Box of delight

Anyone who seeks out a health and well-being provider is looking for someone who will be a part of their health care team. When they walk into a space where they are vulnerable and reliant upon care, they hope that the provider will be respectful and allow them to share their story without judgment. For this to be possible, the provider (or anyone, for that matter) should have cultural humility.

Is the title of this piece an oxymoron? Aren’t international academic spaces international by definition? Unfortunately not: “international” too often (one might venture, almost inevitably) means the Global North, and indeed it usually means Europe and the USA. So, for example, announcements at European conferences of international speakers more often than not means those from the US (not even Canada, sometimes). This is a problem for obvious reasons: it perpetuates the skewed geopolitics of knowledge, renders invisible voices, views, and epistemologies from the Global South or even from peripheries within the North. Everyone is the poorer for it.

What do you think of when you hear the word “black”? Do you think of a colour? A race? A culture? A movement? There are many different ways of interpreting “blackness”, prompting the question: is it a concept worth studying?

As educators doing antiracism work, we often focus extensively on the impact that white supremacy has on students. But even though we recognize that white supremacy shapes all of our lives and work, we spend little time talking about its impact on educators.

For the past three years, we’ve worked as colleagues in our Philadelphia high school’s humanities department and with teacher-led racial justice organizations. Clarice is a Black, biracial woman, and Charlie is a white man.

We know we all live in the same society of racism and white supremacy. We know white educators have the privilege to ignore these conditions and often do. And we know our collaboration is the exception, not the rule.

History teaching in schools has long been seen as central to creating a sense of national identity, and in defining the scope of citizenship.

Who and what gets included in the vision of ‘British history’ has been hotly contested, particularly by black and minority ethnic communities, who have campaigned for over five decades for the inclusion of black histories on the curriculum. The establishment of supplementary schools and of Black History Month – which celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2017 – have shown both the significance of a more inclusive version of British history in our increasingly ethnically, racially and religiously diverse society, and the tenacity of BME activists in seeking alternative ways of telling these (hi)stories.

From the shortage of black teachers to lowered expectations of our black students and curriculum that all but ignores African American history and culture, there is a crisis in black education. As we grapple with complex issues of race and equity in our schools, these three educators share their candid, concrete, and practical solutions.