Journal of a Black Teacher

  How can understanding the “continuum” be helpful to planning Culturally Responsive work with individuals within your organization? When I opened up chapter five to start reading, the pull-quote by Ellis Cose from his book, The Rage of a Privileged Class has me rethinking everything, and I cannot move past it; he wrote, “If we tell ourselves that the only problem is hate, we avoid facing the reality that it is mostly nice, non-hating people who perpetuate racial inequality”  (Cose 1998, p. 20). In my organization, as well as in the state of Minnesota, we know the ‘nice’ people are at the center of some of the most horrific, disabling, and learning-killing proposals and policies from the Minnesota Department of Education granting over $245 million to a non-existent agency for feeding children and families during the 202o COVID-19 quarantine, to its lack of diversity, inclusion, and color in the agencies upper leadership . These ‘nice’ people make sure the status quo is never disrupted

No one should be treated differently but addressing race and inequitable education is toxic; but in Minnesota, spending more than $600 million a year on closing the achievement gap with ZERO successes in any district is considered a win?   By Don Allen, M.A. Ed./MAT - Journal of A Black Teacher©  2022 All Rights Reserved (Editorial Opinion - Not Written for the Guilty or Weak Minded) Besides everything else, W.E.B. Du Bois must have also been a fortune teller back in the day.  In all of his authored books, Du Bois sternly warns Black folks in the United States about our Black and Brown children being used as “doormats to be spit and tramped upon and lied to by ignorant social climbers.” Today, the proverbial ‘doormats’ and ‘spit’ come in the form of the generational minimal proficiencies for Black and Brown children born in the United States, and the phenomenon has spread quickly to our new kids - some Somali, Latin, and Asian children whose families exited a bad situation in their hom