Doing equity work while Black in a culturally white district

For educators of color, taking a leadership role in equity initiatives often comes at a price.

 

Shomari Jones, the director of equity and strategic engagement for the Bellevue School District in Washington state, is sitting in his car at 8:20 p.m., after a long day of meetings, when he receives a phone call from a Black parent he knows. He takes a deep breath and answers. After a minute or two of small talk, the parent tells Shomari that their middle school son was making his way to lunch with a friend when he heard a white student use the n-word to describe another Black student at the school. And just two weeks earlier, a white student in the son’s history class remarked that if they were both alive in the 1800s, he would be the white student’s slave. The parent starts crying in frustration over the school’s lack of response to both incidents: “How am I supposed to protect my baby when the school and district won’t?” As Shomari listens, he rubs his forehead, stares at his steering wheel, and repeatedly apologizes to the parent. He promises to try to connect with the principal and the supervising executive director to find out what is happening.

In an article titled “Losing an arm,” Michael Dumas (2014) explains how difficult it can be for Black students, families, and educators to cycle back and forth, again and again, between hopefulness and disappointment in their schools. Referencing the 1979 Octavia Butler novel Kindred (in which the main character loses an arm when pulled into her enslaved ancestors’ past), Dumas describes the emotional toll of these experiences as “a kind of constant travelling between historical memory and current predicament. . . [T]here is a psychic link between the tragedy of antebellum African bondage and post-civil rights black suffering” (p. 3). Shomari knows precisely what that means. As he talks with parents, his emotions are yanked this way and that, from a comforting belief that things are getting better, to the dreadful sense that part of him will always be anchored to the past.

Shomari is haunted by the feeling that, despite the rhetoric of progress he hears from his colleagues, the change he seeks for his community might remain forever out of reach. That feeling overcomes him during his frequent nighttime conversations with parents who beg him to do something about the racism their children experience in school. It wells up again nearly every workday, whenever he senses that he is being treated as the “token Black man,” or when he endures microaggressions from colleagues. And it haunts him especially when people tell him “the community isn’t ready” for the programs and policies he’s spent years to develop.

As the director of equity and strategic engagement, Shomari holds a cabinet-level role in the district. Beyond consulting on various equity initiatives, he is responsible for establishing strong relationships and lines of communication between local communities — communities of color, specifically — and district staff. He sees it as a critically important and rewarding position. Yet, working in an almost exclusively white district for the past seven years has exacted a toll on his well-being, forcing him to leave behind a piece of himself every time he drives to the office — it does indeed feel like losing a limb, just as Dumas describes. All Black Americans work hard to compartmentalize their experience of historical trauma, he recognizes. But Shomari’s job as a district equity leader, and the disconnect he experiences between his professional role and his personal identity, entails a particular kind of emotional suffering.

The nature of the job

Located at the heart of the Pacific Northwest’s high-tech hub, and just outside of Seattle, the Bellevue School District draws from a deep well of corporate and community support to serve a diverse population of roughly 20,000 students. Approximately 43% of students identify as Asian, 31% as white, 13% as Latinx, 9% as multiethnic, 3% as Black/African American, 0.3% as Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, and 0.1% as Native American/American Indian/Alaska Native. Approximately 40% of students speak a first language other than English, 16% receive English learner services, and 17% qualify for free and reduced-price lunch.

As the district has become more racially and socioeconomically diverse in recent years, it has taken steps to reckon with both historical and ongoing inequities in its schools. These efforts have not come without some conflict, but, to its credit, the district has demonstrated a willingness to embrace equity as a guiding principle by, for example, investing in professional development that addresses implicit bias and by taking concrete steps to diversify the social studies curriculum. And while Bellevue surely has more work to do in this area, this article is not meant to criticize the district. Rather, our goal is to show how educational norms, rules, and practices that exist in virtually every school district in the country can affect the professional and personal lives of the people most responsible for doing equity work. Further, we want to suggest some ways for districts to provide stronger support to those people.

Taking hits

Because Shomari is both the external and internal face of equity in the district, he takes constant punishment from all sides. As he put it in a recent conversation:

When I took this job, I knew what the job was, you know? I put on the flak jacket and I knew I was going to take some hits. I was intentionally driving into the battle. And you get hit and you get hit, and you’re cool because you got the jacket on. But when you get hit enough times, the jacket doesn’t work for you anymore. You’re hoping there are other people who are willing to put on their jackets and take a hit for you, or alongside you. But [if] that day never comes, you have to decide, to what point am I willing to sacrifice myself? And the closer you get to that point, the angrier and more frustrated you get, and sometimes you can’t keep it in. And your performance is judged on that, not on all the times you took the hit and kept the anger in.

Efforts to promote more equitable policies and practices in K-12 education inevitably lead to some amount of controversy and criticism. Anybody who takes a position as an equity leader understands this. If you propose, for example, to assign the most seasoned teachers to work with the most vulnerable students, or if you suggest a fairer way to identify students for gifted and talented programs, or if you recommend detracking the curriculum, then you will probably face resistance from parents and community members who worry that these changes will disadvantage their own children or from teachers and other colleagues who resent having to take on more “challenging” responsibilities. Your job often involves persuading and cajoling people to acknowledge that these decisions are fair and correct, even if their initial response is to hurl abuse at you.

Nobody enjoys taking these hits, but the experience tends to be particularly jarring for educational leaders of color, given their sense of personal affiliation with many of the students on whose behalf they are advocating. Further, as Joshua Starr (2020) notes, while district superintendents often choose to put leaders of color “in charge” of equity initiatives, they often neglect to give them the support and authority required to make those initiatives succeed. And when their efforts go unfulfilled or unnoticed, those equity leaders are left with a profound sense of frustration and disappointment at being so close to, and yet so far from, being able to help their community.

Shomari has experienced such disappointment many times. For example, Bellevue has always lacked a formal protocol for handling complaints from students and families about being attacked or harassed or called racial epithets or punished for expressing their authentic selves. Several years ago, in an effort to be more responsive to such complaints, district leaders asked Shomari to come up with ways to tweak the educator evaluation system, creating incentives for teachers and administrators to pay closer attention to the racial climate in their schools and to take active steps to curb abuse. After months of work, he and his team presented their recommendations only to be told no, such changes were out of the question. Although they had described it as a priority to be more responsive to the concerns of parents of color, district leaders were not willing, in the end, to disrupt the existing teacher evaluation framework and contend with the resistance that would likely come from the teachers union.

It’s hard to overstate just how deflating it is to labor over a thoughtful, well-intentioned effort to promote racial understanding, only to see one’s efforts casually dismissed and misrepresented.

In a recent Kappan article, Antony Farag (2021) shares a similar story, describing the blowback he faced from administrators and community members in his New Jersey school district after he and some colleagues designed a new U.S. history course that relied on critical race theory as a conceptual framework. Having spent months pouring his energies into creating a curriculum meant to engage high school students in productive discussions about the racial complexities of the American experience, he was met with resistance, even accused of promoting anti-white hostility. It’s hard to overstate just how deflating it is to labor over a thoughtful, well-intentioned effort to promote racial understanding, only to see one’s efforts casually dismissed and misrepresented in this way. As Sharif El-Mekki (2021), director of the Center for Black Educator Development, argues, that’s why it is critically important for district administrators to understand how exhausting it can be to lead equity-focused initiatives in the public schools. They must be “mindful of what Black educators need, not just to maintain their mental health and well-being, but to become the high-caliber teacher-activists students need them to be” (p. 41).

The major obstacles to equity work

Drawing upon Shomari’s professional experiences and our conversations with other equity leaders of color, we see four obstacles that make it particularly challenging to do this work:

The reluctance to redesign structures and systems. For school- and districtwide equity initiatives to gain any traction at all, educators and community members must, at the very least, be willing to consider the possibility that their existing policies and procedures are unfair to some students. But even if they agree to take a hard, honest look at how their schools serve children from various backgrounds, and even if they conclude that the system is in fact inequitable, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be willing to do much about it. To provide truly equitable resources, services, and supports to all students, stakeholders would have to agree to dismantle and redesign every part of the system that is unfair — everything from biased disciplinary practices and dress codes to teaching assignments, curricular tracking, textbooks, and college advising systems. However, large bureaucracies such as school districts tend to be doggedly resistant to such change (Labaree, 2020), especially if it would require them to overhaul long-standing policies, practices, and procedures. And that puts equity leaders like Shomari in a bind, caught between the desire to make dramatic progress and the sense that it’s more realistic to pursue small improvements that don’t trigger massive resistance from teachers, administrators, parents, and community members.

Awareness without accountability. Shomari estimates that his department has spent millions of dollars on equity trainings over the past several years, motivated by district leaders’ genuine desire to ease the persistent inequities and inequalities experienced by Black and brown students, students living in poverty, and students with disabilities. However, no matter how frequently these trainings occur, they don’t seem to translate to significantly more equitable practices in schools and classrooms. For instance, students continue to say they feel invisible and unheard when they report racist incidents, and teachers of color continue to sense that their white colleagues expect them to take the lead on all matters related to race and equity. Given the lack of concrete results, it’s tempting to assume that something must be wrong with the design and facilitation of the trainings themselves. But as we see it, the quality of the trainings isn’t the issue. The real problem is that teachers and staff are required only to participate in them, not to apply what they’ve learned to their everyday work. In short, while the effort to promote greater awareness of various forms of bias and inequity is commendable, it is also toothless. Diversity training and related policies are unlikely to have much effect unless they are accompanied by clear and consistent guidelines for practice, to which teachers and staff know they will held accountable.

A position on the margins. In many school districts, equity work is tacitly understood to be a sort of add-on to the district’s core academic mission, leaving equity leaders unclear as to their power to compel people to take equity work seriously. And when their position is viewed as peripheral, they tend to receive less funding than other district staff, to be included in fewer high-level meetings, and to have less input on decisions related to human resource allocation, curriculum adoption, collective bargaining, and more. They might even be left off of parent and community committees that are tasked with investigating inequitable district systems. (For that matter, because equity is seen as having little to do with the academic core, those committees themselves may have no real authority to implement policies or create programs.)

All the responsibility, little of the authority. Given how closely Shomari works with students and families of color, he often hears from them when they’ve been marginalized by other students or district educators — on any given day, for instance, he might get a call from a Latinx parent who is upset because a school counselor seems to buy into ethnic stereotypes or from a Black student who is furious at having been disciplined more harshly than a white classmate for the very same offense. And when students and parents come to Shomari with stories like these, he feels a responsibility to drop everything else and rush to help them resolve the problem. However, he has little authority or power to make teachers or staff respond. It’s a predicament that we’ve heard from other equity directors, as well — they must bear the weight of students’ and families’ pain and frustration, but they cannot hold anybody accountable for the actions that have caused such anguish.

What we have described here is not the result of one policy or practice or the actions of one district, although the frustration Shomari feels when he encounters each of those policies, practices, and actions is emotionally draining. What is most grinding for Shomari is how the specific incidents he and others experience seem to work in quiet concert with a broader district culture that seems designed to slow the rate of change, not just in how individuals are held accountable for their actions, but in how the district bureaucracy functions. Over time, it is primarily this dynamic that makes the work of district equity leaders of color both infinitely frustrating and emotionally exhausting.

To provide truly equitable resources, services, and supports to all students, stakeholders would have to agree to dismantle and redesign every part of the system that is unfair.

Moving forward

Having to confront these obstacles, over and over, can take a serious social, emotional, and intellectual toll on the well-being of equity leaders of color. Time and again, they must plead with other district administrators — those who have greater authority — to acknowledge the inequities that exist in the local schools and to treat students’ and parents’ suffering as important enough to require their immediate attention. Time and again, they are held to account for the meager results of equity initiatives, even though the success of those initiatives depends on many other people across the school system. Time and again, they find themselves pushed to the margins of the district hierarchy, their work treated as an add-on to the schools’ more essential academic mission. And time and again, they sense that their presence in the district — the fact that equity has been “assigned” to a specific person — makes it easy for white colleagues, especially, to abdicate their own responsibility to pursue equity.

As more districts embrace equity-focused policies and practices, and as more of them hire equity leaders of color, it will be essential for them to grapple with these challenges and figure out how to make this a more sustainable position, one that entails fewer frustrations and many more opportunities to succeed in the role. For instance, how can districts provide teachers and administrators the time they need to learn about the complex history of racial bias in schools, while also requiring them to act quickly to make schools and classrooms safe for children of color? And if district officials discover their existing practices to be inequitable, will they have the capacity and courage to overhaul those practices in the face of resistance from local educators and community members? Will they be willing to pursue the changes that their equity leader recommends?

We have no simple answers to these questions, but we argue that schools and districts can certainly take steps to empower their equity leaders of color. First, they can make equity central to the urgent work of school improvement, rather than accepting the painfully slow pace of what David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) call “tinkering toward utopia.” This will require them to support the equity leader in conducting a serious, systemwide analysis of the district’s programs, policies, and practices, working in partnership with those members of the community who’ve been most deeply affected by past and present inequities. And it will require them to give real consideration to the proposals that follow, even if the equity leader recommends that they redirect and redistribute resources to areas of greatest need and impact.

Second, all district staff should be required to participate in antibias and anti-racist trainings that help them develop what Isabel Wilkerson (2020) calls “radical empathy,” which establishes a “kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it” (p. 368). However, merely requiring participation in such trainings is not sufficient. Districts must also define clear and consistent expectations for professional conduct, and they must hold teachers, staff, and administrators accountable for how they behave toward students, parents, and colleagues from all backgrounds.

Third, superintendents should ensure that the district equity leader has real opportunities to influence important policies and decisions. As Joshua Starr (2020) has argued, equity directors must be given a cabinet-level position, the role and scope of their work must be clearly communicated to everybody in the system, and their authority must be well-defined, enabling them to take action in response to complaints about racist language used in schools, for example, or in response to data reports showing that students of color have been disciplined more harshly than their peers.

Genuine efforts to promote equity in schools always require sacrifices. Not only must advocates be willing to endure abuse from those who oppose change, but some members of the community must be willing to see their power and privilege reduced. Many school districts have taken the first necessary step of hiring district leaders of color to help lead these efforts. And while that’s a good start, white colleagues, allies, and accomplices will also need to be willing to take some hits, too, in order to dismantle the underlying systems and policies of oppression that exist within schools.

 

Note: The authors thank Ivan Duran, former superintendent, and Eva Collins, acting superintendent of student academic performance and instructional leadership, in the Bellevue School District for their valuable feedback on this manuscript.

 

References

Dumas, M.J. (2014). ‘Losing an arm’: Schooling as a site of black suffering. Race Ethnicity and Education, 17 (1), 1-29.

El-Mekki, S. (2021). Teaching while Black: An open letter to school leaders. Educational Leadership, 78 (4), 40-44.

Farag, A. (2021). The fear of multiple truths: On teaching about racism in a predominantly white school. Phi Delta Kappan, 102 (5), 18-23.

Labaree, D.F. (2020). Two cheers for school bureaucracy. Phi Delta Kappan, 101 (6), 53-56.

Starr, J.P. (2020). So you hired an equity leader. Now what? Phi Delta Kappan, 101 (7), 60-61.

Tyack, D. & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering toward utopia: A century of public school reform. Harvard University Press.

Wilkerson, I. (2020). Caste: The origins of our discontents. Random House.