Culturally Proficient Leadership: The Personal Journey Begins Within

by Raymond D. Terrell

90 percent of respondents reported that their school climates had been negatively affected following the 2016 election, with heightened student anxiety and hate speech incidents on the rise (Potok, 2017).

True for us. The president has made it okay for people to be prejudiced against others.

our progress in closing opportunity gaps, in reversing the predictable

Are we really 250 years away from closing the achievement gap?

odds of failure for historically underserved groups of students, has been painfully slow.

Are we really 250 years away from closing the achievement gap?

now understand that most of these teachers, no matter how well intentioned, were poorly prepared to educate the students who now inhabited their classrooms.

may not have had direct responsibility for perpetrating White Supremacy, but as an adult, I now have a moral and ethical responsibility to do something in response.

growing awareness of the deadening effects of colorblindness and our increased comfort level in engaging in both private and public conversations about race, gender, oppression, marginalization, power, and privilege.

You have to identify your own biases before you can begin to help students identify there’s.

chaos

We are scared and uncomfortable around things, people, and/or situations we are unfamiliar with. We avoid them, and thus, we do not ever become comfortable with those that are different from us.

losing our sense of self,

We’re afraid to change because we don’t know what the knew “us” will look like.

invite our own powerful stories To reveal the diversity within.

Just as others have important stories we can learn from, we do as well.

may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and may not come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction: toward a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

This quote, plus Bush in chapter 5, is the “why” for the book.

cultural autobiographies

She constantly admonished me to be sure to be polite and show deference to white people in order to avoid confrontations that could ultimately prove to be deadly.

clearly had no notion that whites, though impacted differently, were also negatively affected by acquiring an inflated sense of privilege and entitlement.

explore and learn “how” and “from whom” you developed your assumptions, values, and beliefs about people culturally different from you

learn from people who are culturally different from you

You don’t get comfortable talking to people about race by talking to people who look like you.

appropriate responses

Poverty has its roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America . . . .

Part of the “why” for this book.

As a domestic for a powerful family in the community, my mom viewed the world as a very dangerous place for African American males. She constantly admonished me to be sure to be polite and show deference to white people in order to avoid confrontations that could ultimately prove to be deadly. There was no one at my father’s workplace that had any community connections. He felt that he had a social responsibility to challenge the status quo around issues of social justice and constantly challenged the segregated school setting and other forms of local discrimination. It

also know that deep-rooted beliefs can also be a source of division between and among people. I often wonder if it’s possible to be a true believer of any form of religion and at the same time value those who hold totally different beliefs.

In fact, there was a practice implemented in my seventh/eighth-grade classroom where the principal, who lived in the house next door to the school, would call roll in the morning and assign domestic work and yard work to half of my class and indicate that they would be pursuing careers as domestics and yard boys in the near future and needed to hone those skills. The rest of us would remain and engage in academic pursuits.

was in a real state of cultural confusion and experiencing high degrees of marginality, not fitting in or being totally accepted by either the white students or my African American family or peers.

Little did I know or anticipate the racism that I would encounter as I ventured into the military and the larger society.

However, I still was not about to be open and trusting around white people again. Life and death based on racism became a real possibility in my life space.

through dialogue and interaction, they developed awareness about their whiteness and the difference in forms of oppression. Once we worked through those issues, the “oppression Olympics” came to an end.

being the only person of color in class after class and being expected to be the Negro expert wore thin very quickly.

He challenged us to think deeply about the issues of racism and poverty and constantly insisted that we always ask Why over and over again if we were ever to develop full understanding.

African American students who were demanding that our culture be included in curricula and that teachers be taught to be more sensitive to the racial and cultural differences that students brought to school.

We were not fully prepared for the level of resistance from school staff and community members. We also were very naïve about how power operated in a racialized environment.

It was my position that they would never be ready for such a move if left to their own devices. (Parenthetically, the same issue was raised again recently, and the local board again opted to build eight new elementary buildings in local communities, maintaining a continued form of racial and socioeconomic apartheid within the Princeton City School District.)

had never personally encountered anyone who was Hispanic, and I was totally unaware that across Texas, Hispanics were afford second-class status in much the same way that Blacks were where I came from.

would always be an individual with all of my knowledge, abilities, values, beliefs, and behaviors, but to most people I would also always be “just another one of them,” until I somehow proved to be “different from the rest of them.”

One of the difficulties that people had in discussing these issues was that such discussions tended to lead to statements about how “my pain is greater than your pain”; these proved to be fruitless debates, and too often there was a lack of understanding the terms. While all negative attitudes—and more importantly, behaviors—directed toward others are harmful, there are different degrees to which the negative actions are taken. It was a form of “oppression Olympics,” ignoring that institutional racism and other forms of institutional oppression have a negative effect on all of us.

We also believed that people were not born with negative views about the various “isms,” but rather they were learned phenomena. If

We also soon discovered that there are deep-rooted structures embedded in all educational systems that make change difficult at best, and at some levels it seems impossible. Our work and the frustrations that we encountered served to pull us personally and professionally closer.

We would frequently have other family members and/or friends who were also migrating north come to live with us until they could become established in the city. Our home was always filled with people.

was public housing, segregated, and all of our neighbors were African Americans, which I came to learn was a pattern of housing discrimination in urban areas all across America.

Now as I look back I am aware that I was afraid of gay people.

I later became aware of differences in sexual orientation. I was finally at a stage of life that I was a proponent of social justice and an advocate for individual rights.

changed my last name, a custom that was usual for women. Almost no one expected males to change their names when they were married.

I became aware that because of my diction and tone of voice, she though that I was white—another encounter with racism.

I guess the social pattern was where separation was maintained, at least in my family. While my father spoke against issues of racism, my mother was less generous.

I remember most vividly was my father’s deft challenging of family members’ attitudes.

By high school, most of the Black students had disappeared.

Competence takes a back seat to privilege.

Another Country,

was learning the history of a different United States.

Shocked to learn what I didn’t know

was beginning to recognize the disparities in schooling and how very few educators would confront inequities.

The deep, seemingly intractability of racism and the unwillingness of white people, in particular, to recognize that racial disparities were attributable to more than personal ambition. Racial disparities are the residual effect of systemic factors that marginalize students of color and foster disproportional achievement, graduation rates, suspensions, expulsions, and placement in special education programs.

I became fascinated with trying to understand white, institutional racism. I could identify racism. I could give examples of racism. I could not understand it.