When people come into conflict over identity issues, how can educators promote understanding?

A storm has come upon us. It’s been brewing for some time. Culture wars. Identity politics. Parents against their kids being exposed to controversial and inappropriate material. Educators under attack. Parents’ rights. Teachers’ plights. As we’ve pushed for inclusion of all marginalized students of different identities, we’ve seen a backlash of political and parental indignation. What are educators supposed to do?

Sometimes, we have to draw up the battle lines and stand on the right side of them. This is certainly true when it comes to Black Lives Matter versus white supremacy; LGBTQ+ pride against homophobia; gender equity against toxic masculinity; love and dignity against hate and dehumanization.

Yet not every dispute comes down to oppressors and oppressed. None of us has only a single, simple identity. More than 33 million Americans identify as being of two or more races, for example (Foster-Frau, Mellnik, & Blanco, 2021). Almost half of Brazil, the world’s ninth largest economy, now identifies as mixed race (Malleret, 2023). Although U.S. Census data acknowledge multiracial identities (Jones et al., 2021), many school districts lag behind and don’t collect these data.

When schools recognize or embrace just one identity, they miss many other parts of students’ identities that compound or complicate their marginalization. Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) coined the term intersectionality to describe the compounding effects of holding multiple marginalized identities. But discussions of this concept don’t fully encompass what intersectionality might mean. What happens when people’s intersecting identities aren’t only expressions of multiple oppressions? What do we do when people are both oppressors and oppressed? This is what  we call conflicting intersectionality (Shirley & Hargreaves, 2024).

Members of white working-class communities are often economically marginalized, yet some of them are also xenophobic and racist. Religious-based schools often are lauded for their ability to develop their students’ moral and spiritual identities. But many also have been slower to include students with LGBTQ+ identities. The rights of transgender students to use restrooms where they feel safe are not always easily reconciled with the rights of cisgender girls and their families to feel safe, too. In schools and college campuses across the country, bitter disputes are raging about who have been the most egregious aggressors in the war in the Middle East.

It’s complicated. So, what on earth should school leaders do? What we must seek, at the very least, are ways to build better understanding among different groups and their identities. Here, we offer five concepts that can help us do this.

The power of representation

Politics is about power and therefore also about voice and representation. Representation is about who does and doesn’t have a seat at the table, and who is or isn’t in the forefront of people’s thinking. The point of representation is not to check off all relevant boxes. There are too many boxes to check, and no single person can reasonably represent everyone in their identity category. The goal, rather, is to widen contributions beyond a single, dominant, perspective. It is to bring different voices into the room and establish a norm of putting oneself in others’ shoes.

The most obvious aspect of representation is asking who is in the room. The most essential aspect of it, though, is to always be mindful of who is not in the room and of how to consider their interests and experiences.

The emotion of sympathy

Understanding people who are different from us has an emotional dimension. Emotional understanding depends on our being able to reach down into the reserves of our own experiences to connect with the emotions of others. This is what sympathy is. Feeling what life is like for other people encourages us to take more care of them. Sympathy involves more than empathy. It’s about feeling with people, not just feeling for them. Catfishers and gold diggers, for example, use empathy to fleece their targets of their money, but they don’t have any sympathy for them.

Sympathy, Adam Smith (1759), the 18th-century economist, said, is the basic emotion of democracy. One way we can develop genuine sympathy for others is by drawing on analogous experiences of our own suffering, even when the suffering is not the same. You may not be gay, for instance, but you may be more easily able to empathize with LGBTQ+ individuals who have been bullied if you can connect with having been bullied for another reason. You may not be a refugee student arriving in a foreign land. But you might have felt like an outsider when you moved to a new school for other reasons.

The ability to learn

The most obvious way to understand something new is to learn it. This is the essence of education. If we believe that we can only understand diverse identities by having that diversity being represented in the room, then we have given up hope in the power and the promise of learning. If all children can learn, then all adults can, too. We don’t have to be replicants of someone with another identity to understand them and how they feel. Women can understand men, adults can understand children, extroverts can understand introverts, and people of one race can understand those of another.

Literature, drama, and the arts give us access to ways of life we may never experience for ourselves. They can help us to feel what it’s like to be a monarch, an enslaved person, or a convict; to live through a war or a famine; to exist in another culture far away from one’s own; or to be part of another generation. Why else would people of many ethnicities read The Color Purple or Wild Swans if they weren’t motivated to step into African American or Chinese cultures and all the identities that populate them?

The common good

Since the early 2000s, until a change of government five years ago, the Canadian province of Ontario established a policy guideline to improve inclusion and student achievement. Schools in 10 districts that we collaborated with between 2009 and 2018 brought this policy to life (Hargreaves & Shirley, 2022). Our continuing work in Canada through the Canadian Playful Schools Network (https://playjouer.ca/) shows that the spirit of this inclusive approach persists.

The principle underpinning this guideline embodies the original precepts of universal design for learning: What is essential for validating one group’s identity may well be good for all students, whatever their identity. For example:

• All students, not just those with special educational needs, will be more successful when every student is involved in developing and writing an individual educational plan, when they have the skills and opportunity to advocate for the supports and approaches that help them learn best, and when they can and do use digital technologies to express what they know.
• All students, not just those of Indigenous heritage, will benefit from learning outdoors, sustainably, in nature; from interacting in circles rather than listening in rows; and from storytelling and the arts taking a more prominent place in the curriculum.
• All students, not just those who speak a minority language or come from a minority culture, prosper when their identities are accorded as much priority as student achievement gains.
• All students, not just those with LGBTQ+ identities, will flourish in a school environment from which bullying and stigmatization have been excised and which is a safe place where they can thrive.
• All students will finally get better bathrooms when toilets are redesigned to be gender neutral wherever possible.
• All students will benefit from welcoming and engaging with immigrants, as well as other newcomers, such as children in military families or students forced to change schools when their parents get new jobs or split up.

A spirit of reconciliation

In the past few years, efforts to promote inclusion for more and more students have provoked indignation among parents and school board members. Our students, their families, and their teachers have been divided into villains and victims, those who have privilege and those who are oppressed. When we mature as human beings, we often discover that few people are wholly good or completely bad. People are complex and cannot automatically be categorized as unarguably privileged and unambiguously oppressed. Labeling people according to a single characteristic, even when this is well meant, is an insult to their dignity and a betrayal of the fullness of who they are as human beings.

What do we do when transgender activists and gender-critical feminists cannot agree on the definition of a woman? How can we respect religious freedom when some faith groups adopt patriarchal attitudes about girls and women? How can we honor the historical struggles and vocational skills of the white working class without turning a blind eye to manifestations of racism and xenophobia? How can the rights to inclusion of individual children with self-regulation issues be squared with the rights of other children to learn without disruption?

This brings us back to the problems of conflicting intersectionality. One useful way out of this thorny labyrinth again comes from Ontario’s legal framework for dealing with what it calls competing human rights. The Ontario Human Rights Code (2013) notes that “competing human rights involve situations where parties . . .  claim that the enjoyment of an individual or group’s human rights and freedoms, as protected by law, would interfere with another’s rights and freedoms.” The goal of the code is to encourage people to:

• Show dignity and respect for one another.
• Encourage mutual recognition of interests, rights, and obligations.
• Facilitate maximum recognition of rights, wherever possible.
• Address stigma and power imbalances and help to give marginalized individuals and groups a voice.
• Encourage cooperation and shared responsibility for finding agreeable solutions.

We need processes for addressing these kinds of issues that embody virtues such as civility, generosity, solidarity, humility, forgiveness, rationality, and practicality.

A way forward

It’s time to get beyond the two discrete categories of oppressors and oppressed. We must confront oppression in the curriculum and in life unflinchingly, wherever it exists. But we must focus on specific acts of oppression and not unfairly single out or stigmatize people as being exclusively on one side or the other. Identities are complicated. First appearances can be deceptive. Our most basic goal must be better understanding as a basis for learning to live together. Better representation, drawing upon our capacity for sympathy, not giving up on the power of learning, seeking out what serves the common good, and conducting disagreements with consideration for each other’s rights, are some of the best ways to define and defend the inclusive school and to get us through the storms of outrage and indignation.

References

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989 (1), 139-167.

Foster-Frau, S., Mellnik, T., & Blanco, A. (2021, Oct. 8). ‘We’re talking about a big, powerful phenomenon’: Multiracial Americans drive change. The Washington Post.

Hargreaves, A. & Shirley, D. (2022). Well-being in schools:  Three forces that will uplift your students in a volatile world. ASCD.

Jones, N., Marks, R., Ramirez, R., & Ríos-Vargas, M. (2021, Aug. 12). 2020 census illuminates racial and ethnic composition of the country. United States Census Bureau.

Malleret, C. (2023, Dec. 22). Mixed-race people become Brazil’s biggest population group. The Guardian.

Ontario Human Rights Commission. (2013). Guide to your rights and responsibilities under the Human Rights Code.

Shirley, D. & Hargreaves, A. (2023). The age of identity: Who do our kids think they are . . . and how do we help them belong? Corwin.

Smith, A. (1759). The theory of moral sentiments.

This article appears in the April 2024 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 7, p. 44-47.