This is an edited version of a Facebook post from my personal page earlier today. I wonder aloud how much your experience as a FL teacher has led you to the same conclusion as I, that to teach others to engage cultural outsiders in respectful communication that honors their identity and that does not assume... is a wonderful part of our profession.
So, it is FIFTY years ago today that this country first heard "I Have a Dream?" That's amazing. Although I was born just a bit after King, Jr.'s assassination, I was profoundly affected by him and the Civil Rights Movement, generally. If you were my friend or classmate back in school, you're going to hear things today of which you likely had no inkling. If you are a former student of mine who now can see me on FB, that goes double. One day, you will talk about how you witnessed history while you were going through the halls of your school, too, just as I did. Thank God you had graduated before Miley Cyrus stuck out her tongue at the VMAs. You'll get to talk about something else!
You see, I've come to realize that growing up in the "post-Civil-Rights" era meant that I got see and feel things that those in other eras didn't and it has shaped me powerfully. When I was a Mississippi first grader, in 1975, desegregation had only made it out of the courts there for about five years. I'm sure the shock was still there, although I was six and therefore oblivious. But by the time I walked through all the hallways, we learned "I Have a Dream," and Booker T. Washington, and Richard Wright, and walked by the Black History Month posters, proudly constructed by girls with little scrubbed faces and braids in their hair set off by colored marbles on the ends of stretchy little bands. I had Black teachers (we didn't say African American yet) who HAD to become teachers, with no other choice, because, they explained, that segregation had prevented them from having any other career choice as college students (Try to imagine, North Springs graduates, being told that you CAN'T pursue a certain career. I DARE someone to try to tell you that!). My English teacher in the 11th grade taught us first how she had only two dresses for school, and that each day she washed one and wore the other, and then second, spoke with so much pride about her Alma Mater, Tougaloo College, in Jackson, but then also about the beatings that people of her generation suffered while trying to get the right to vote or go to a school where the roof wasn't falling in. And she spoke with pain about The Invisible Man. I thank her for giving me a chance to learn from her. Without King, I would never have met her.
If not for desegregation, some very important moments in my own life could not have occurred. I never, ever felt "in place" in my school, as the son of an immigrant who, although he was by then long American and most certainly "white," had grown up far from the South and did not pass much on to me in the way of manner of speaking, appearance, religion, sensibility, or anything else that made me feel plain or average amongst other White kids. I did not make many friends. But, by some miracle, probably junior high band, I don't recall, I found a group of sweet kids who hung out in the loading area by some dumpsters behind the cafeteria at Hawkins Jr. High. And they let me join their group, and we spent breaks there talking and laughing and dreaming. Every one of them was black, except me. And they didn't care. That time was critical for me, as I sit here talking about it, 31 years later, let me tell you! I still need that moment to have occurred just about every day. And it would not have except for the price in blood paid by those in the generation before me. It would not have been possible!
Now I am this unusual adult, a male American Southerner who wants schoolchildren in 2013 to learn Spanish or Korean or Arabic starting in elementary school, or earlier, and who dedicates his days happily to advocating for the cause of getting us to be more accepting of others and to suspend judgment of them so that in our mixture something new and wonderful may happen. In my twenties working in ethnic Atlanta (read: the undocumented-Mexican-along-with-Southeast-Asian corridor known as Buford Hwy) I threw myself into at first learning a language that my father had not passed on to me, and then meeting and engaging with halting, first-time phone conversations and awkward emails with my family in Mexico that had not known that I existed, for the most part, . And I still speak Spanish now, everyday, in my home with that cumbersome quality that I will always have, in the hopes that my children will not. Because I want them to live IN THE WORLD, and not behind a wall. The walls must come down!
And I rant and Like on FB about causes about which some of my Friends feel me at best naive and manipulated and at worst stupid and dangerous. But I do not come across those opinions carelessly or in some academic, detached manner, although I happily recognize that my thoughts are just one valid facet of many that have been hard won. Mine were encountered because of a handful of kids who befriended me and those who came after, with whom time passed easily in long lines at McDonalds on band trips or on the "black bus" listening to records scratching on cassette tapes (do you remember?) on the way to earn high marks at competitions. YOU engaged ME, the "other." Later, that helped me engage with what so many would consider an Other, too; dozens and dozens of cousins from whom I was cut off as a child due to divergent migratory streams and a language barrier. I can now introduce their children to my own in a bond that will perhaps not break from this point forward. That will be up to them, of course, but you gave me the chance to give THEM the chance. And so did King.
I get angry when I hear about how "black" issues are wearing on folk who aren't of color. That's not how I see it. Disenfranchisment occurs everywhere, and trying to alternate between being tough, getting over it, and ignoring it is not enough. It wasn't for me, and I certainly can "pass," heh heh. If someone who is of color tells you that others not of their hue or background are enjoying privilege, you don't have to vote a certain way just to listen to them and perhaps soften your heart and suspend your judgment long enough to see things from another point of view. I ask the same thing of them. When our president says Trayvon Martin could have been his son, and you are so angry when a White baby baby gets killed by someone who also looks like Trayvon Martin and that then Obama doesn't say go on TV and say the same thing about that baby looking like his own, assume with me that he's not just playing to his base but perhaps reflecting on the many moments of pain he had and may continue to have because he was not given the cultural benefit of the doubt. It wears you down, I promise you, even though I look like you and may not always suffer it just like you don't suffer it. You who are angry are members of many groups other than those which are enfranchised. I know that because I am a member of them, too, with you. I ask you, most deferentially, to reflect on your pain and shock at the ways of others when assumptions are made about you, and how it quickly draws your ire. You then go to ground to fight against your misrepresentation, as you should, but rare is the person who then thinks that you look savage and like an "other" just because you express rage. And that is NOT the case for others. I know I've lost some of you in this last paragraph, but I still ask for your friendship and love and openly give you mine. I promise to keep on listening to you, too, even though I am clearly in a different camp.
"Sit down at the table of brotherhood," oh, how many times have I thought of those words, when "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers." Thank you, Dr. King, for inspiring is so many others the courage to withstand the bombings and lynchings and the gouging of eyeballs and the hoses that my sweet sweet friends never had to endure, and the whispered-in-close, cowardly threats to the protesters' children, which I shrink and shudder from all the more now as a father, sitting here safely, a White man in 2013 on the "right" side of both culture and time.
Nonviolent protest likely turned the hearts of many of those who were aiming their hatred at you, but more importantly finally put all this madness on television in order that your people could be seen as humans and citizens and not as lampoons or stereotypes, images controlled by others. At the table of brotherhood, we really see each other, perhaps for the first time, like Dr. King demanded that others see his people. And fifty years later, I want that table made bigger, no, I, too, demand it! And I will forever be thankful that amongst empty chocolate milk cartons and paper napkins blowing in a sweltering Mississippi breeze that a handful asked me to sit down at it with them. It has guided and shaped me every day hence. Thanks for reading.
Greg Sanchez is a Foreign Language Education consultant out of Georgia who thinks that part of getting a good education means learning to sit down at the table of brotherhood. If you'd like him to visit your school to discuss authentic assessment, music as CI, or using technology to engage learners, please contact him at CobbSpanishTeacher (at) gmail.com or 404 388 62 zero 2.
