Today we'll hear an excerpt from author Shamari Reid's "Humans Who..." YouTube series. In this series, Shamari joins some of the top educators and authors in the county to discuss the humanity in all aspects of teaching and life. In this deeply reflective episode, Shamari talks with Dr. Chris Emdin. They discuss Chris's groundbreaking first book and his transformative new work. They dive deeper into what it takes to become humans who have a critical understanding of the role race plays in our lives, in and out of schools.
Transcript
Shamari Reid:
You have a new book out, From White Folks Who Teach in the Hood. This is not the same as the first book, "For White Folks". And I was on my research trying to figure out what has changed, and what you said about this new book was you realized that it wasn't your job and your burden to tell white folks what they should be doing with schools. White folks need to do that. And Toni Morrison also said this, right? Toni Morrison said that they, white people, should start thinking about what they can do about their race problem and leave her, us, Black folks out of it.
But Chris, what was the moment in which you realized that telling white folks what to do or not to do wasn't your burden? Can you talk me through the evolution of your ideas through that first book, For White Folks, to this new book, From White Folks, and the role that you should play in white folks unlearning about race and education? Help us bridge the gap from what? 2015, 2016, that first book, to now.
Christopher Emdin:
Man, what a beautiful question. When I wrote For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood it was burning in me. That book had to get out, and that book was in the making from when I was in high school and there were some things I wanted to tell to my teachers like, "Yo, come on." And as a researcher, going into schools, that book was an outgrowth of both an experiential thing, a scholarly thing, and what I thought was a responsibility. Folks had to know. And so, I shared some practices, I shared some perspective, I shared some insights, I painted a picture and I said, "Here, y'all. Everybody else need this, too, but y'all need this."
What happens when you do a book like that, and people love it, people hate it, I'm unconcerned about how people feel about it. For me, the thing was, it was in my belly and it had to be born. But what happens after you put a book like that out is, then, it becomes almost like a manual or like, "Chris Emdin said on page 47 that this is what white folks should do," and that was not the intention. It was being misread. It was being misperceived. It was supposed to be something that triggered something in you to make you go think and go do. And then, I would give talks on it, et cetera, and it kind of evolved from being a book that I had to put out there, to be a spectacle to be observed.
And then, I would come and talk about it, and I felt like I was being a spectacle to be observed, and that ain't my calling, that ain't my ministry, that's not why the book was out. I love teaching. I love the art of teaching, I love the craft of teaching, I love what it feels like to stand in front of a classroom, I love to just witness young people come to a space unsure and leave feeling like, "I'm a scientist and I can take on the world." I love everything about being able to look into the eyes of a child and see the future in them. I love everything about teaching. I know it inside, outside, backwards, and I keep learning more, even though I know so much about it.
And so, because of that, there are aspects of my work around teaching and learning that I feel responsible to share. Right? I have been designing classrooms and turning them into beautiful spaces for young people. I have been talking about the nuances of teaching as a performance art and the rights of the body and the intersections of pedagogy and counseling and therapy. There are all these things that I want to investigate more deeply, and folks are still stuck on me telling white people how to teach kids good. So I was like, "You know what? To free myself from the labor of having to keep on reiterating the same thing and not seeing growth, it's time for folks who have done this work and are doing this work to tell their stories to their peers."
When I tell you I got two dozen chapters from some folks, and they sent them joints to me, I sent them back. You ain't talk about race enough. You ain't talk about whiteness enough. You ain't talk about your mistakes enough. You sound like a savior in here. You think you a savior? Go talk to the kids you were teaching. And I kept sending these chapters back until they came back beautiful. And when I say beautiful, beautiful in that they are honest, they are raw, whiteness is faced, race is faced, mistakes are faced, hero moments are faced, but it tells a story.
And I connected with my brother, Sam Seidel, who's over at the d.school at Stanford, who I love deeply and who's just one of them white folks who get it and I was like, "Yo, fam. Help me get your mans." And so, we put together this book that I think was needed and the book started like I'm writing to these cats, and now I'm creating an ecosystem to allow these cats to talk to each other, so I can free myself and other Black educators who are stuck in this informing these people to be free to do other pieces of the work.
Shamari:
So when I heard you say exchange of chapters, they're sending it, you're sending it back until it became beautiful, I heard you say beautiful, but what I heard was actually it came back human. What I'm talking about in my book, I got to plug it, Humans Who Teach-
Christopher:
[inaudible 00:05:53]
Shamari:
... A Guide for Centering Love, Justice, and Liberation in Schools, is because to go to that place, which is not always beautiful, not always pretty, but it's that human place and that is where the best teaching lives. So what I feel like I heard you say was you continue to invite them over and over and over, "No, you got to be human. You go to be human." And to be human is to talk about their mistakes, talk about race, because in this country, and in our world, to understand your humanity is to understand how you've also been racialized. So let me ask you this, you edited a book with 24 stories from white educators, I want to say white humans who teach, what did you learn about white humans who teach through engaging with those stories?
Christopher:
I just expected certain narratives, and I had to check myself like, "Yo, why did you expect that?," and I probably expected that because of the experiences I had-
Shamari:
That's right.
Christopher:
... with white educators.
Shamari:
That's right.
Christopher:
But these are folks who really care about babies and in spite of all their care do it so wrong. I think very few teachers come to the craft in urban spaces with the intention to harm, but so many of them end up harming. And so, the first thing was just the realization that humans are, at their core, very good. And so, when narratives of guilt would emerge and narratives of shame would emerge and their whole pieces were being oriented by that, through that, I would have to send them back to go heal, otherwise it couldn't make the book.
Shamari:
It's one thing to sort of write a chapter from guilt and shame, but many of us and many of y'all are teaching from a place of guilt and shame, which is why I say in my book, over and over, "You've got to heal, you've got to heal, you got to forgive yourself, forgive yourself, forgive yourself." Because if you don't, even without your participation, that guilt and shame becomes a core of your teaching and you will do harm.
So in my book I talk about these things you're talking about. I call them social lessons. I do this whole thing about socialization and I talk about how as humans in a society, we are socialized to accept ideas about ourselves and other people. So if we're talking about race and we're talking to the people and we're saying, "Y'all got to heal this," and "You got to do that," let me ask you this, Chris, in thinking about your social lessons, what was the lesson about race that took you the longest to learn or unlearn?
Christopher:
I'm still grappling with race and to keep it a buck with you, bro, I interrogate race in my work not because I want to, but because I have to, because it keeps showing up. In a perfect world, for me, I want to talk about the ways that young people make meaning of the quadratic formula. I want to talk about the theory of relativity and K=1/2... I love my disciplines. I love science and math, and I love connecting those disciplines to young people. Ideally, I would leave it there. So I'm like, "All right, so let's just teach this science and math lesson." And then, I'm like, "Oh, look. There are no Black folks, queer folks, Latino folks, Latina folks in any of this text." So what am I supposed to do with that? Y'all brought me to race again.
Shamari:
Sure.
Christopher:
And I'm learning, most importantly, and I talk about this a lot in my book Ratchetdemic, and the reason why I love that book is because it's a welcoming of self to self. It says, "Hey, human being, meet the pieces of you that you've tucked away the most and allow that person to lead," and that person that leads is my real, Black, Jamaican, African, Bronx self. And so, the lessons I'm learning are mostly about the beauty and magic of my Blackness.
Shamari:
Which, for me, is becoming and remaining human, as Toni said. That's what you're doing, Chris. Becoming and remaining human, which only is possible when you begin to look at yourself and us as to how we've loved on each other, cared for each other, and not what has only been done to us. It's also, to go back to that word, that's healing.
Christopher:
Facts.
Shamari:
Who or what has taught you the most about race? Who would you credit, if you will, with your present day understanding of race in education?
Christopher:
Every time that I am in a room with Gloria Ladson-Billings I become smarter, I become more thoughtful, I become more clear. I would say, man, the first time I read Baldwin, you ever read something and you shiver?
Shamari:
Toni. It was Toni for me. I felt like, "Wow, she just freed me. She just freed me."
Christopher:
Baldwin does that for me, man. I'm like, "Ooh, everything I'm feeling but don't know how to say gets said." And, I mean, happy 100 to the OG. I've mentioned before how much Malcolm X has shaped my being. Folks don't know this, but you know how people binge-watch Netflix or binge-watch, I will binge listen Malcolm X speeches. Every possibly recorded Malcolm X speech, I've heard.
Shamari:
So I want to make sure we're sharing this space. We got beautiful questions coming in, Chris. I want to take one from someone that I know you and I both know and love, it is the Doctora Yaribel Mercedes is in the house. So she got a question for us, Chris, a powerful question. So Yaribel asks us this, as Black men with intersectional identities, how do we, because we're raising daughters, how are we unlearning patriarchal systems of domination within us?
Christopher:
I don't think you unlearn them, and it's a radical thing to say out loud, and I probably shouldn't say it, but here we are. I don't think you unlearn. I think that you become aware of the ways that patriarchy enacts itself within you and plays out in your life. And let me tell you why I say you don't unlearn, because it's so thick in the world and in the universe to place unlearning as an ideal is an impossibility. And I think what happens to people if they're like, "Oh, you just unlearn it," then you feel like, "Oh, I unlearned it. Now I'm good." You can't unlearn racism, you can't unlearn patriarchy, you can't unlearn homophobia. It's in the air.
And the recognition that it's in the air also allows you to be able to do what's necessary for growth. So you ain't got to unlearn it, but you can grow. Growth requires understanding that you are going to make mistakes, own them, face them, recognize them, move forward better.
Shamari:
Yeah. I was going to say I would throw out-
Christopher:
[inaudible 00:12:40]
Shamari:
... to that question, Yaribel, it's community, for me.
Christopher:
Facts.
Shamari:
It's understanding the limitations of my humanity. It's understanding the limitations of my ideas, because I have been privileged with regard to my gender identity. I have been and I can say, "Oh, I haven't been." I have. I have a privilege, because I have been gendered as man in this country and I grew up with all the privileges thereinto. And so, what I do to unlearn, if you will, and check myself, is stay in community with women and femmes and nonbinary folks who continue to check me and hold me accountable when, because I'm going to, when I make mistakes.
Christopher:
Yes. I couldn't give a better answer. That was just brilliant.
Shamari:
It's a beautiful, necessary question. We got more. Someone's asking, Chris, can we give teachers some advice who are about to start this new year and are handling the challenges from pandemics to other crises, especially with the election day on the horizon? So advice for teachers who are about to start the year again.
Christopher:
So I'll take this one, because I love this one.
Shamari:
Go ahead.
Christopher:
It don't matter what is going on in the world, because you have this space that is called the classroom. If you curate a space of love, a space of radical imagination, it literally protects you and those students. I don't say you could stop what's going on in the world. If I am concerned about how the election is going to impact my classroom, then I allow the election to be inscribed into my pedagogy and then everything is driven by the election.
So it's an orientation shift. The world can go crazy and fall to pieces, but in this space you are loved, in this space you can dream, in this space you will be challenged academically and intellectually, but with love, in this space I will prepare you for a world not yet, instead of a replicating of a world that is. And once you have that orientation, everything shifts. And so, you and those students are working together to construct that space. What would you guys like to see with me? How can I better for you? How can you be better for me?
Shamari:
And I have a very similar answer. There's a viral video going around right now. First of all, y'all we got to be critical consumers of media. Let's talk about media literacy. There's a viral video going around of the presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, and there's a quick clip of her in which she's saying to people who are protesting, I think she's saying something to the effect of, "I'm speaking now," or something like that. If you watch the longer video, which is why you got to be a critical consumer, there's a time when they're heckling and protesting and she just looks and she says, "It's all good," and she repeats herself, "It's all good."
And so, new teachers, returning teachers, that peace that she had, there's an art of holding onto your peace, even when the waters get chaotic, because what we know is chaotic waters are going to happen, but you can't let them in your boat.
Edie:
Thank you for tuning in today. To read a full transcript and link to the full conversation on YouTube where you can also explore the other "Humans Who..." episodes, visit blog.heinemann.com.
About the Author
Shamari Reid (he/him/his) is an assistant professor of justice and belonging in education at New York University. He has taught Spanish, English as a new language, and ELA at the elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels in Oklahoma, New York, Uruguay, and Spain. He is the creator and host of the podcast Water for Teachers. Shamari is also the author of the upcoming book Humans Who Teach: A Guide for Centering Love, Justice, and Liberation in Schools. As a scholar–educator, Shamari’s work centers love as a moral imperative in social justice education, and as a path toward culturally sustaining school communities. Shamari is an active member of the National Council of Teachers of English where he was awarded the Cultivating New Voices research fellowship. He is also active in the American Education Research Association (AERA) as the chair of AERA’s Queer special interest group. Shamari completed his doctoral work in Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. In addition, he holds an M.A. in Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language and TESOL from New York University, and a B.A. in Spanish and Education from Oklahoma City University. His scholarly publications on race, gender, and sexuality in schools have appeared in various peer-reviewed journals such as Teachers College Record, Urban Education, and Curriculum Inquiry.
Dr. Christopher Emdin is the Maxine Greene Chair for Distinguished Contributions to Education and Professor of Science Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is also the Director of Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship At the STEAM DREAM and Ideal Lab.
He previously served as Robert Naslund Endowed Chair in Curriculum Theory at the University of Southern California, where he was Director of Youth and Community Partnerships at the USC Race and Equity Center.
Dr. Emdin is an alumni fellow at the Hip-hop Archive and Hutchins Center at Harvard University, Scholar in Residence at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and was STEAM Ambassador for the U.S. Department of State and Minorities in Energy Ambassador for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Dr. Emdin holds a Ph.D in Urban Education with a concentration in Mathematics, Science, and Technology; Masters degrees in both Natural Sciences and Education and Bachelors degrees in Physical Anthropology, Biology, and Chemistry.
He is the creator of the HipHopEd social media movement, Science Genius BATTLES and the CREATE Accelerator – an initiative that funds non-profits focused on culture and education. He has been named one of the 27 people bridging divides in the United States by Time magazine and the Root 100 lis of most influential African Americans.
He is the author of numerous award winning works; including the Strage Prize awardee, Urban Science Education for the Hip-hop Generation and the New York Times bestseller, For White Folks Who Teach In the Hood and the Rest of Ya’ll too. His latest books are STEM STEAM Make Dream and Ratchetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success.
