thoughts

tonight i sat in a room full of educators discussing the ways in which our work with young students of color must be transformed in order to open up dialogues about their race and class and culture in the context of today's world and the future of it. we talked about how important our work was. how important these conversations that we tend to avoid are. how education is the modern-day platform and starting point for social justice movements in america. we talked about how the students that we stand in front of and educate may come to us each day, teetering on the edges of either relentlessly inspiring hope or indefinitely debilitating dejection. we talked about mike brown. we talked about eric garner. we talked about our personal experiences with race within this country. we discussed how the death of a young person of color becomes a tragedy only when he or she is on a "good" path. we said, with the utmost passion and unwavering certainty, that the untimely death of a young person is and will always be, under any circumstance, a tragedy, a national tragedy. we talked about how this conversation alone was an example of ground-breaking moves in the right direction.

through all of this, i could only think of this young man who i remembered seeing around the way when i was growing up. he was, at that very moment, lying in a church not too far away from this school i was in, being mourned by his family and friends. i wondered if he, and the many young men like him, were who we were speaking of saving. i felt discouraged. i felt angry. i felt a deeply sinking sadness for him and the many young men like him, those that have passed and those that will. because, just as we fight these societal and social structures by educating our children, so it fights back to kill them. as i heard a woman say tonight, "no mother should feel that her womb is a threat, or a tomb."

and this civil war rages on inside of me.