Recently, a conversation flared up on Twitter. (That last sentence has become the new “a guy walks into the bar …” for online education activists, but more soon, maybe.) Mind you, at the end of 2017, I set a goal to minimize how many arguments I’d get into on Twitter in 2018, but I must have missed the fine print when I signed on that platform because I failed hard. Most folks have an argument on Twitter and get over it the next day. I participate on Twitter and I can guarantee the thread will continue a week later. This time, it happened between another education professional development leader in the field and a person who consistently discusses race issues on and offline.

Long story short: nobody won except racism. The practitioners who ask everyone to reflect on their practices did nothing to reflect about their racial relationships and the practitioners who do this race work daily took precious time explaining our lived experience to people who want to maintain our current racial paradigm.

In the middle of these difficult conversations, people always ask for the resource that will help them understand how to apply it into the classroom. Without fail, people bring up Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Why Are All The Black Kids …, Glenn Singleton’s Courageous Conversations …, and Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children. There are a few others. Some of the books do a solid job of charting some activities that can be integrated into simple or complex conversations. Some books are written by people of color with racial dynamics in mind, but don’t actually address race. Others still have equity and any other social justice buzzword integrated into the text, but still speak on race as if they were observing galaxies from a telescope.

Related: did you know that the light we see from other galaxies is probably millions and billions of years old so what we’re seeing is probably not relevant? Yeah, that.

Matthew R. Kay seeks to address this gaping hole with the book Not Light, But Fire: How To Lead Meaningful Race Conversations In The Classroom. The book starts off with a prelude that’s an ode to his imbued identities as a seasoned English teacher, as a slam poetry champion, and as an unapologetically Black man. After his introductory polemic “Talk is cheap,” he sifts through tidbits of the American race conversation to land upon what we consider “the conversation about the conversation.” He says:

[Frederick] Douglass knew what many are noticing now: that we never seem to graduate to the next conversation. The hard one. That we hide our stasis beneath puffed-up punditry and circular debate. He called for us to infuse our conversation with fire – to seek out and value historical context, to be driven by authentic inquiry, and above all, to be honest – both with ourselves and with those with whom we share a racial dialogue. Just as fire rarely passes through an environment without acting upon it, so too should our world be impacted by our students’ race conversation.

In the next chapters, he skillfully does three things:

• He explicitly discusses conditions and dissuades the reader from using words like “safe space” uncritically.
• He pulls in student examples regularly and uses their voices as a way of pushing the narratives forward.
• He doesn’t make himself out to be the hero at all.

The last point is especially paramount. As I’ve said numerous times in this space, education “influencers” of all stripes have clamored for relevancy by weaving in mentions of equity, access, and social justice even when their legacy doesn’t suggest that they’ve put in the work in that front. Kay’s book challenges all of us to reconsider our current classroom practices and readjust ourselves to get maladjusted and discomforted so we can have this race talk. Current classroom teachers will find resonance in chapters like “The N-Word: Facing It Head-On.”

You get a sense that, if you asked Kay to swing at you, he’d take a few minutes to explain why he was going to swing at you with a full-knuckle fist, then do exactly that.

We should be so fortunate, too. Our classrooms deserve to have a book that directly lays out scenarios for us to consider. Obviously, critics will point to the fact that he teaches in one of the country’s most celebrated schools (Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA) with a principal who allows a level of autonomy that most of us wouldn’t get if our admin walked by with their Danielson “not-a-checklist” checklists. Yet, as I was reading it on the train, I found myself immediately applying at least one of the techniques almost immediately into my own math classroom.

This book deserves a bigger audience, especially those who only recently found their social justice voice in the service of expanding their influence. If there is a tool to be given, this book is one. If people want to hire someone to actually lead conversations about race in 2019, I’m asking school districts to focus on folks who are ready to have the next conversation, the one that not only sail the surface of the racial ocean, but also willing to dismantle the rudders of the boat driving in it.