Black Lives Matter at School by Jones Denisha; Hagopian Jesse; Tometi Opal

Author:Jones, Denisha; Hagopian, Jesse; Tometi, Opal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2020-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

Image credit: Wear Out the Silence.

CHAPTER 14

Centering the Youngest Black Children

An Interview with Takiema Bunche-Smith*

Denisha Jones: Let’s start with a little bit about you. Tell me what you do at Bank Street College of Education.

Takiema Bunche-Smith: I’m the executive director of the Center on Culture, Race and Equity at Bank Street College of Education. At CCRE, we provide research-based professional development to education professionals and institutions to help them create antiracist and culturally responsive, sustaining environments for children, families, and staff. In the work that we do, we center race in these conversations. We work in settings that include birth to twelfth grade and beyond. We even recently started working with a school that serves individuals up to age twenty-one, so we really cover the whole spectrum of childhood. We adapt our development frameworks based on the ages of the children, but our consistent focus is helping adults become aware of their own mindsets and behaviors around race, culture, and equity, which means our model is applicable across all settings.

A while back, as we were doing our work with schools, I started to identify places of potential growth in our curriculum and approach. We would often get questions like, well, why is this just about Black and white people? Where is everyone else? I had actually raised that question myself when I first came to CCRE. Trying to answer it pushed me to really ask, why are we talking just about Black and white people? The answer is that we have to. We need to talk about Black people specifically, and people who are racialized in other ways. And we need to talk about Black and white people because there are specific issues we need to understand related to Black oppression in the US context and around the world. We need to understand our racialization and how it has been woven into every single system in the United States.

And so I asked myself, do people genuinely understand that? No. Do we talk about it? No. Do we talk about the impact of anti-Black racism in the field of education? No. We need to be talking about it at the personal, professional, and institutional levels. The heart of CCRE’s approach is to discuss concepts, research, and practice on those three levels. But there was a gap in our curriculum on the topic of how racism impacts people of all races, and anti-Black racism in particular.

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