People often remind me that my story is peculiar. “Black Kid From Compton Becomes a Harvard Professor” is the headline, as they see it. Although I am apprehensive to conflate a job at Harvard with some universal vision of success, I do recognize why my family, my friends, and even those with whom I am unacquainted take pride in the accomplishment. But this flattened narrative of individual achievement misses a key aspect of my development: My education was mostly led—and undoubtedly influenced—by Black teachers.
The educators who taught me, like so many generations of African American teachers before them, operated from a pedagogical vision that was fundamentally anti-racist. They exposed students to expansive visions of Black life, through both their lessons and the relationships they formed with us as students. They helped us understand that we were more than the suffering of our people. Our dignity and self-worth had to be cultivated from within, even as we were taught to resist racism in all its forms.
The concept of anti-racist teaching is being fiercely debated right now. Its advocates insist that students learn about the roots of racial inequality, that they be encouraged to name and challenge it explicitly. Critics suggest that anti-racist teaching is dogmatic, unpatriotic, and an impediment to critical thinking. They have, in recent weeks, irresponsibly clumped together anti-racist teaching, critical race theory, ethnic studies, and anything else involving the systematic study of race and racism, painting them as one heap of race-talk mumbo jumbo. Lost in the discourse on both sides, however, is the acknowledgment that Black teachers, as early as the 19th century, have been deeply engaged in the work of challenging racial domination in American schools. The traditions of African American teachers provide the country with a model, a vital intellectual resource for more nuanced conversations about the place and possibility of anti-racism in the classroom.