This #Blackout era has provided some of us with a quixotic yet prosperous platform to center our experiences without apology. The recent murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery at the hands of police, plus the ensuing uprisings across the world have created a level of urgency among white educators to become more aware of their complicity. Rather than an abrupt “I told you so,” I’m choosing to engage this new set of subscribers with a huge sense of responsibility and awareness of the moment, holding steadfast to my identity and all the anchors that held this boat steady even when the current smacked against its starboard.

If anything, this moment has shown us how critical Black educators have been to this work.

There’s a burgeoning literature out there suggesting the importance of Black educators, from our distinct ability to recommend students for gifted and talented programs to our focus on relationship and community building. However, too many of us have paths carved out for us that has little to do with will and more to do with opportunity. School cultures often push back against our very existence as authority figures in school buildings. When we’re accepted, we’re normally assigned the more difficult classes, or, when one of our colleagues finds a student difficult, pushes said student in our direction. When we’re elevated, it’s usually to a position of dean and/or an assistant principal who works as the de facto dean of discipline. We’re often hired in the spaces with the least resources, forcing us into spaces that we thought we might change only to perhaps replicate the trauma we once felt. We’re stripped of our concerns whether the school is unionized or not.

Never mind the “race” conversation when we’re often relegated to modern-day overseers, something I’ve even said at the US Department of Education since 2015. Not much has changed since.

Professionalism is a function of the dominant culture. Because our dominant culture aspires to whiteness, Black teachers are often asked to speak to issues of race. The dynamic is pernicious and pervasive. A Black teacher might have come into a school building thinking they had been granted a license to teach math, but soon, they realize that their concentration on relationships, affirmations, and multiple representations of math get dismissed in favor of more palatable representatives of the school. Informally, I’ve heard stories where there’s conflict between student perception of said teacher compared to administrator or peer perception of the same teacher.

Let me lay this to rest. Black teachers can be experts at their given content area and its pedagogies, not just as delegates for our entire race and their experiences.

In my experience, I’ve felt the direct lineage between our understanding of social justice and math on a visceral level. As I’ve said on numerous occasions, I don’t teach math; I teach students math. I know my students’ lives matter. I know my relationships with their lives matter. I know I hear voices when I’m looking at the units and lesson plans in front of me. I’m already envisioning their faces responding to my questions and prompts. I know when to talk less or more, when to move from the front to the center of the classroom, when to duck so I’m at students’ eye level, and when to shut up so students can do more of the teaching.

This includes when students need to speak on issues of race, justice, and uprising. We can set the lesson plan aside when students are about to get their own education.

Yes, it’s critical to point out that I’m a National Board Certified Teacher and a Math for America Master Teacher. It matters that I went to Syracuse University for a computer science degree and City College of New York for a mathematics education graduate degree. It matters that I was unemployed for months and worked at close-to-minimum wage at a Wall Street education research firm. It matters that I’m from a similar neighborhood that my students come from. It matters that it was my first class of students who the system often throws away that also taught me to explain any given topic at least five different ways. It matters that I didn’t know exactly what lesson planning or developing units meant the first couple of years. It matters that my first advisor told me he thought I would quit the profession in my first year because I was too much of an idealist.

I came into this profession knowing that I could change the trajectory of my students’ lives if I could bolster their understanding of middle school math. If that led them to understanding freshman year algebra after they left me, then I immediately saw how math for my kids was as much a civil right as it was another subject that would be graded. And I would be there to deliver on that right.

Teaching well is also teaching justly. So whenever teachers of color, especially Black teachers, come into a teaching context, we teach regardless and because our identity often put us there. In a week where America wants to know how we can build a way forward, a small but significant thing our country can do is listen and learn from Black math teachers who’ve developed racial and social justice as a core of their work.

Even when we don’t explicitly mention social justice (ahem), our work often shows up in the streets and the classrooms, ready to right our country’s wrongs.