By Courtney Epton, White public school parent in NYC & some
Intended audience: those engaged in educational justice work for some time. If this isn’t you, here are some resources – stories and data – for additional context on why working with White people in public education systems is important.
This is a proposal for intentional work with White people as one critical part of a larger educational justice strategy.
Is ‘White people’ exactly what I mean? It’s not just White people, but it’s a whole lot of White people, so I’m just gonna keep saying White people throughout. Substitute ‘Whiteness,’ ‘people with White privilege,’ or whatever else if it makes this readable for you.
I wonder, too, do I begin by naming some of the ways White people, while at times meaning well, cause harm – and at other times not meaning well, cause irreparable harm, to explain why this work is needed? I remind myself that these are more than well documented, have been for quite some time, and continue to be each and every day. If we aren’t seeing them, nothing I can say in a couple of paragraphs will change that.
And so instead, I take space now to lay out a proposal for how a district or municipality might layer in engagement with White families and educators in their integration or educational justice plan. This is a plan-of-action for including White people work as one critical part of a larger educational justice strategy (like this one) – where White people are not centered, not ignored. This proposal does not replace, critique, or compete with any of the extraordinary integration and educational justice work already in progress (Alliance for Quality Education, for one). It is directly inspired by it – an effort to honor and embed the often invisible work so many have modeled, and to address a persistent barrier that can quietly destabilize or derail even the most thoughtful educational justice efforts. Simply put, if we want racial justice in our public schools, one thing we need is for White people to stop doing racist things. This plan can help us get to that critical 3.5% for creating lasting change.
Throughout my time as a public school teacher, educational non-profit worker, and for this context most significantly as an equity facilitator over the last 8 or so years, I’ve had the incredible honor of working within educational justice spaces with some brilliant thought leaders and educators. Grounded in these experiences, and grounded in my own body born into Whiteness, I urgently recommend the following three sites of accountability, working in tandem, for engaging White people within education spaces:
- For Educators: Sustained Multiracial Professional Learning Communities (like these) Ongoing, cohort-based learning spaces for educators and school-based staff
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- Grounded in racial literacy and historical context
- Focused on understanding disproportionality and institutional bias
- Including systems analysis, individual accountability, and affinity space work
- Sustained over time rather than one-off trainings
- For Caregiver Communities in Schools: Multiracial Family and Caregiver Organizing (like this) Long-term support for building/sustaining antiracist, multiracial school communities
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- Centering relationship-building and political education across difference
- Including racial affinity space work
- Capacity building to interrupt and dismantle harmful policies and practices
- Supporting the co-creation of equitable policies and school community norms
- For Families Not Yet in the School System: Early Engagement Proactive, preventative work in predominantly White, affluent and/or gentrifying neighborhoods
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- Disrupt the “smog” of misinformation around ‘school quality’ before enrollment decisions are made
- Using public education campaigns to challenge dominant myths about “good” and “bad” schools (like this for example)
- Facilitating community forums that interrupt resource hoarding and promote collective investment
Let’s fund these three streams of work. Let’s do them for years and study them and see if they have an impact on our kids, on our families, on our school-based staff, on each other. Let’s fund it and study it and tweak it and fix it and make it better. Let’s get this ball rolling on sustained White people work. Let’s see how working with and for and demanding things of White people works – not as a unique aside, not by chance, but as a strategy we value to affect one of the kinds of change this city, country, world very badly needs to take root.
We know how to do this. There are pockets doing this White people work right now. Really brilliant awesome pockets – Integrated Schools, people with great newsletters and substacks, people doing racial affinity work in multiracial spaces, people who are bringing together 12 to 18 White people to do some cool stuff and it’s dope and radical – insert your name here if this is you.
And if that’s you, you also know this work needs to scale and nobody wants to give (or take) money to scale White people work. But White people work benefits everyone. Let’s learn what scaling feels like, and then reflect and do better. We have everything we need to shape a world in which White people do better. Let’s cast a wider net, bring more people into the healing and accountability work that reshapes how White people, in both body and mind, show up with each other and with us all. Let’s go big, and get our local municipalities involved.
There are many, many things left unsaid here, questions I welcome and encourage. I am holding in my imagination a time and space when these questions can be a part of a collaborative conversation in the movement for integration and educational equity.
Let’s start putting into practice intentional, collective, sustained White people work. For the sake of all our humanity, White people need to heal and we need to be held accountable. And my goodness does everyone else need us to heal, too.
Thank you (for talking about White people work with me):
- Meredith Winfrey
- Barbara Gross
- Matt Gonzales
- Integrated Schools
- Crystal Martin, Ph.D
- Anna Lodder
- Andrew Lefkowits
- Vibhuti Arya Amirfar, Pharm.D, MPH
- Elizabeth Bishop, Ph.D
- Ana Duque
- Autumn Leonard
- Blair Cox
- Alex Epton
And an extra thank you to Zohran Mamdani and his team and the great City of New York
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