One of the things I keep telling people is that the month of June brought about a 600% increase in inquiries for antiracism work.

That said, I am witnessing something that I feel the need to address as people are (finally!) joining this discussion. Gonna think aloud here.

There are some profoundly distracting questions out there. For instance, playing that awful game of "find the racist" as if we're going to locate the person or persons upholding white supremacy, name them The Racist, and then everything will be fine.

I just saw one setting up a false pretense to ask people what it is they would rather have: a great teacher who is racist OR an antiracist teacher with poor pedagogy.

WHAT. THE HELL?

That's an absurd question focusing on individual people. Part of the problem is the setup.

Work from an understanding of how all our schools are white institutions. Start there. Then, you can do transformative work. But acting as if we'll just root out the bad apples is a dangerous false dichotomy.

I was reminded, today, of the powerful poem by @elguante

"How long do we keep pointing out the bad apples, ignoring the fact that the orchard was planted on a mass grave? And that we planted it there."

The whole crop is poison and you wanna discuss the color of the leaves as you take a bite?

Here's the distracting question that actually leads us NO WHERE. It's a useless set up. Don't take this bait. https://twitter.com/CitizenEdu/status/1278083650454802433?s=20

I sincerely hate giving more eyes to that, but we have plenty of examples from which we can still learn to critically examine. Don't get stuck in such places.

It doesn't allow us to get to any dismantling of policies, programs, or practices. We gotta get free.

And we gotta stop asking permission for that freedom.

I'm sure I missed stuff but I have to get back to work.