Journal of a Black Teacher

A personal narrative about looking into the blind spots.  by Don Allen, M. A. Ed./MAT       ​I consider myself somewhat of a league civil rights activist in the early 90’s. I felt that my upcoming visit to the Lorraine Motel, now the National Civil Rights Museum, would be my pilgrimage to what I considered my Mecca.”      ​1992 had been a good year. I had had stories published in two Minneapolis newspapers as well as other work published in Denver, where I used to live. I was always very critical of the way the mainstream media presented the civil rights struggle and the plight of Black Americans in the United States.  At the same time, I was critical of the Black community itself.  While it was not a popular view, I believed firmly that a significant number of the problems faced by those in the black community were exacerbated by privileged members of the Black middle class more concerned with personal enrichment than wit...

By Don Allen, Educator and Truth Teller  The Black Lives Matter fundraising movement left the Twin Cities with $90 million dollars (plus) ignoring the need to address systemic racism, institutional racism, education, and economic justice in the Twin Cities. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) saw to it that the local (Minnesota) organization Feeding Our Future quickly scaled up during the COVID-19 pandemic, and received $193 million in federal grants in 2021 after having gotten $307,000 three years before. The rapid rise came crashing down in January (2022) when dozens of federal agents raided locations owned by subcontractors who have been accused of stealing millions of dollars (Fox 9 News).. Of course, we don’t know where the money went, nor can we find a family that was saved from this mysterious agency funded by MDE.  When Black Americans in Minnesota lose, our losses are monumental, devastating, mostly ma...

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 sit...