As a white educator, it has taken me far too long to realize that it will never be enough to share with our students the stories of racism that enrage us. It is necessary and vital that we share stories such as the story of #GeorgeFloyd, but that alone will never be enough.

Because if we stop at sharing stories, there will just be more & more stories to share. Instead, what we can start to do is share the stories that enrage us & then model for our students how these stories can lead us to interrogate the SYSTEMS that allow these stories to exist.

So, for example, we make sure our students know about #GeorgeFloyd, but then we teach them to notice our own outrage & use it to ask questions about how this story came to be. We ask, “What systems caused these police officers to fear George Floyd in the first place?” And then...

We model asking, “What systems exist that allowed these same police officers to NOT fear the potential consequences for injuring or killing George Floyd?” And then we teach them to search for answers by looking for patterns that have been perpetuated by systems.

And once we do that, then we can model how understanding the systems that allow these stories to take place, then allows us to ask for the kinds of change in those systems that can stop these stories from happening again.

We teach them, especially those who share facets of identity with those perpetuating these acts of violence, that it is not enough to express outrage or shock when a story like this happens again.

We must do more to understand the systems that create the stories and then use any privilege we possess to push back against and disrupt those systems. And in this way, we are not just left reacting, again, each time another story needs to be shared.

Instead, we are engaged in a constant effort to teach our students to create the kind of systemic changes that maybe one day will stop these stories from continuing to exist in the first place.

Because this sharing of stories, it is just not enough. People are dying. People are being killed. And we just have to do more, especially as white educators, to fix this mess that we have helped to create and sustain.