Finding a Better Way

Jeanne C. DeFazio, Jeanne C. DeFazio

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781666705041
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Ethnische Studien

This is a wonderful collection of conversations from ethnically diverse contributors using the art form of writing to promote inclusion and as an antidote to structural racism. Thanks to these contributing authors whose conversations allow us to understand the experience of people who have a bias against them. This collection of conversations offers some ideas and strategies. What is the next step?

Section One

Defining Strategies and Frameworks for Conversations about Racial Reconciliation

Indira Palmatier

Indira takes a stand for English language learners, facilitating conversations about “what’s wrong” but also explaining “what could work.” Indira created practical tools and a skill-based framework, which is important in conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Growing up as an immigrant in England in the 1950s and early 1960s, I experienced the value ascribed to accents. As a child I remember a con- tinuous mild dread that came with feeling “one down” to the dominant society. One aspired to being as much like the “upper crust” as possible, with accents that, today, sound like speech impediments. If you had that accent the world opened up to you. If not, you could expect to be relegated to the lower echelons, your footsteps barely heard. Could there not be some vein of resentment at this pressure?

So, the question is what to do with a possible, almost organic, resistance to the very idea of changing something so ingrained as a language with all its nuances and nurturing. One could start right there. Questions such as “What are some important parts of your own language? What are things your mother said to you that you still remember? Please say these out loud in your mother tongue. How do you carry them with you? What do you feel when you hear your own language versus struggling to make yourself understood in another?” (powerless, stupid, disregarded, an irritation?). The longer the description the better—don’t be afraid, just stay present, stay patient. The concept of “join and lead” begins to come alive. Besides the obvious, that it will help you get along in this society, how else might it be useful to learn English in a way you haven’t thought of before? And, if that happened, then what else could happen? After that what else could open up for you personally? Who else could benefit? How? How would your identity change, who would you then be? Don’t accept monosyllabic answers, express your faith that the students have the answers already within them. Eventually, with this line of reasoning one looks for “freedom” as the ultimate answer. And everyone wants freedom!

Important in goals to strive to reach is to listen as long and as deeply as one can. Only after all is “emptied out” is the receiver open to a new approach, a new possibility. At that point, when the goal is clear and bright, beautiful and beckoning, the teacher holds a precious hope for the future.6

Frances Kai-Hwa Wang’s article “California Governor Signs Bill to Develop High School Ethnic Studies Curriculum” begs the question: can education legislation promote racial reconciliation?

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed new legislation Tuesday to develop a model curriculum for ethnic studies in high schools, according to the Office of the Governor. Bill AB-2016, was sponsored by Assemblymember Luis A. Alejo (D-Salinas) and had bipartisan support in both houses. “AB-2016 is a landmark law that will ensure all California high school students have an opportunity to learn about their own or another culture’s history and importance in shaping the state’s past, present, and future,” founder of grassroots education news and civic tech site K-12 News Network Cynthia Liu told NBC News. “We hope mutual understanding, empathy, and racial/cultural literacy will be the fruit of this important law. The law requires the California Instructional Quality Commission to develop—and California’s State Board of Education to adopt—a model curriculum in ethnic studies, according to Alejo’s office. This curriculum will be developed with ethnic studies faculty from California universities and public school teachers with experience teaching ethnic studies.7

Educators need to create the space to talk about race. While student teaching in a California public middle school, I gave a life skills lesson to a class after an adolescent male student tore the burka off the head of a female African American Muslim student during class. I was required to send him to the vice-principal’s office immediately. Eventually, the mother of the female student took legal action. During the remainder of the class, I engaged the students in an exercise that reenacted the incident as an interactive instant replay. The students identified and modeled appropriate behavior. The group participation kept the students focused and enhanced their understanding as they participated in real dialogue around the issues of racial and religious justice. They took from that class the hands-on experience of upholding equal rights too often entrenched in racial disparities.

The death of George Floyd and the protests that have followed sparked a national dialogue about race in America. For many, discussions about race and the reality of living in America as a black person happen daily. But many households, communities, and workplaces are having these conversations for the first time. How can employers and colleagues better support employees of color? What is the most productive way to talk about race in the workplace?8

Charlie Lehman

Lehman’s reflection on “Christians and American Racism” is an excellent framework preparing readers for constructive conversations about race and equity.

Over the past couple of decades, conservative Christians have stood up and sacrificed for endangered human life, specifically fetal life. Now conservative Christians oppose others who stand up and sacrifice for endangered human life, specifically Black life. Conservative Christians point to the violence, law-breaking, hypocrisy, and stated opposition to the institution of the family they have detected in the Black Lives Matter movement. I dispute the moral high ground of a movement characterized by assassination, intimidation, law-breaking, and hypocrisy. Where was the conservative Christian outrage at the death of half a million Iraqi children whose parents, unlike the parents of American unborn children, struggled in vain to keep them alive?

Who questions the values expressed in our founding documents? But, as the character Jackie Cogan points out in Killing Them Softly, the movie based on George V. Higgins’s Cogan’s Trade, the man who enshrined the inalienable rights of men kept his son in slavery. The expressed values are routinely superseded by the other, dark values. Some pro-lifers and Black Lives Matter activists make sacrifices for the victims of these other values, specific human beings.

My mom followed Christ better than I do. She worshipped, helped to found a church in her old age, visited the sick and elderly, cared for her mother and aunt in their final days, and put up with me. But, as I remember it, she accepted Emancipation as America’s answer to racism. If she were aware of the statutory racism of restrictive covenants and their damage to Black families, I don’t remember her speaking about it. I don’t believe my mom understood that the woes of Black Americans in the twentieth century were not their own fault, that official and corporate America put them where they were and kept them there for the benefit of White America.

I do not know how current these figures are, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the only differences would be reflected in their sources—FBI? The Innocence Project? As I understand it, non-Whites are treated more harshly at each stage of the criminal procedure: pretrial, trial, sentencing, and appeal. A lawyer complained to me and his officemate about an LSD sales case he’d been assigned—the only thing his client had going for her was her white skin.

My first assignment at the Los Angeles County Public Defender was felony arraignments. I got so used to the horde of low-level Black and Hispanic clients in the grungy, packed lock-up behind the courtroom that I was taken aback by seeing an institutionalized Japanese-American convict there on a new case. His presence there was not normal. As a paralegal, I benefited from the examples, kindness, and mentoring of Black, Hispanic, Asian, and White superiors and peers for twenty-five years. It was like Carl Weathers’s respect and kindness shown to a young, tense actor.9

Jozy Pollock

As a former chaplain to the Los Angeles County Jail, Jozy ministered to the incarcerated from every race. While many professionals feel ill-equipped on what to do when it comes to diversity and inclusion, Jozy Pollock built a safe space and practiced engagement.

Jozy recently reflected on the multicultural community she developed as a chaplain ministering alongside Mel at the Los Angeles County Jail. She commented that, while watching a ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Martha Reyes
• Foreword by Olga Soler
• Finding a Better Way by Jeanne DeFazio
• Section One: Defining Strategies and Frameworks for Conversations about Racial Reconciliation
• Section Two: Diversity and Inclusion in the Interracial Family
• Afterword by Francois Augustin
• About the Authors
• Bibliography