A Social Justice Newsletter for Educators

Better late than never.

March, as in March fo(u)rth! March on, march in line, march to the beat. Keep marching. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Bending The Arc for this auspicious month is only appearing near the end. I wasn’t sure it would get written at all. If your attention span is anything like mine at this stage of the pandemic school year, then you’ll appreciate my decision to dispense with a lot of narrative and simply share a couple of good reads.

Let’s start with a book. Community organizer and full-time abolitionist, Mariame Kaba has published a collection of essays on justice and abolitionist transformation which touches all aspects of society.

We Do This Til We Free Us is out now. Consider viewing this conversation with Mariame Kaba and co-authors as an entry point.

Something else I want to draw your attention to is the Disability Visibility Project, now out in book form, curated and edited by disability activist and author, Alice Wong. These first person essays provide much more than food for thought. They shake us out of our complacency and force us to acknowledge all the ways in which disability erasure harms us all. As a warm-up I encourage you to dip into this conversation between comedian and podcaster, W. Kamau Bell and Alice Wong. It’s stellar.

Finally I want to leave you with a blog post by diversity consultant and educator, Alison Park in response to the Atlanta shooting which claimed the lives of primarily Asian women, “Do we have to make a statement of solidarity with Asian-Americans? (Do we have to make a statement about EVERYTHING?)” Park writes:

“…like many other aspects of the work of DEI, this is going to be inconvenient and hard for a while. Because we are not here, playing injustice whack-a-mole, by accident. We are here by design. White supremacist patriarchy has rigged the system to win by making solidarity a reactive stance, thereby overwhelming and exhausting us with the need to build – in moments and waves of crisis – relationships and trust that actually require space, attention and priority to develop.”

There are so many ways for us to create and build solidarity with and alongside others. We can be identity-affirming along as many lines as there are people. Let’s do that and leave “injustice whack-a-mole behind.”

Peace,

Sherri