To Whom It May Concern,

Recently, you invited me into your space to discuss what it means to be an educator of color doing this work.

The term “work” is almost as ubiquitous as the word “equity,” and in both instances fraught with ambiguity. When I tell people I’m up at the crack of dawn daily, lessons in mind, students strategically placed, necessary conversations placed in my frontal lobe, coffee in hand, I mean that I’m ready to educate students with all the energies bestowed upon me that day. The bell may sound twice and I might look scurried, but I’m never scared. There was a time when I thought 90 students in three classes felt daunting, but now it’s 140 middle schoolers pouring in and out of my doors in 45-minute intervals throughout the day. After that wave, I still carve time to share wisdom with subscribers, develop visions with collectives, pontificate on the merits and demerits of our current slate of education initiatives, and continually work on my own definition of home with my partner and my son. Other words are done sub rosa, but all important steps towards my and hopefully our work towards justice.

Oh, and mentor folks like you, of which we have so many, of which we will have so few.

The current initiatives to diversify the profession have deeper incentives and meanings, mostly noble. We want a staff that racially and experientially reflects the student body in front of them. We’ve discussed ad nauseam the ways that whiteness permeates our teaching staff, not just as a reflection of the phenotypic make-up of the adults our students work every day, but also the institutional barriers and levers our education system enacts on our students. These practices, so deeply ingrained in our system-based edifices that our imaginations collapse in defeat, cannot be uprooted by simply changing the faces of the people in front of our children. We can discuss the aggressions these adults of color face, truly a microcosm of society as a whole. The simple solution, if it’s any real solution, is to provide anti-bias trainings, restorative justice programs, syllabi for teacher education programs, and grants with mentorship to bolster these burgeoning adults so they may stick with us a little longer.

The harder, more relevant, and sustainable work for America would be to understand what parts of our humanity are admissible to this nebula we call the teaching profession.

What good does it do to recruit and retain educators of color if we strip away the consciences, experiences, and alternate histories that would give our students a more holistic understanding of their positions on this Earth? Who commissions 3.6 million people to transmit its values to the children of a country on stolen lands with stolen peoples and pilfering policies that create conditions for immigrants to risk our smoke and mirror? The progeny of such a journey would hopefully nudge our policies and practice to see you and me as keys to building a better, more uplifting America. Instead, we’re assumed negligent and irreparable upon entry.

And we have the nerve to be teachers.

Our “struggles” are generally not our fault, but we’ve assumed responsibility. These checklists determine little more than compliance, but that compliance is also tied to letters in our file and our livelihoods, our hopes that we might make it out of generational debt. These data may serve as security blankets for the administrators and politicians who “are happy that progress has been made, but there’s more to go,” but it does little to resolve the underbelly of a culture explicit on setting children to irrational numbers. Ask people who yell to the rafters about doing an initiative “for children” if they have had a transformational conversation with a student in recent memory.

Never mind. Don’t. There’s enough shame to be passed around.

You asked me about my struggle, and I promised I’d tell you. I struggle with writing pretty lesson plans because I’m worried about any number of elements with the students. I struggle with paperwork that doesn’t connect with me because I rather be thinking about my own practices. I struggle with my own demeanor in class because “highly effective” and “gets kids to respect him without disrespecting their voices” mean different things for different people. I struggle with advocating for my fellow educators in this imperial city while seeing so many of them, us, advocating for the subjugation of our most under-served youth. I struggle with not getting swept in this specific respectability, this specific conservatism. I struggle with writing these pieces for over a decade with readers from the highest positions in the city, state, and nation and still letting these struggles subsume me. My social media following, my testimonials in your favorite outlets, my emergence as a beacon in this profession does little to dissuade people far and close to me from diluting the relevance of this work.

Let others tell it, I never take agency in my professional growth, even as I grow the profession’s boundaries. Akin to a horse race, they would prefer to put blinders on us and keep us in clearly bordered stables and race tracks. For some of us, the minute we’ve decided we’ve grown weary of the race is the minute the prods and whips in the form of letters and slips come. Because our work is rooted different, it moves different, it relates different, it means we’re more likely to face the wrath our institution has for us. I remain convinced that the diversity conversation means nothing without accounting for the minds and hearts that come with.

I acknowledge that, even as I’m trying to recruit you into greatness and glory, I often feel like a case study for our disappearance.

But fret not. Hope isn’t an aside; it’s a challenge. Our students deserve the best and brightest, not just of us, but in us. Find solace in the chaos and irregularity of the students in front of you, each containing multitudes, each of those worthy of your time and attention. Wade in the comfort of subverting at several levels the rigid and meandering demands of folks nervous to be or return to the shoes you’re in. Believe deeply in reflection. Second and third guess yourself, and self-soothe once you’ve come to a more comprehensive version of yourself and your vision for others around you. Be not afraid of vulnerability and love; modeling is the praxis.