Monthly Archives: January 2023

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Divided We Stand

Five days after the murder of George Floyd, I sat by my daughter’s bed in our local children’s hospital, feeling deeply saddened and helpless about the racial division in our country. I shared a list on social media called “Anti-Racism Resources” that stated it was “intended to serve as a resource to white people and parents to deepen our anti-racism work.” Along with the link, I wrote a simple message: “Excellent list of resources for teacher friends, mom friends, and just friends in general. I want to be part of the solution.” A measly offering, I knew, but somehow it felt better than doing and saying nothing.

A Facebook “friend” that I knew only from some shared community activities over the years commented, “Though I agree with the sentiment and the drive to do something helpful, several of the resources listed in this reference have a decided political and polarizing agenda.” I was genuinely puzzled by her comment and simply responded that I appreciated a starting point for resources but trusted everyone to discern for themselves what is useful for their needs and what is not. 

She was not reassured and replied with, “It’s your wall and of course you are free to do as you wish [insert happy face emoji]. I am just concerned about the widespread dissemination of anything that may be geared at creating more divisiveness.”

This exchange has stayed with me over the past several years as educational debates have raged across the country. I recently stepped away from a teaching job after being told to avoid “any politically charged issues and topics” in developing a course for teachers working with at-risk learners—a virtual impossibility, considering poverty and race are two predominant causes of a learner being at risk of academic failure. In my home state of Virginia, an executive order was passed “ending the use of inherently divisive concepts, including critical race theory, and restoring excellence in K-12 public education in the Commonwealth.” Florida just banned a new College Board pilot Advanced Placement (AP) course in African American Studies on the grounds that the course is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.” 

As an English teacher who has taught AP courses for the past five years, the Florida ban astonishes me. AP courses are not mandated; they are chosen by students—typically the most academically advanced students. They are carefully designed courses with rigorous guidelines because they culminate in an exam that provides students an opportunity to earn college credit. The AP courses offered by the College Board reflect an array of subject areas representative of the choices in the general education curriculum of a typical liberal arts college—Calculus, Statistics, Chemistry, Environmental Science, Psychology, Human Geography, Music Theory, European History, Chinese Language and Culture, and Microeconomics are just a sampling of the courses currently offered. A course in African American Studies is a logical addition to the AP course menu.

The statement that such a course “significantly lacks educational value” would be baffling out of the context of our current culture of stupefying political and governmental attempts to silence voices that desperately need to be heard. Ironically, the very act of avoiding “divisive concepts” perpetuates divisiveness more than the inclusion of them ever would. Rather than “protecting” students from divisiveness, these acts fracture our nation, dividing us into those who foster ignorance and those who seek understanding.

As a teacher, I encouraged my students to join academic conversations by articulating their own experiences, beliefs, and opinions and supporting them. When researching an issue, I implored them to go first to primary sources—the letters, speeches, transcripts, and memoirs of participants in whatever historical, scientific, or cultural event they were studying. If participants were silent, I encouraged them to discover why. Were they illiterate? If so, why? Did a disability or lack of access to necessary tools inhibit their ability to communicate their experiences? Did systems exist that silenced or simply did not value their perspectives? 

Primary sources are not infallible. History is not definitive. Perspective and context are vital components of every story. The same experience told from multiple viewpoints will always sound different, much as each instrument in an orchestra produces a unique sound and plays a unique part of a movement. Diverse, even contradictory, stories paint a fuller, more detailed picture of an event and while they can never fully capture an experience, they provide a curious individual the opportunity to at least try to understand the event or situation being described. Omitting the most tragic, flawed, disturbing parts of a history deprives a learner not only of the full picture but also of the lessons to be learned, even from failures and atrocities. The authors of the Old Testament books of Judges, the Kings, and the Chronicles clearly knew this.

I, too, once thought that the goal was to ignore difference and pursue unity. But unity doesn’t require sameness or turning a blind eye to difference. The foundation of unity is a common respect for the value of human life—every human life. Understanding as much as possible about the histories and experiences of others is unifying, not divisive. My experience as a white single parent of children with disabilities differs from those of my black friend who parents two young adults, including a son, in a culture where black men are in danger if they are pulled over for a burned-out taillight. They differ from those of a friend who co-parents her son with her fiancé, her ex-husband, and her ex-husband’s husband. They differ from a Sikh family that is torn between the desire to pass on tradition and the risk of sending a turbaned man out into a world of fear and hate. They differ from the men and women who sit on death row either because they made a mistake or because someone else did and they were falsely imprisoned for it. They differ from a child who grows up in a neighborhood where drugs are easier to get than food. They differ from my own child whose brain suffered so much damage at birth that she struggles to see, to eat, and to move her body in the simplest of ways. I will never fully comprehend any more than someone else could fully grasp my lived experience, but every story I hear or read expands my capacity for empathy and my sense of unity to the people in our beautifully diverse nation. 

My own journey to understand more about racial justice has shown me both the impossibility of truly understanding and the necessity of never ceasing my efforts to do so. In the weeks after George Floyd’s murder, I had the opportunity to participate in a prayer march with members of my church. I have never felt more truly a part of the body of Christ than I did marching through the streets of Norfolk, Virginia, with my Black Lives Matter sign. But I was also taken to school that day. Listening to community leaders speak about specifics of systemic racism in our community opened my eyes to how very little I know about how we got to where we are today. I am an educated person. I am a teacher. I have had many black friends through all stages of my life. I admire numerous black heroes in our nation. I took college courses on African American literature and have included works by Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Bryan Stevenson, and many other black writers in my English courses for years. I thought, at the very least, I was not part of the problem. But after listening to speaker after speaker at that prayer march, I realized how incredibly ignorant I have been to the depths and sources and consequences of the racial disparities in our nation and how complicit I am in them.

Since that June day in 2020, I have read and listened voraciously, trying to learn what my education failed to teach me. I have been a student of Anthony Ray Hinton, Jr., Esau McCaulley, Wes Moore, Ian Manuel, Austin Channing Brown, Brandon P. Fleming, Howard Thurman, Nikole-Hannah Jones, Danté Stewart, Ibram X. Kendi, Cole Arthur Riley, and Derrick Bell. My bookshelves overflow with the stories and perspectives that will teach me next. Everything I read or hear simultaneously helps me understand more and highlights the fact that I can never truly understand. It exposes not only my ignorance but also my illusions of innocence. As long as the problem of racial injustice exists, we are all part of the problem. Every story I hear has expanded both my understanding of the “faces at the bottom of the well” and my desire to join their ascent, however hopeless it sometimes feels. 

The idea that a course in African American Studies “significantly lacks educational value” is ludicrous. It would be valuable for every American citizen to take that course—and a course on every other marginalized people group in our country for that matter. We all need MORE understanding, not less. The word educate is derived from the Latin root educat (led out). To educate is to lead someone out of ignorance, not by deciding what they should know or believe but by equipping them to be critical thinkers who are capable of reading multiple perspectives, discerning their own understanding and beliefs, and then adding their voice to the conversation—the conversation of a diverse nation united by its mutual respect for the people that comprise it. The thought of any individual seeking to hinder another individual’s access to specific perspectives and stories defies the very purpose of education. It is an act rooted in ignorance and fear. It is the epitome of the very divisiveness it seeks to eradicate.

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Team Hamlin

I ordered my first official NFL jersey last week. It only took me 52 years. I enjoy a good pro football game but have never closely followed an NFL team. My team loyalties lie with my college alma maters. As a lifelong UNC Tar Heel basketball fan and a dedicated Michigan Wolverine football fan, I bleed Carolina blue on the basketball court and have Go Blue forever imprinted in my DNA from grad school days in “The Big House.” 

I will wear my Buffalo Bills Hamlin 3 jersey with no pretense of being a member of the Bills Mafia (yet) but simply as a grateful tribute to the hope and inspiration I witnessed over the first week of 2023. In stark contrast to the embarrassing fiasco played out in our nation’s capitol by bickering national “leaders,” watching the events surrounding Damar Hamlin’s traumatic injury unfold exemplified all the good I want to believe about humanity and our nation’s potential. 

I once longed for Condoleezza Rice to run for president and think I now understand why she set her sights on the NFL commissioner position instead. Two decades ago in the New York Times, Rice was quoted as saying, “I think it would be a very interesting job because I actually think football, with all due respect to baseball, is a kind of national pastime that brings people together across social lines, across racial lines. And I think it’s an important American institution.”

That’s exactly what we witnessed over the first week of 2023 and it was truly beautiful. Hamlin’s injury was horrific and terrifying, and I wish it had not happened to him. But all that was triggered the moment he crumpled to the turf was extraordinary and will hopefully carry him through his long road to recovery and beyond.

When I wear my jersey, I will think of Damar’s parents, who hospital personnel and the Bills head coach described as exemplary in their handling of their son’s life-threatening injury. As a parent of multiple children with complex medical issues, I have spent many days of my life in ICUs, including the day our son Timothy died there. It is both an overwhelming and beautiful place to be, but it is not an easy place to be. Tensions run high in life-or-death situations, and the ICU is a constant life-or-death situation for its inhabitants. The ICU staff is trained for that, the patients are fighting for their lives, but family members are thrust into the environment, usually without warning. Sleep is elusive, stress abounds, and the stakes are high. To have your parenting described as exemplary in that context is an impressive tribute.

Damar credits the presence of his parents as “the biggest difference” in his life, but that presence did not come easily. Damar’s dad was imprisoned for a drug conviction for three-and-a-half years of Damar’s childhood. Whatever choices may have led to Mario Hamlin’s conviction as a young father, they were clearly overshadowed by his choice not to let that define him or give him an excuse to abandon his son. As Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) says repeatedly, “Each of us is more than the worst thing we have ever done.” The fact that Nina and Mario Hamlin held their young family together through such adversity likely prepared them for what they faced on January 2 and the days that followed; the hottest fires forge the strongest steel. When I wear my jersey, I will hope to parent my family with the same resolve.

My Tar Heel legacy (born, bred, dead as our fight song so eloquently states) imprinted me with a clear understanding of rivalry and competition. When we beat Duke in the semifinal game of the 2022 Final Four, that was as satisfying to me as winning the national title would have been. (In addition to passing the dreaded swim test, all UNC grads are mandated to hate Duke for the rest of their days.) Seeing the intensity of the Bengals-Bills competition immediately dissolve into unity in prayer and support for Damar on the field and over the week that followed was incredible to witness. Cincinnati’s acts of hospitality and support trickled across the nation and into Week 18 of competition as opposing players, coaches, and fans expressed support for Damar and the Bills. When I wear my jersey, I will carry these memories as hope for our polarized nation.    

Medical providers have long been heroes in my world. The heart surgeon who repaired the hole in my daughter’s heart and the perfusionist who simulated her heart and lungs while the surgeon worked seemed to have superpowers in my eyes. The many nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists, and countless other medical providers who have cared for my kids year after year have my utmost respect. Seeing the athletic trainers, paramedics, trauma physicians, and other “ordinary” folks doing their everyday jobs while the nation was riveted to television broadcasts and Twitter updates allowed a dark situation to illuminate something that happens somewhere every single hour of every single day. When I wear my jersey, I will remember the people who live ever-ready to fight for the life of whoever needs their care. 

My youngest son is my sports-watching buddy, but he can never play a contact sport because of the cerebral shunt placed in his head just before his first birthday. He can’t emulate the physical prowess of the elite athletes we cheer for, but I will surely encourage him to show the love and brotherhood that Damar Hamlin’s NFL brothers demonstrated this past week. The hugs, tears, and prayers were not limited to the minutes or even hours that followed Damar’s cardiac arrest but extended into the next weekend and to the week of his return to Buffalo. In a world where masculinity is too often equated with self-reliance, bravado, and emotional absence, we sure needed to see that when shaken by sudden trauma, the biggest, strongest, toughest men in our society dropped to their knees, bowed their heads, and pleaded for the life of their brother. And as they waited days for news, they clung to and took care of each other. When I wear my jersey, I will remember that as Damar tweeted after waking up to find he had “won the game of life,” “Putting love into the world comes back 3xs as much.” 

I do not subscribe to the philosophy that tragedies happen “for a reason,” but looking for the good and the hope in darkness has served me well in the hardest seasons of my life. Damar Hamlin has a long recovery ahead of him, but everything I have seen from him, his family, and his teammates makes me believe that they, too, will be looking for the good and the hope. Perhaps the nation that came together in the first week of 2023 to show “Love for Damar” can put some love back into the world by believing that young dads in prison can grow into exemplary parents and by supporting overworked medical providers whether they care for pro athletes or kids with disabilities. Maybe we can encourage our sons to look up to men who pray and cry and hug and stand in unity, even for their “enemies.” And perhaps our polarized nation, whose leaders seem to be constantly embroiled in conflict, can follow the NFL’s playbook this past week and come together across racial, social, and political lines. That’s the team I want to be on—the team whose jersey says Hamlin 3.