A few weekends ago, ARRAY Inc. invited EduColor to a screening of Origin, a movie based on the events surrounding and within Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Before the screening started, Hank Azaria thanked everyone for coming and introduced a new initiative: to make sure as many 16-year-olds as possible got a chance to view the film for free. Shortly thereafter, though, he described the movie as great in the movie sense, but “it’ll change you.” The movie was rated as PG-13, I steeled myself for what I perhaps should have seen coming.
Without giving too much away, one of the scenes in the movie depicts George Zimmerman’s killing of Trayvon Martin, including the shot that catalyzed a movement. My 11-year-old son and I were moved, too. We stepped out of the theater so we could talk out the shock. Instantly, I recalled where I was when Judge Debra Nelson and a jury of Zimmerman’s peers acquitted Zimmerman of all charges. In fact, Alejandro was two years old and our family was a few miles away from where the tragedy happened. An hour after the verdict dropped, I was expected to attend a STEM professional development with my colleagues.
The dread of facing colleagues from across the country when my mind felt chaos was in alignment with how society expected Black people to endure systemic suffering. Worse still was that I had no one to process the grief with at the PD because professionalism is ostensibly separate from our shared humanity.
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