To Dulce, Tamir, Patrick, James, Jemelleh, Kelisa, Julia, Lorena, Shana, Val, Cornelius, and the rest of us, too,

A few years ago, I was in the middle of a gathering of young burgeoning educators. It was ostensibly about becoming better educators, but everyone received the messages differently. Some took the presenter to heart when she tried to impart wisdom from her decades of experience in the classroom. She spoke about her experiences in the classroom with a glimmer in her eye, reminding the audience that the best parts of her profession were the moments with students. In her presentation, you felt how seriously she took her job. I watched as the audience seemed to pay attention and scribble notes as she revealed her theory of practice and how she approaches the day-to-day of classroom teaching.

During one of the breaks, however, I observed a conversation happening when the presenter stepped out. One of the participants ended the conversation by boasting “Oh, everyone, there’s going to be a professional development session on Teach Like A Champion later. It’s gonna be lit.” When the presenter came back, a couple of the participants seemed to lose interest, even as the presenter got into the meat and potatoes of her presentation. When she asked for questions, there weren’t as many as I anticipated given the expertise of the presenter and the lack thereof from the educators.

Normally, a letter like this on my site would reveal friction between races and / or ethnicities. But nope. The presenter was a Black woman presenting to a Black audience. While I understood that every teacher in the room comes from different contexts, different schools, different administration, different goals, and yes, different understandings of what we consider school, it also revealed how complicated and complicit so many of us are in spaces we consider “ours.” The outright disregard of someone who’d been doing this work was astonishing to me, and I’ll be the first to diss a bad workshop. This wasn’t that. Even when teachers of color are more likely to believe their students’ brilliance, the “more likely” does not absolve those of us who still act oppressive for our bottom lines or from our own insecurities.

The sayings go “sometimes, it be your own people” and “all skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.” In the education space, there’s a set of people of color who prefer to receive knowledge from and disseminate to white sources. This occurs even when the person swears to the heavens that they’re “about that life.” It’s disturbing to me, and those of us need to have that internal conversation aloud.

“For us, by us, about us” is a difficult concept as is. We’re asking people to come together with common concepts of schooling and living. We’re emphasizing doing and naming the “doing” as an act of love and appreciation for people we consider ours. We’re constructing things without benevolent benefactors or at least folks we’re willing to negotiate with. We’re going deeper than codeswitching. We’re moving the culture by creating our own and asking everyone else to act accordingly. In this conversation of equity, diversity, and inclusion, they need us; we don’t need them.

We’ve grown tired of the interruptions, the ad hoc approval cliques, and the acculturation that passes for professional conduct in spaces we’re asked to occupy. We get the need to let our hair down. Yet, we’re seeing time and again how we replicate some of the same behaviors we despise and attribute to the American hegemony. It ain’t OK.

I haven’t spent two months without any number of our own people questioning the expertise and experiences of us. I’ve seen people of color who point to the white person outside of their circle to discuss writing for a major publication while another person of color who wrote for the same publication was sitting right there. I’ve seen administrators skip over their own staff of color for culturally responsive pedagogy conferences when the staff member of color was the one who wrote the proposal for it in the first place. Until recently, I’ve seen researchers of color get ignored when they discuss the conditions of teachers of color by people who ought to know better. I’ve seen how an all-Black school staff with an all-Black student body can snicker at the prospect of culturally responsive pedagogy. I’ve seen administrators of color throw their own staff and students under the bus to advance their own careers, and whole sets of parents disregarded until a white parent’s voice said the same exact thing.

We can talk Black excellence and collectivity, but not without discussing the ways a small subset of us continue to subvert our advocacy. We can call it impostor syndrome, internalized oppression, or post-traumatic slave disorder. Whatever we’re calling it, we’re in need of a collective detox, and it’ll start with us.

Give us our check. Put some respect on our intellect. Pay us with equity. Watch us reverse out of generational debt.

I’ve come to appreciate that the work does not speak for itself. If anything, the heights we reach are only invitations for any number of folks to disqualify our accomplishments. That’s cool. If our core wasn’t the students we serve, these constant slights from people all around us might deter us from going forward. Sometimes, we must make prophecy away from our own homes, only to return victors working hand in hand with those who first disregarded our works.

We got this. We got us. Even those of us who ain’t with the program yet. More soon.