Missing Home, Dreading Home

Here in the Dhabs, we are still on holiday break and won’t start back at school until the ninth. Friday, I met up with a friend from work—we’ll call him “Alex.” After my three hour afternoon jet-lag nap, I hit him up and we met for shisha. We went to Idioms, the local hookah spot and smoked and chatted for nearly four hours. He’s a friend, colleague, and Black educator from South Carolina. We talked for a spell about our families, the complications of distance, and our lives outside of the US. I am from Tacoma, Cascadian to a fault, but my roots, like his, are in the South. My father was born in Laurel, Mississippi in 1930. My grandfather plied his trade as a shoe shine man and the Army brought my father to Fort Lewis during the Korean War. My mom was born on a farm in Arkansas in 1940. My step-dad, who raised me, hailed from Houston. I think of myself as having a Southern ROM, but a Washington RAM & UI.  

“Alex” and I spent a long while chopping up the contradictions of our current lives. The UAE is firmly an authoritarian state, an absolute monarchy with hereditary rule. But we are both happy here, with an undeniable and shared sense of peace. I have tried to explain it elsewhere but I always come up short trying to convey the sense of dread that comes with being in the US. Racism and the threat of arbitrary violence (state violence or otherwise) are like a fanny pack of anxiety you carry your entire life. Literally, every institution in the US has racialized outcomes: lower life-expectancy, lower median income, lower credit access, higher rates of homelessness, higher rates of incarceration, higher infant mortality, ad infinitum. We know all this data, but you aren’t truly aware of the weight of it until you get the opportunity to take that bag off. My assorted travels exposed the pervasive baseline anxiety that racism creates in my life. The only time that I get the full benefit of “Americanness” (whatever that even means) is when I depart the US. 

With the recent acquittal of the clearly guilty Pierce County Sheriff and upcoming trial of the police that murdered Manuel Ellis in 2020, law enforcement back home is front of mind for me. Despite the years of protests, despite the narratives about police “having their hands tied” and “not being able to do their jobs,” US police killed more people last year than any year on record: 1,176 people, This equivalent to the population of the entire towns of Ruston, West Pasco, Ilwaco, or Waterville, Washington. Every encounter I have with US law enforcement, from airport customs to local police, is an awkward dance where I have to bury my fear and hide my contempt. When I encounter police abroad, I don’t feel anxious—I feel they’re generally there to help. When I encounter cops abroad, I usually assume they mean me no harm. When I drive in the UAE and pass a police car, I don’t start going through my “what if I get pulled over” mental checklist. 

It may seem contradictory, but when I am in the Gulf, I find myself missing friends, family, and my old haunts in Tacoma. But each time I’m in the States, I feel a deep sense of relief when it’s time to leave. I don’t know how to square those competing sentiments. I have fewer absolute freedoms living in a monarchical state, but I have a better quality of freedoms: I am free from fear. I am free from being hassled for existing. I am free to live my life on my own terms. 

When people ask “when are you coming home to stay?” I always demur. I can’t give a straight answer. This mental tug is largely why.

My Mom Had to Lie to Get Me Into a Good School

Note: This post originally appeared on Education Post. After its publication I was contacted by several of my old teachers from Stanley, the elementary school my mom got me into. I am insanely thankful to Mrs. Anderson, Mrs. Winterhouse, Mrs. Bullock and all the staff from Stanley who taught me then and support and follow my work today. I was also contacted by classmates from Tacoma Montessori, which is how I got my hands on that dope class of '86 photo (Thanks Kati).  

I, like all Black Americans, am keenly aware of the gobsmacking contradictions that come with being Black in America.

Both of my parents fled the South in the 1960s to Washington State, roughly 20 years before I was born. I went through public school during the decline and eventual destruction of federally mandated school desegregation. For six years I proudly served in the U.S. Air Force Reserves, before leaving in 2003 in protest of the Iraq War. For a time, I was vice president of my college Republicans club. I hugged and lifted my teary-eyed mother off the ground, while my friends beat pots and pans in a spontaneous neighborhood parade on election night in 2008. I dabble from time-to-time in respectability politics, but believe vehemently that #BlackLivesMatter.

I am a 37-year-old Black male who teaches American government and politics at a school that is 80 percent students of color in a state that is roughly 80 percent White.

In my classroom, we spend a significant amount of time talking about the gaps between the values we espouse as a nation: liberty, justice, individualism, meritocracy and the reality that we witness on a daily basis: segregated schools, segregated housing, disproportionate law enforcement and sentencing, inequitable school funding, reduced life expectancy and other indicators of systemic racism.

This is the American dilemma: there is no other nation in the world where people who look like me do as well, yet no other nation has such a dogged and continued history of marginalizing and abusing those same folks. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of education.

As a young child, I was blessed to attend a phenomenal, private Montessori school for the early stages of my education. I have clear memories of sign language and Spanish lessons, hands-on science experiments about the physiology of a sunflower, and the shocking experience of seeing the chemical reaction when vinegar and baking soda are mixed for the first time.

I had a predictable routine. Every morning, my mother would drop me off at school on her way to work and every evening my grandmother would come and pick me up. Grandma and I would ride the #27 bus down MLK, past the bank and the local pool, back to her house where she would help me with my letters and numbers…then reading…then, as I aged, homework until my mother could pick me up and take me home for dinner.

This was my routine: mom, Montessori, slippers, learning, copious snacks, grandma, learning, mom, dinner, TV or reading (usually not TV), bed. Wash, rinse and repeat.

At the school, I also recall being one, along with my friend Sterling, of only two Black children. This was a harbinger of what was to come. As my neighborhood, Tacoma’s Hilltop, descended into drug-fueled gang violence in the 1980s, my school closed up shop and moved to whiter pastures, in a nearby suburb. The building remained vacant for years and at one point in my early adulthood, it was turned into a funeral home—a poignant reminder each time I passed by it.

My mother put me in the Montessori because she lacked faith in my neighborhood school. With my Montessori’s closure, my mother, ever resourceful, ever the advocate, went around the system. She lied. She used her church friend, Sister Crawford’s address, to get me enrolled at a school focused on the arts and sciences. I do not believe I would be the man I am—the teacher I am—without her lie.

But, in a nation as wealthy as America, no parent should have to lie about their address to get their child into a high-quality school. Sadly, I have heard this same tale from many, many other Black families. She did the same when it was time for me to go to high school. For my sake, she lied.

I think about this often when I stand before my own classroom today. What would Black parents say about my teaching and the way I treat their children? How do I best make my classroom a place where parents know their children are valued? How do I make my classroom a place where students feel safe and loved? How do I make my classroom instruction relevant to their lives and needs? These are the preconditions for effective teaching and learning. These are questions every educator should ask themselves every day.

As Washington State’s 2016 Teacher of the Year, I visited numerous schools and talked with hundreds of teachers across our state. My lone, lingering frustration from that experience is my anger at walking the halls of a school filled predominately with Brown students and happening on an International Baccalaureate (IB) history class that was Whiter than the Trump cabinet.

It is infuriating, but also painfully common. Students enrolled in Advanced Placement (AP) and IB classes are challenged to do college level work, while in high school, are statistically more likely to go onto college, and more likely be successful there. Denying children of color access to these classes—particularly at majority Brown schools—is an act of callous racial injustice, but also common practice across the country.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Throughout most of my life, the school where I teach was the lowest-performing high school in our district. That’s not the case anymore. We now graduate over 80 percent our students on time, over 45 percent of our kids are enrolled in an AP class. We are at capacity and have a waiting list to get into the school, despite the recent opening of a charter school nearby.

My AP classes are as diverse as the building itself and the neighborhood surrounding it. Last year nine starters from our football team, five of them Black males, passed the AP government exam—all of them are now in college. We’re living, breathing proof of what’s possible when we put our focus on the students.

District leadership has provided additional staffing and funding to our highest need schools. In my school we have a family support specialist—in others there are partnerships focused on keeping families in stable housing. I recently asked my mother, “Would you send me to McCarver [my old neighborhood school] today?” She replied, “Yes, yes I would.” This is a measure of progress we have made.

The fights in education shouldn’t be about models of schooling, but instead about the quality of the educational experience for the students. Kids of color and low-income students deserve great teachers, great schools, access to challenging courses and they shouldn’t have to lie to get them.

A Familiar Feeling, But Worse This Time

Via Facebook

If your phone rings at 5:30 in the morning, it’s never good news.

Yesterday morning, long before my alarm was due, my phone started vibrating on my dresser. I muttered several expletives to myself and rolled over planning to ignore it. Then my brain started turning through a cavalcade of worst case scenarios. I tried to go back to sleep, but that lasted about two minutes. Then my phone vibrated again. “Fine,” I muttered and went to check who it was. It was a simple, brutal, life altering text from my principal: “According to kids it looks like Elijah Crawford was killed last night.” I don’t really remember the next two hours.

Elijah was the most energetic student I have ever taught. He drove me up the wall freshmen year. But, over the next three years I had the pleasure of watching him grow, mellow slightly, and turn into one of the hardest working students I had last year. He was a captain of the wrestling team. He sat in the front seat in my AP Government class. He grinded for me like no other student last year. And I remember how proud of him I felt as I read his name last June at graduation. Now I can’t believe he’s gone.

We’ve lost kids before, we lost Chandler and Hector in the last few years. Last year, we lost Jalon--that one really hurt me too. But I have never felt a loss this personal.

The next thing I remember was finding his math teacher in her classroom. She also had a very close relationship with Elijah. We had just discussed a few days prior how much we missed him--now he was gone. We hugged and cried in her doorway for what seemed like an eternity. I was a mess; she was worse. Neither of us knew what to say. We just cried. There really aren’t words for moments like that, if there are I certainly am not smart or composed enough under pressure to know them. We just cried.

It was Election Day and I had an armful of Voters’ Pamphlets to use in Government with me. As I shuffled past pockets of students, some with tears in their eyes, other completely unaware of what had happened, I just cried.

My next clear memory was right before the bell rang for my first class. Tears again welled up in my eyes and as I greeted seniors at the door. I was informed that about a third of my class was downstairs with the district crisis team. I wished I was with them. I appreciate that my district has protocols in place for moments like this, but at the same time, there really aren’t protocols for moments like this.

Throughout the day people kept asking me “are you okay?” “how are you holding up?” “you, good B?” my answer to each one was the same: “I am a mess.” I was a mess and remain a mess as I type this. I keep listening to The Mighty Rio Grande by This Will Destroy You. I keep welling up when I see one of the kids from the wrestling team in the hallway. I really lost it this morning when the (frustratingly effective) Twitter algorithm, recommended I start following him.

But I am glad I am upset. I shouldn’t be okay.

Society is far too willing to accept the violence that frequently takes the lives of young black men. The normalization of the deaths of young black males is a scourge on our society. It should shame us all. We should never be comfortable with the loss of young men with their entire lives ahead of them. The normalization of funerals, of candle light vigils, of impromptu street corner memorials are all sad commentary on our shortcomings as a culture.

In the coming days, there will be news reports and investigations. There will be a moment of silence at the football game. There will be tears. Tomorrow I will call his mother and see how I can help the family, but for now, I am not okay. 

None of us should be okay.