Recently, I made a change to my course on Culturally Responsive Leadership. I asked my students to write and share a racial autobiography, inspired by Glenn Singleton's example and the work of Drs. Mark Gooden and Ann O'Doherty. Understanding one's own story of race is critical for leading for antiracism. And so, because I try not to ask my students to do something I would not do myself, I wrote (and now share) my own story of race.
Both of my parents were children of immigrants, Irish and Italian, and they grew up in Inwood, a neighborhood of New York City filled—at that time—with other European immigrant families. (Inwood is still a neighborhood of immigrants, though today mostly from the Dominican Republic.) My parents grew up just minutes from each other, visiting the same parks, even attending the same school (though, as a Catholic school, it had separate entrances for boys and girls). My parents finally met as young adults, after they each entered religious life. My father was a young priest in a church in Washington Heights, where he delivered mass in Spanish to the mostly Puerto Rican congregation. My mother was a nun teaching in the Catholic school joined to his parish. They found kinship in their shared commitment to late 1960s anti-poverty social programs. After a few years, they left the Church, got married, and moved outside the city, to Bronxville, to start a family.
Bronxville was then, and is still, a wealthy suburb of New York City. My parents were not wealthy. After religious life, my mother worked as a teacher until I was born, and my father worked as a social worker while he finished his Ph.D. in psychology. We lived in a small apartment, just over the Yonkers line. But that town border made a big difference in terms of who we knew and who we saw around us. While Yonkers was mostly Black and Brown, Bronxville was mostly White. All of the children I remember playing with were White—a fact I never noticed until I sat down to write this. I do not know that my parents’ (and, by extension, my own) social circles were intentionally segregated by race, but they definitely were.
When I was four, my father finished his Ph.D. and we moved to New Hampshire, where we were even more racially isolated. With help from their families, my parents put a down payment on a modest two-bedroom house on an acre of land in a small, suburbanizing town within commuting distance of Boston. My father worked at a mental health clinic in Lawrence; my mother stayed home to raise my brother and me. When my grandfather died a year after we moved, he left money to my father, an inheritance he used to pay off the mortgage and own the house outright. I didn’t realize how unusual this was until I was an adult.
Looking back on my childhood and adolescence, I can count on one hand—maybe even half a hand—the number of children of color I knew. In my elementary school, there was only one: a Black boy named Mike. The only memory I have of Mike is one I remember now with shame. But it is also maybe the first time I remember consciously noticing race. I was seven.
In second grade, I had a second-grade crush on a girl named Nicole. I liked her smile. I liked watching her hair swoosh back and forth when she walked down the hall. I even convinced the teacher to let me move my desk to sit next to her. Looking back, I am amazed by my boldness. One day, lining up for lunch, Mike came up next to me. Playfully elbowing me, he nodded his head in Nicole’s direction and commented on how cute she was. (I also can’t help noticing how, at seven, he and I were both well socialized into our heteronormative gender roles, but that’s another autobiography.) It had never occurred to me that anyone else could feel the way that I felt about Nicole, so when I heard Mike’s words I was taken aback, maybe worried. Looking back, I see in my reaction a universe of racist tropes about the perceived threat of a Black male expressing desire for a White female. I don’t think this threat was conscious, but it was there.
I fumbled for something to say, some way to wrest my private fantasy back from him. “But you can’t,” I said. “You and Nicole are… You two could never… You look…” I was never able to complete a sentence, but the meaning was clear: you cannot love her, because you are Black and she is White. This is not a message my parents ever communicated to me—and one they probably would never have endorsed—but it was an idea, a racist idea, I had nevertheless absorbed.
To Mike’s credit, he stood up for himself. “Why not?” he asked, before answering his own question: “Of course we can,” he said, with confidence. I just stared, dumbstruck. The line ahead of us started moving, and we never talked about it again.
Mike and I had never been that close, but I think now how lonely it must have been to be the only Black face among hundreds of White faces. I wonder now whether his playful comment to me that day was an invitation, a search for common ground and shared interests, an opening for a friendship. And I think how my response—perplexed face, disbelieving and dismissive tone, short but uncomfortable silences—called back to a tangled and tortured past to deliver a stark and familiar message: stay in your place, we’re different, we don’t belong together.
The story of this moment—this exchange in the second grade lunch line—lingered in my subconscious for decades, but it did not become meaningful to me until one summer afternoon, in my mid-20s. I was young and idealistic, weeks into a new job with a non-profit that partnered with elementary and middle schools to teach peacemaking and social change. As part of this role, I was attending a week-long institute on “peaceable schools” at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I listened to some amazing keynotes, attended workshops, and participated in “Connection and Reflection” groups where mixed race and gender groups processed together some of the things they were learning. It was, I think, in one of these groups where the story of Mike and me bubbled to the top. I didn’t have the courage, in the moment, to share it out loud, but I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget it, so I could remember that—even though I was never taught racism—I had still somehow learned it.
My process of unlearning racism began that week. I attended Peaceable Schools with a cohort of new colleagues at the non-profit where I’d been hired. Each afternoon, we would gather to share what we were learning and to apply the lessons to the work we would be doing in schools. We were facilitated by a colleague who would, in time, become a dear mentor and friend to me. His name was Steven Brion-Meisels. Steven called himself an old hippie, and in some ways he was. He was an ardent peace activist, but he was also pragmatic and devoted to action. To quote a Marge Piercy poem he loved, he would “jump into work headfirst / without dallying in the shallows.” He was an earnest relationship builder, especially across lines of difference. As a White man, he did more listening than talking. He modeled allyship and a willingness to talk about and name race. When conversations became tense, Steven—often sitting on the floor with a notepad in his lap—would close his eyes and immerse himself in the discomfort. He heard and absorbed people’s pain. He readily acknowledged his own complicity and faults. He would become for me an anchor and a source of wisdom as I navigated justice work in public schools, especially as a White man working in schools where most students (and, at least one school, most teachers) were people of color.
But that first week at Lesley I found his idealism naïve. Reading through my copy of the peacemaking curriculum we were charged with teaching (and that I would later learn he largely wrote), I had scribbled numerous skeptical comments in the margins: “How?!” I wrote. “Completely unrealistic,” I added. “With these kids?!” I asked. I remember these comments now with regret and shame, but at the time the activities—for example, role playing about a “recess mess” or a cooperative game called the Compliment Relay—felt so feeble, even silly. My skepticism was partly a defense mechanism, a reflection of my own insecurity, but I see now that my comments also belied a deeply ingrained deficit mindset toward students of color. In my mind, students of color were too dysregulated, maybe the result of trauma, to succeed with the kind of patient, turn-taking activities Steven had written for them. Once again, as with my reaction to Mike years earlier, no one had explicitly taught this belief to me, but it had nevertheless found its way into my subconscious.
Eventually, I shared my doubts with the group, which included several colleagues of color. I think I knew enough not to talk about “these kids” and to phrase my skepticism in more acceptable terms, but the implicit message was, I think, hard to miss: peacemaking was for White kids. Steven listened patiently to my concerns, then waited another moment before speaking. His response was direct but kind. “I think,” he said, “you’ll find these activities resonate more than you think.” He was right to challenge me, and he could have been even more blunt about my narrow-mindedness and pessimism. Instead, he talked about the need to create space for children to explore issues like violence in safety, guided by compassionate and thoughtful people. Moreover, he added, playing games and talking about peace or justice, when everyone else is lecturing about self-control or anger management, took courage. It may, in fact, be a revolutionary act, he said. It was a refrain I took to heart and one that I would often repeat to others expressing similar doubts. The curriculum was, at times, challenging. But when a Compliment Relay fell flat, it was usually because the (mostly White) teachers didn’t teach it well, not because the students (of color) were incapable of learning.
I grew up in a loving family, politically progressive. I have worked for decades with young people, educators, and communities on issues of justice. As a parent myself, I work hard to instill values of inclusion and kindness in my kids. And yet: despite all my best intentions, I have learned (and have had to unlearn) racism. These two moments are just the tip of the iceberg and serve as a reminder to me of just how powerful the racial hierarchy in this country is, how pervasively I (and all of us) are socialized into it, and how persistently I (and all of us) need to work to overcome it.
Both of my parents were children of immigrants, Irish and Italian, and they grew up in Inwood, a neighborhood of New York City filled—at that time—with other European immigrant families. (Inwood is still a neighborhood of immigrants, though today mostly from the Dominican Republic.) My parents grew up just minutes from each other, visiting the same parks, even attending the same school (though, as a Catholic school, it had separate entrances for boys and girls). My parents finally met as young adults, after they each entered religious life. My father was a young priest in a church in Washington Heights, where he delivered mass in Spanish to the mostly Puerto Rican congregation. My mother was a nun teaching in the Catholic school joined to his parish. They found kinship in their shared commitment to late 1960s anti-poverty social programs. After a few years, they left the Church, got married, and moved outside the city, to Bronxville, to start a family.
Bronxville was then, and is still, a wealthy suburb of New York City. My parents were not wealthy. After religious life, my mother worked as a teacher until I was born, and my father worked as a social worker while he finished his Ph.D. in psychology. We lived in a small apartment, just over the Yonkers line. But that town border made a big difference in terms of who we knew and who we saw around us. While Yonkers was mostly Black and Brown, Bronxville was mostly White. All of the children I remember playing with were White—a fact I never noticed until I sat down to write this. I do not know that my parents’ (and, by extension, my own) social circles were intentionally segregated by race, but they definitely were.
When I was four, my father finished his Ph.D. and we moved to New Hampshire, where we were even more racially isolated. With help from their families, my parents put a down payment on a modest two-bedroom house on an acre of land in a small, suburbanizing town within commuting distance of Boston. My father worked at a mental health clinic in Lawrence; my mother stayed home to raise my brother and me. When my grandfather died a year after we moved, he left money to my father, an inheritance he used to pay off the mortgage and own the house outright. I didn’t realize how unusual this was until I was an adult.
Looking back on my childhood and adolescence, I can count on one hand—maybe even half a hand—the number of children of color I knew. In my elementary school, there was only one: a Black boy named Mike. The only memory I have of Mike is one I remember now with shame. But it is also maybe the first time I remember consciously noticing race. I was seven.
In second grade, I had a second-grade crush on a girl named Nicole. I liked her smile. I liked watching her hair swoosh back and forth when she walked down the hall. I even convinced the teacher to let me move my desk to sit next to her. Looking back, I am amazed by my boldness. One day, lining up for lunch, Mike came up next to me. Playfully elbowing me, he nodded his head in Nicole’s direction and commented on how cute she was. (I also can’t help noticing how, at seven, he and I were both well socialized into our heteronormative gender roles, but that’s another autobiography.) It had never occurred to me that anyone else could feel the way that I felt about Nicole, so when I heard Mike’s words I was taken aback, maybe worried. Looking back, I see in my reaction a universe of racist tropes about the perceived threat of a Black male expressing desire for a White female. I don’t think this threat was conscious, but it was there.
I fumbled for something to say, some way to wrest my private fantasy back from him. “But you can’t,” I said. “You and Nicole are… You two could never… You look…” I was never able to complete a sentence, but the meaning was clear: you cannot love her, because you are Black and she is White. This is not a message my parents ever communicated to me—and one they probably would never have endorsed—but it was an idea, a racist idea, I had nevertheless absorbed.
To Mike’s credit, he stood up for himself. “Why not?” he asked, before answering his own question: “Of course we can,” he said, with confidence. I just stared, dumbstruck. The line ahead of us started moving, and we never talked about it again.
Mike and I had never been that close, but I think now how lonely it must have been to be the only Black face among hundreds of White faces. I wonder now whether his playful comment to me that day was an invitation, a search for common ground and shared interests, an opening for a friendship. And I think how my response—perplexed face, disbelieving and dismissive tone, short but uncomfortable silences—called back to a tangled and tortured past to deliver a stark and familiar message: stay in your place, we’re different, we don’t belong together.
The story of this moment—this exchange in the second grade lunch line—lingered in my subconscious for decades, but it did not become meaningful to me until one summer afternoon, in my mid-20s. I was young and idealistic, weeks into a new job with a non-profit that partnered with elementary and middle schools to teach peacemaking and social change. As part of this role, I was attending a week-long institute on “peaceable schools” at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I listened to some amazing keynotes, attended workshops, and participated in “Connection and Reflection” groups where mixed race and gender groups processed together some of the things they were learning. It was, I think, in one of these groups where the story of Mike and me bubbled to the top. I didn’t have the courage, in the moment, to share it out loud, but I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget it, so I could remember that—even though I was never taught racism—I had still somehow learned it.
My process of unlearning racism began that week. I attended Peaceable Schools with a cohort of new colleagues at the non-profit where I’d been hired. Each afternoon, we would gather to share what we were learning and to apply the lessons to the work we would be doing in schools. We were facilitated by a colleague who would, in time, become a dear mentor and friend to me. His name was Steven Brion-Meisels. Steven called himself an old hippie, and in some ways he was. He was an ardent peace activist, but he was also pragmatic and devoted to action. To quote a Marge Piercy poem he loved, he would “jump into work headfirst / without dallying in the shallows.” He was an earnest relationship builder, especially across lines of difference. As a White man, he did more listening than talking. He modeled allyship and a willingness to talk about and name race. When conversations became tense, Steven—often sitting on the floor with a notepad in his lap—would close his eyes and immerse himself in the discomfort. He heard and absorbed people’s pain. He readily acknowledged his own complicity and faults. He would become for me an anchor and a source of wisdom as I navigated justice work in public schools, especially as a White man working in schools where most students (and, at least one school, most teachers) were people of color.
But that first week at Lesley I found his idealism naïve. Reading through my copy of the peacemaking curriculum we were charged with teaching (and that I would later learn he largely wrote), I had scribbled numerous skeptical comments in the margins: “How?!” I wrote. “Completely unrealistic,” I added. “With these kids?!” I asked. I remember these comments now with regret and shame, but at the time the activities—for example, role playing about a “recess mess” or a cooperative game called the Compliment Relay—felt so feeble, even silly. My skepticism was partly a defense mechanism, a reflection of my own insecurity, but I see now that my comments also belied a deeply ingrained deficit mindset toward students of color. In my mind, students of color were too dysregulated, maybe the result of trauma, to succeed with the kind of patient, turn-taking activities Steven had written for them. Once again, as with my reaction to Mike years earlier, no one had explicitly taught this belief to me, but it had nevertheless found its way into my subconscious.
Eventually, I shared my doubts with the group, which included several colleagues of color. I think I knew enough not to talk about “these kids” and to phrase my skepticism in more acceptable terms, but the implicit message was, I think, hard to miss: peacemaking was for White kids. Steven listened patiently to my concerns, then waited another moment before speaking. His response was direct but kind. “I think,” he said, “you’ll find these activities resonate more than you think.” He was right to challenge me, and he could have been even more blunt about my narrow-mindedness and pessimism. Instead, he talked about the need to create space for children to explore issues like violence in safety, guided by compassionate and thoughtful people. Moreover, he added, playing games and talking about peace or justice, when everyone else is lecturing about self-control or anger management, took courage. It may, in fact, be a revolutionary act, he said. It was a refrain I took to heart and one that I would often repeat to others expressing similar doubts. The curriculum was, at times, challenging. But when a Compliment Relay fell flat, it was usually because the (mostly White) teachers didn’t teach it well, not because the students (of color) were incapable of learning.
I grew up in a loving family, politically progressive. I have worked for decades with young people, educators, and communities on issues of justice. As a parent myself, I work hard to instill values of inclusion and kindness in my kids. And yet: despite all my best intentions, I have learned (and have had to unlearn) racism. These two moments are just the tip of the iceberg and serve as a reminder to me of just how powerful the racial hierarchy in this country is, how pervasively I (and all of us) are socialized into it, and how persistently I (and all of us) need to work to overcome it.