Recently, my son did an active-shooter drill at his school. I asked him how it went. He mentioned how it was fine, but a few students couldn’t be quiet.

I nodded, remembering my days as a middle school teacher when I’d have to insist that children be quiet when, developmentally, they’d want to shake the room. An active-shooter drill means that teachers have to lock their doors, cover their door windows, command students to hide in a corner or a less obvious spot in the classroom, and ask for perfect silence. From a professional standpoint, I understand these drills (fire drills, lockdown drills, active shooter drills, etc.) help us prepare for emergencies and serve to instill a sense of routine for everyone in our schools. Yet, the fact that we need certain types of drills in our society feels gruesome given the type of work we’re attempting in schools. Too much of the rhetoric out there suggests that students should both be protected from sensitive conversations and be prepared for what happens when we don’t have those conversations.

Two questions we don’t ask often enough when it comes to our schools: “What will we do about this in the long term?” and “How did we get here?”

Too many people say things like “Well, I want my child to feel safe in a classroom,” appealing to the lowest common denominator. Yes, of course, most caregivers want safety. But where the argument usually falls apart is what people determine as safety. The word “safety” is relative to multiple factors, usually involving identity and social context. Where most parents agree on some measures of safety (“Can my child turn to someone when they’re getting bullied?” or “Do they have a designated person they can trust in the building when I’m not there?”), things get more precarious as we ask for finer details. Where one set of parents want to prevent their children from hearing about society’s problems, another set of parents knows their children will face those problems and wish to gather the tools to survive and perhaps thrive in this life.

I get that values ultimately determine what we want from schools, but I don’t get how we continue to put forth one dominant set of values that continually harm us all, particularly our schools.

In the news, conservative policymakers rebuke some collection of abortion rights, civil rights for people of color and/or LBGTQIA+ folks, and other calls for dignified treatment, clumsily jeer them as “woke,” and go on with the status quo. Even though most of the shenanigans are deeply unpopular to the majority of Americans, our country has always created a well-oiled slide for “MAGA”-identifying people while human rights need mass social movements behind them time and again. This dynamic pushes more innocuous initiatives like DEI and multiculturalism to the margins of every industry in the country. Especially education.

So, while books flew off the shelves and donations to POC-led groups came in the millions, the country took much of that progress back and regressed in many circles to 1930s ideologies. Not every classroom or school was ready to take the next step in dismantling racism. But for those that were, this not only silenced the white educators and made them more fearful to attempt this work, it also reified that educators of color didn’t belong in front of any students, even those who looked like their own.

That’s ultimately why, when we call a racial or other identity conversation “difficult,” it just means that the students we’re most likely protecting are those who would benefit from reifying the status quo. Brown students don’t benefit from not mentioning the waves of asylum seekers into our cities and schools, as mayors and governors blame them for their jurisdiction’s problems. Black students don’t benefit from not learning about slavery, Reconstruction, and/or human rights in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement. Native American students don’t benefit from lessons that just stop at land acknowledgments (at best). Christians don’t benefit from learning corrupted versions of Christianity that don’t point toward authentic peace, justice, and love. For that matter, we don’t benefit from not learning more about Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and other religions. (Especially true since any Americans used to think that the separation of church and state was critical to a burgeoning democracy.)

But perhaps most critically: White students don’t learn when the American project professes to protect them, but are really just preserving the status quo that gets us further away from a truly shared humanity. Emphasis on sharing.

Today, I took my family and some of EduColor’s executive board to see Origin, the Ava Duvernay-directed movie based on the events surrounding Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste. The harrowing film gave us glimpses in world history that one might initially think children shouldn’t know. But, if it’s one thing I know about our world, it’s that I rather my son find about these events from his parents than a distorted version of events from elsewhere. Until America learns its lessons, I’ll continue to teach my son and any person in my sphere of influence how we got here. I will continue speaking up in service of the oppressed and stand in solidarity with those who have also sought to hold the line at truth.

We can’t treat the specter of inhumanity as normal. The “difficult” conversation for this world is the one where we look at the suffering of others, learn what it would take to minimize that harm, and imagine a society that would never allow for this.

Justice is a routine that keeps us all safe.