Right? Whatever the circumstance.

Daren Graves:

The point being is that we’re going to have to do a lot of intentional work to step into the parents’ realm and say, look, we have a lot that we’re trying to get done here. We can’t do this without you. Right? We can’t do this without you. You, as the parent, as the family member, as the caretaker, you are an expert on your children and an expert on your community. Right? I want us to both know this and say this to them. Right? Because it’s something that we have to know and feel for real so that we can act on it. And we have to communicate this to the families. Right? So as to change that power dynamic, right?

Daren Graves:

Because oftentimes it’s the school is saying, parent, this is what’s what. Get on board or you’re a problem. Right? And there’s always that tension between teacher and parent in this regard. The teacher especially feels some measure of expertise about that child. Why? Rightfully so in some ways, right? Because you’re with that child many hours a day, many days a week. That parent also obviously feels some measure of expertise. And so sometimes there’s this kind of standoff between the parent and the child. Especially if they have very different understandings of that child. Right? I would suggest that we as schools and as teachers in particular need to start off on the foot of saying, we need you, I can’t do this without you. I need to understand your children because you know them even better than I do.

Daren Graves:

I know them in some ways. But you know them in ways that are even more profound. And use that as the starting point for the conversation moving forward and really orient it as giving the parents and the families the sense of power and authority to really disrupt a dynamic that often put the school people in a position of authority that then enacted, unwittingly often, the violence against the families either as family members or as students when they were younger. I hope that makes sense. I hope that answers that question.

Nikevia Thomas:

Great. Okay. The next question is, how do we combat political structures when critical race theory is prohibited in some states and how it affects pre-K through 12 school systems?

Daren Graves:

Yeah. I knew this was coming so I’m prepared for this. I’m actually prepared for this. I might be able to share a slide here real quick. If I can do this. Let’s see if I can make this work. I don’t think I shared this. Sorry. Let me see if I can share it. Because I knew this was coming and I wanted to have some information to share with you. I know this is a big deal. Okay. So a few things. One, just from being factual, it’s really unlikely that anybody’s learning actually critical race theory in schools. Critical race theory is a very kind of niche, grad school level thing that most people in grad school don’t even encounter.

Daren Graves:

Right? So I just want to make that clear that critical race theory is not happening in [inaudible 01:17:17] schools. Right? But to be fair, and to get to the point of the question, CRT is really a stand-in honestly … like the name CRT or critical race theory is really a stand-in for any really training or curriculum that’s focusing on anti-racism, identity, privilege, or multiple histories. Okay? So that’s what we’re really talking about. So let me say a few things about that. One in terms of the history part, I think we would really blow up a lot of this argument, especially around the histories part of it as if we taught history in K to 12 like we do in college. Right? As soon as you get to college, the first thing they teach you is everything you’ve learned about history, just throw it out the window, right?

Daren Graves:

Because in K to 12, you learn a history, usually political history. And when you get to college, the first thing you learn is that even if you’re just living in the realm of political history, there is no history. There’s only histories. Right? There’s only multiple perspectives. Right? And so we normalized the notion that we will be learning the multiple stories or even better, the danger of a single story through our history, we wouldn’t have to be choosing. And this is what a lot of the people get worked up about. Choosing between this history or that one. One that lionizes the founding forefathers and one that demonizes them. One or the other is insufficient. That’s just how history works as a methodology.

Daren Graves:

So history is a methodology. It’s not a content set. Okay. So we need to do some work in our K to 12 level of blowing up history as a set of facts that we need to learn. Okay? Let’s be clear that the goal of this work, of my work and the work that happens in these anti-racism or other kinds of trainings, the goal of this work is not to define white people as just inherently evil and mortally, like indelibly [inaudible 01:19:13] and to make them feel shame and guilt, and then to walk away. Right? Like that is not the goal of this work or it shouldn’t be the goal of this work. Right? For two reasons. One, like I said, we were all born into this system, I’m talking about the white folks.

Daren Graves:

I’m talking about the white folks in this room. Y’all didn’t make the system. Y’all were socialized into this. Right. And so you didn’t ask for any of this. So that’s one. Two. Yes, you might be benefiting from it for sure. And that’s something we need to think about individually and collectively. But like I said earlier, it’s going to take all of us that do this work to dismantle the system. Right? And so this notion of turning these trainings or curriculums into ways of saying white people, you’re evil, feel shame, feel guilt, get out of here. Right? That’s not going to help with dismantling racism. You need everybody on board. And B, it’s going to probably backfire because as we’re seeing, some of these folks are going to think, what? No.

Daren Graves:

Well, forget that. I’m going to go against you. Now you’re going to have people fighting against you in the process. So that’s not the goal of this work. Okay. Yes. Some of the work might make white students feel uncomfortable. Right? And to that I say two things. One, what is learning without discomfort? I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what learning is about discomfort, A. B, I don’t know. Welcome to the world of students of color everyday. Students of color feel that discomfort as like a matter of course, it actually makes you stronger. As you learn to navigate that discomfort, it actually makes you a stronger person and student. So if the goal is to avoid your white students experiencing discomfort because of their identity …

Daren Graves:

No, do I think they should be indelibly shamed and guilted? No. But they’re going to have to experience some measure of discomfort. But I think that’s part of growing. And this work is about helping our students excel academically and psycho-socially. For me, this is what it’s about. So when I’m doing this work, it’s not to promote like Nancy Pelosi or whatever agenda. This is about the research that I tried to show you in the beginning that shows that this way of doing school actually produces the outcomes that we’re interested in academically and otherwise. So that’s what this is about, right? This is not about pushing some partisan outcomes. I think what you really need to do, I hope that helps, but … I’m going to stop sharing.

Daren Graves:

You really have to help people realize that you need everybody on board to do this work. And it’s not a work of excluding people, right? This is a work of really trying to get people … I think even the people who are against the CRT in schools probably do have some investment in racism going away. Right? And so what a critical race theorist would say is for racism to go away, it’s not going to go away by itself. It’s not going to go away magically. We’ve got to do work to make it happen. And so we’ve all got to do the work, right? And so that’s what it’s about. So it’s not about shaming the kids indelibly. It’s about giving them the information to empower them to do the work.

Daren Graves:

And for white students in particular, they need to feel a sense of pride around white racial identity that’s not rooted in white supremacy, but that’s rooted in using one’s privilege to help the United States become the country that it’s trying to be. And there’s so many great examples of white folks who have taken their privilege, historically and contemporarily, who’ve used their privilege to make this world and this country a way better place. That’s what this is about. I hope that answers that question. And let me just say one more thing. Yes. I understand that then there are these laws, and these people are irrational, and they’re just going to say, I don’t care what your rationale is, it’s still illegal. To that I would say, in schools, we’ve always had this issue. Right? Politicians have told us what we can and can’t do in classes in a lot of different ways.

Daren Graves:

And I would never urge someone to just lose their job over this. That would be really easy for me to say from this privileged position saying, yes, do whatever the law says. Right? I think as teachers and educators, we’re always in positions where we have to be crafty and sometimes subversive, but working within the bounds of what makes sense in our context. Right? For example, a lot of states have these civic actions type standards and goals. Use that as your way to do some of his work, for example. I hope that makes sense. I’m sorry.

Nikevia Thomas:

Yes. Thank you. So we have questions that are pouring in, but we only have a minute to go. So I will ask one more question and then we will wrap up. So there’s a question about the critical age of zero to three. What about addressing the critical age zero to three years where the brain is building its capacity for learning? This time period is much more important time for engaging with parents and families. Do you have something to say in regards to that question, Dr. Graves?

Daren Graves:

Very much so. Thank you for the question. I was just looking at some of the other questions. But yeah. But this is important. Yes. Because I think there’s going to be a lot of people who will, I think, reasonably come to the conclusion that why are we going to be talking about this with super young kids, right? Zero to three, even older than that, K to 12, kindergarten, first, second I’ve heard. And so I think my simple answer to this is that yes, the research does show that whether we like it or not young folks, super young, maybe even as young as seven or eight months are starting to learn about race. They’re starting to learn about it.

Daren Graves:

And we’ve all seen either historically or contemporarily, some of the doll experiments that have been done over time where they show black and white children black and white dolls. And they’ll ask the children which one’s nice, which one’s bad, which one’s smart, which one’s dumb. Right? And consistently, we’ll see in different ways, whether it’s the doll experiment or otherwise, ways in which young folks absorb these problematic messages about race like a sponge. Right? Even when we’re doing nothing, especially when we’re just doing nothing to socialize the students. Right? Even though our idea is like, let’s not talk about race with my kid and hopefully everything will be fine. That’s not going to work. Even when you are doing it in intentionally, even when you’re saying … a lot of us might experience this as parents.

Daren Graves:

Even as parents we’re saying, hey, I want to be intentional about socializing my child, whether it’s around race or gender or other things to help them blow up those problematic concepts, it’s still hard. Right? Because then you have the whole society around you, media, stores, people just constantly bombarding young folks with all these messages. Right? I mean, a lot of us have experienced that around trying to blow up gender norms with our kids. Right? We do this amazing work in our homes around not trying to make this boys clothes or girls clothes. Right? And as soon as we walk into Target, it’s a wrap. It’s over. It’s done. Right? Because Target will have the boys section and the girls section and the pink stuff and the blue it’s like a mess.

Daren Graves:

So this notion of let’s not do this work until they’re ready, they need to do the work early so that they don’t have to unlearn as much as they get older. And there’s already stuff to be unlearning, right? Even at that super early age. So my sense is that we have to be super intentional. And what I would say, and what gives me so much hope, and I’ll end on this note because I have to … but what gives me so much hope in this work is some of the work that’s happening in the realm of children’s literature and young adult literature is mind blowing to me. It is such a vibrant field that is giving teachers and educators and parents so many amazing texts that can help young folks in ways that are developmentally appropriate, start to engage these issues of identity and fairness and equity.

Daren Graves:

And by the way, that’s how you can talk about these issues. You may not use the word racism and systematic and idealized. Right? You may just talk about it in terms of fair and not fair. Young folks get this stuff. We make things super complicated to young folks. They get it [inaudible 01:28:10] super easy for us. So in some ways you might have to change the language, but young folk can understand fair and unfair. They can understand judging a book by its cover. Right? They can grasp that. So we can’t afford not to have these conversations. They’re learning about it anyway.

Nikevia Thomas:

Okay.

 

Daren Graves:

I want to say, yes, you have to have these conversations around other identities as well, including sexuality and gender and physical ability and so on and so forth. So 100%, I’m not saying that this should be happening at the expense of any of those things. They often need to be happening at the intersection of those things as well. So I want to give that a shout out as well. And then the last thing I’m going to say, so the question about parent expertise. I’m really arguing that teachers and parents need to partner with each other. I’m not trying to necessarily create a hierarchy. It’s going to really depend on each situation. But to partner with each other, to see each other as authentic partners, not as opponents. And I think teachers probably, especially for our most marginalized parents, need to take that affirmative first step to make the parents feel welcomed and to make them feel some measure of expertise. I know that’s not always the case for all the parents and families. Believe me, I understand.

Nikevia Thomas:

Okay, great. Thank you so much. So now we’re going to have to wrap up, everybody. This has been a rich discussion. So I have a couple of housekeeping things before we … can you all see my screen? I just see complete darkness. Hold on. Here we go. So we are going to wrap up. And after our keynote, we have a 45 to an hour break before we go to the remainder of our workshops. To do that, you can go and visit our Whova app. Whova.com. It’s actually available on our website. But I am going to put it in the chat for everybody.

Nikevia Thomas:

Here we go. And you can see the schedule of all of the offerings that we have. If you scroll down at the bottom, here’s our events schedule. And at 12:30 to 2:00, we have three selections of sessions to choose from. And then from 2:15 to 3:45, we also have three more selection of sessions from which you can choose. Okay?

Nikevia Thomas:

And I would like for you all to share your feedback for this keynote and for the subsequent sessions that we’ll have. And to do that, please take a moment to complete this survey that I’m also putting in the chat right now. And you can toggle between the topics, if you see right here. Which workshop did you attend today? And if you can scroll down at the bottom, there’s the keynote, but then all the other sessions that we have available, you can select them there as well. Okay?

Nikevia Thomas:

I would like to thank everyone, all the participants. I’d especially like to thank Dr. Graves for delivering such an amazing keynote. And for our new superintendent for joining, I’m so happy that he was able to participate. And everyone at MSDE and all of the staff at MEC. And last but not least, our ASL interpreters who have helped as well. We look forward to seeing you all at 12:30. Thank you.