Black History Month at the AFT

Wispy threads of centuries-old family history may be tenuous — and upsetting in how they diminish living people to chattel. But they are part of a growing fabric of knowledge about the lives of enslaved people otherwise lost to history.

Every February, a chorus of voices proclaims Black History Month. But the truth is, we must insist on a more complete understanding of this country’s origins every month and every day, especially in our public schools.

It’s no surprise that student debt is disproportionately higher for Black people. Barriers to higher education mean barriers to higher-paying jobs, which mean less opportunity to benefit from reliable housing, high-quality healthcare and well-resourced schools and communities.

Webster’s Dictionary defines healthcare as “efforts made to maintain or restore physical, mental, or emotional well-being, especially by trained and licensed professionals.” I expected it to be much more complicated based on the current state of affairs. Further, it defines “equal” as “sameness or equivalence in number, quantity, or measure”; however, healthcare equity is not so simple for Milwaukee County, where I work. In fact, it’s the opposite of equal because, for many years, the disparity in the healthcare system has been tragically unbalanced.

In 2021, my union Health Professionals and Allied Employees in New Jersey took an important step when we passed a resolution at our convention resolving to put the full weight of our union behind efforts to address racial disparities in healthcare.

I have been teaching United States history at the High School for Environmental Studies, a New York City public high school, for 18 years and every year it feels as though I am negotiating two things at once: I am sharing painful, even crushing truths about the American story while at the same time presenting this knowledge of our ugly history as a tool we can all use to take action and bring us closer to our nations’ foundational ideas.

Among the many tensions that the year 2020 laid bare, the divisions in our beliefs about the continued role of racism in the United States were central. While some of these divisions were drawn along political lines, with liberals far more likely than conservatives to see systemic racism as an ongoing problem, many were also drawn along racial lines. Although Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s deaths brought together one of the largest multiracial coalitions in recent protest history, our nation remains divided in beliefs about the root causes of racial injustice, what we should do about it, and who is willing to do the work.

As the United States contends with a pivotal moment of reckoning on racial justice, inequitable treatment in healthcare has risen in the public consciousness—largely due to the disproportionately high rates of COVID-19 among Black Americans and other communities of color. Behind the statistics are personal stories of people of color, across geography, socioeconomic status, and health profile, who have been denied access to lifesaving care, even as their expressions of pain, discomfort, and illness have been ignored. For those of us working in health equity and who have studied the history of mistreatment of marginalized communities by the medical establishment, hearing and seeing these stories play out in the context of COVID-19 is not surprising. As devastating as these stories are, the commonalities are always Black and brown skin, mistreatment, and, far too often, premature death.

So, what do you do?” As a history professor, this question has felt like an invitation into a trap lately. “I’m a teacher.” “Oh, yeah? What do you teach?” Sometimes I’m purposefully vague. I respond to the cab driver, the airplane seatmate, or the fellow traveler on the crowded train that I teach US history. I pray that it’s left there.

Throughout my career studying the relationship between race and teachers’ instructional practices,¹ I’ve learned that many teachers may not fully realize the importance of this relationship or how it plays out in the classroom. For instance, one science teacher I worked with told me that when he first began his teaching career, he wanted to focus solely on teaching his content: “I just want them to get excited about science,” he explained. However, he was a white teacher working in an urban school with students of color living below the poverty line. Often, students called him “racist,” questioned his authority, expressed that he did not “know” them, and demanded that he change.

In a recent interview, Vita—who identifies as Black, trans, nonbinary, mentally disabled, pansexual, demisexual, and femme—powerfully highlighted how living in a world that is structured against her has harmed her health.

One of the ways I think being a Black pansexual trans woman affects my hypertension directly is stress.... I hadn’t had super high blood pressure until I came out.... It’s a mental exercise to leave the house now, you know, and to feel confident enough that you would get from point A to point B and back to point A safely.... On a racial level, there’s a societal stigma that Black people aren’t intelligent...

In August 2020, I welcomed 400 educators into my Culturally Responsive Education (CRE) by Design Online Professional Learning Community (PLC). This nine-month deep dive into redesigning instruction through a culturally responsive lens went beyond gimmicks and one-off activities. Then, in January 2021, we welcomed another 600 teachers, instructional coaches, and site leaders who wanted to participate. The CRE by Design virtual platform was a few years in the making, long before the pandemic.