What’s Missing From the Discourse About Anti-racist Teaching
People often remind me that my story is peculiar. “Black Kid From Compton Becomes a Harvard Professor” is the headline, as they see it. Although I am apprehensive to conflate a job at Harvard with some universal vision of success, I do recognize why my family, my friends, and even those with whom I am unacquainted take pride in the accomplishment. But this flattened narrative of individual achievement misses a key aspect of my development: My education was mostly led—and undoubtedly influenced—by Black teachers.
The educators who taught me, like so many generations of African American teachers before them, operated from a pedagogical vision that was fundamentally anti-racist. They exposed students to expansive visions of Black life, through both their lessons and the relationships they formed with us as students. They helped us understand that we were more than the suffering of our people. Our dignity and self-worth had to be cultivated from within, even as we were taught to resist racism in all its forms.
The concept of anti-racist teaching is being fiercely debated right now. Its advocates insist that students
