U is for Urgency #AtoZChallenge #BookReview
My 2025 A to Z Challenge theme is activism. I’ve been a Black Lives Matter activist for over a decade. I’m not an expert. I do have experience to share and I’m hoping to learn from your experiences, too. We’re all in this together.
For me, urgency is often in a creative tension with sustainable action and, occasionally, with self-care.
Urgency propels action and limits damage and speeds progress. Sometimes, an urgent action fixes something before it becomes a problem that requires sustained action. Urgent action requires a lot of energy, but over a short amount of time.
More often, though, we’re dealing with problems that have been around for decades or centuries. Two things have to be true at the same time: Our schools need to be fixed urgently and I need to be prepared for it to take a long time. Burning out isn’t an option.
My focus for the past ten years has been on education. The kids who were in Kindergarten when I started are now in high school. I’ve always felt a sense of urgency about children. They only get one chance at those crucial early learning years. If they are treated as if they don’t belong by the people who are supposed to be teaching them, then those years are lost forever.
There are benefits from being an outsider in education activism. My organization can make bold and pushy statements about the importance of policies that implement diversity, equity, and inclusion, with or without the approval of our local school districts. But a downside of working from the outside is that I have few ways to measure the success or failure of our community’s organizing efforts.
One of many Saturday meetings I’ve attended to figure out how to support schools as community members who care about equity
From anecdotal evidence, I’m convinced that our efforts aligned with others to change adult attitudes and behaviors in schools in ways that brought more children into a state of belonging in their classrooms. There were policy and practice changes that reduced suspensions of the youngest students (a practice that disproportionately impacted students of color and students with disabilities and boys and all the various intersections of those three things). That required rethinking how classrooms worked for students and adults.
At the same time, I also have anecdotal evidence that while racism got bolder in our society, it also got bolder among students so that hallways and cafeterias and playgrounds are even more fraught for students of color and other populations that are too often targeted by bullies. That’s a failure by our society for both the bullies and the bullied. I am discouraged by this development.
Okay. I’m rambling. I know this is hard for everyone. I think my contribution, here, is to share a recent video from Dr. Kira Banks that talks about how to navigate the times that we’re in, find our lane, and don’t forget about self-care.