Abstract
Background or Context:
Belonging has proved to be important for youth and adults in schools. However, anti-Black racism in U.S. schooling has led to harmful psychological and physiological effects that teachers of Color face in combating racism. As such, teachers of Color continue to face a “double bind” when it comes to teaching: working to advocate for anti-racist pedagogies, curricula, and school policies, while also having to navigate and protect themselves from the normalcy of racism in individual, ideological, and institutional forms. Hence, it is worth understanding how teachers of Color navigate the politics of belonging in the current contexts of their schools and seeing what lessons there are still to learn about how belonging takes shape in the context of anti-Blackness. Additionally, this piece contributes to the growing body of literature on Asian American teacher experiences by explicitly attending to the relationship of Asian American educators' efforts to combat anti-Blackness in school contexts.
Purpose/Research Question:
This study explores how an Asian American teacher works to cultivate belonging in the context of an anti-Black school. Hence, this study poses the following question: How does an Asian American teacher enact their own politics of belonging to contest the hegemonic presence of anti-Blackness for themselves and with youth? Subsequent supporting questions are: How does an Asian American educator foster senses of belonging in our educational communities when automatically positioned as an authority figure who represents and carries out anti-Black practices that have endured the modern schooling history? What actions and beliefs do teachers rely on to intellectually and materially foster senses of belonging with youth?
Research Design:
This project employed the critical ethnographic methodology of portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997) of an Asian American teacher, Thuy, with an explicitly named commitment to Black solidarity. The study took place in Racial Justice Community School during a two-year period (2019–2021). Data collected consisted of formal interviews, extensive informal interviews, field notes, participant observation, lesson plans, and student assignments.
Conclusion/Recommendations:
Thuy’s portrait illustrates the tension between the potential for classrooms to be sites of racial justice and the hegemonic force of anti-Blackness in schools that she constantly had to strategically navigate. Drawing on these lessons, the conclusion explores what it might mean for schools to support educators like Thuy, with specific attention to the ways that teacher education, school leadership, and policymakers need to divest from anti-Black logics that undergird current formulations of being a teacher.
Keywords
Belonging In The Context Of Anti-Black Schooling
The concept of belonging has been identified in educational research as a critical element in positive identity development for youth (Chhuon & Hudley, 2010; Goodenow, 1993; Juvonen, 2006; Maslow, 1962; Murphy & Zirkel, 2015) and a foundation of the sustainability of teachers in schools (Allen et al., 2018; Gittens et al., 2022; Kachchhap & Horo, 2021). However, positive outcomes are routinely hindered because enactments of belonging are sutured to race and power, as evidenced by the anti-Black logics of U.S. citizenship (Au, 2025; Hartman, 1997; C. J. Kim, 2023; Mills, 1997). As Hartman detailed in her archival study of newly enfranchised Black Americans during Reconstruction in the United States, white politicians protected their power by crafting Black citizenship as a “double bind of freedom” (p. 237), which simultaneously lauded the success of liberal democracy ending slavery while maintaining the anti-Black conditions of U.S. society that materially shaped Black civic existence. This meant that white politicians could claim racial progress while subjugating Black people through anti-Black ideologies (e.g., criminalizing Black communities), laws (e.g., Jim Crow laws), and socioeconomic systems (e.g., redlining, school segregation) that reproduced Black subjugation through the expectations that Black citizens were responsible for their own failures in society.
Given the value of public schooling as a space to cultivate future citizens who supported the U.S. nation-state, schools also served to promulgate racist ideologies that maintained the U.S. racial caste system (Hartman, 1997; Muhammad, 2010; Watkins, 2001). This project remains alive and well today in schools; scholars have observed the ways that teaching about citizenship in K–12 schools maintains anti-Blackness through a negation of racial violence in narratives of civic life (C. J. Kim, 2023; Vickery, 2017), an overreliance on the ideals of democratic citizenship through vehicles such as multicultural citizenship to evade interrogating how Blackness was used to construct the parameters of citizenship in Western societies (Busey & Dowie-Chin, 2021; Duncan, 2023), and exclusionary disciplinary practices (e.g., suspensions, expulsions, arrests) that normalize the exclusion of Black people in U.S. society (Dumas, 2016; Sojoyner, 2016).
As such, enactments of belonging in any given school community are tethered to broader projects of reproducing anti-Blackness (Kohli, 2021; Murphy & Zirkel, 2015; Venzant Chambers, 2022; Vickery, 2016, 2017). Consider, for example, the lived experiences of Black students during U.S. school desegregation. Black feminist Barbara Smith reflected on a memory of her mother making cookies for her newly integrated class, but none of the white 1 children ate them (Eubanks & Jones, 2014). Likewise, hooks (1994) described desegregation as a shift from “beloved all-black schools to white schools where black students were always seen as interlopers, as not really belonging” (p. 4). In fact, contemporary studies have documented how anti-Blackness amid desegregation shifted discipline as a practice of care for Black youth to a rationale for excluding Black and Brown youth from classroom learning (Horsford, 2010; Milner, 2020). Thus, anti-Blackness persists in shaping belonging in schools.
While the forces of anti-Black racism continue to shape belonging in U.S. society, the wisdom in the experiences of racially minoritized youth and educators offers insights into how belonging also takes shape in anti-oppressive ways. Consider the research that has shown that teachers of Color are highly effective at cultivating senses of belonging with youth of Color. 2 In the development of a framework on the impact of teachers of Color, Young and Easton-Brooks (2022) concluded from their synthesis of literature about teachers of Color efficacy in cultivating belonging that “teachers of color have the capacity to serve as structural agents of interpersonal, instruction, and institutional change for students of color” (p. 640). It is then unsurprising that the desire for districts to hire teachers of Color has grown rapidly, as policymakers and school administrators seek to address the dearth of teachers of Color 3 across U.S. schools and address the need for belonging to occur in K–12 spaces (Carver & Darling-Hammond, 2017; Haddix, 2017).
Yet, teachers of Color continue to face a “double bind” when it comes to teaching, working to advocate for anti-racist pedagogies, curricula, and school policies while also having to navigate and protect themselves from the normalcy of racism in individual, ideological, and institutional forms (Achinstein & Ogawa, 2011; Gist, 2017; Kohli, 2021; Kohli & Pizarro, 2016; Pizarro & Kohli, 2018; Woodson & Pabon, 2016). The anti-racist labor that teachers of Color continue to take up comes with the onslaught of everyday racialized macro- and microaggressions that precipitate psychological and physiological harm. Scholars have found this, also known as “racial battle fatigue” (Gildersleeve et al., 2011; Kohli, 2021; Pizarro & Kohli, 2018; W. A. Smith, 2009), to be an existential threat to teachers of Color, driven by a “severe sense of isolation and an exorbitant investment of time and energy into confronting racism” (Pizarro & Kohli, 2018, p. 973). As such, these educators not only struggle to enact their anti-racist commitments but also have higher rates of burnout earlier in their careers than their white peers (Kohli, 2021).
As this critical body of research on racial battle fatigue advocates for policies that challenge the racism that teachers of Color endure, it is worth understanding how teachers of Color navigate the politics of belonging in the current contexts of their schools and seeing what lessons there are still to learn about how belonging takes shape in the context of anti-Blackness. This study explores how an Asian American teacher works to cultivate belonging in the context of an anti-Black school. Of note are the unique experiences of Asian American educators navigating the contested racializing terrain of how Asian American identities, histories, and experiences are routinely subsumed under whiteness (J. Kim, 2022; J. Kim & Hsieh, 2022; Rodríguez, 2019) while also being positioned in materially beneficial ways by not being Black, through the model minority trope (Au, 2025; C. J. Kim, 2023). While the extant research on the experiences of Asian American teachers in U.S. contexts asserts the uniqueness of Asian American educator experiences through the use of AsianCrit 4 (J. Kim, 2022; J. Kim & Hsieh, 2022; Rodríguez, 2019), this piece contributes to this growing body of literature by explicitly attending to the relationship of Asian American educators' efforts to combat anti-Blackness in school contexts.
Hence, this study poses the following question: How does an Asian American teacher enact their own politics of belonging to contest the hegemonic presence of anti-Blackness for themselves and with youth? Subsequent supporting questions are: How does an Asian American educator foster senses of belonging in our educational communities when automatically positioned as an authority figure who represents and carries out anti-Black practices that have endured the modern schooling history? What actions and beliefs do teachers rely on to intellectually and materially foster senses of belonging with youth?
Theoretical Framework: The Politics Of Belonging
To examine how belonging functions, this article draws on critical feminist scholar Nira Yuval-Davis’s (2011) conceptualization of belonging and the politics of belonging. Yuval-Davis asserted that belonging is a continual process of negotiating one’s ascribed and self-assigned social location (e.g., race, gender, sexuality, religion, class, and ability) with emotional attachments to individual or collective stories that affirm with one’s sense of self and political ideologies. Additionally, how any person senses their belonging is context-dependent to local relationships of power.
The politics of belonging is both distinct from and connected to the concept of belonging, in that politics are “the exercise of power” (Yuval-Davis, 2011, p. 19). In this way, the politics of belonging are “aimed at constructing belonging to particular collectivity/ies which are themselves being constructed in very specific ways and in very specific boundaries” (p. 10). In other words, the politics of belonging mobilize power to construct boundaries to include and exclude people from a given community. Critically, these enactments of the politics of belonging have varying degrees of malleability depending on the specific facet being taken up. For example, the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion situated in common sociopolitical values such as democracy or human rights are most malleable, whereas boundaries constructed based on socially ascribed social locations, such as birthplace, race, or gender, are least changeable. Importantly, the politics of belonging adapts to maintain boundaries for those with hegemonic authority. In the case of U.S. society, that politic reifies the exclusion of communities of Color (Mills, 1997; Muhammad, 2010).
At the same time, these same communities have also strategically leveraged the rigidity of anti-Black exclusion to also cultivate spaces of reprieve, healing, and care for themselves through the formation of homeplaces (hooks, 1990). Theorized by hooks (1990), homeplaces draw on her adolescent experiences traveling through a white neighborhood with her family to visit her grandmother’s house. Despite the persistent white gaze that made her feel unsafe and unwelcome, she named her grandmother’s house as a homeplace, explaining that the intimacy of their family relationship in tandem with their racial affinity deepened the concept of home to become a conceptual and physical space to resist white supremacy and anti-Blackness internally and out in the world. Thus, while Yuval-Davis’s (2011) asserted that race serves as a less changeable facet of the politics of belonging because it serves hegemonic authority (e.g., white land-owning political elites), homeplaces elucidate that anti-oppressive politics of belonging can, and do, exist alongside racial oppression.
Consequently, homeplaces serve as a useful concept to better understand the anti-oppressive politics of belonging for many people of Color, given the hegemony of anti-Blackness in schools. Homeplaces in schools enact the political value of care and reprieve from racism for youth of Color (Oto & Chikkatur; 2019; Skerrett, 2011; Vickery, 2016, 2017). In Skerrett’s (2011) study of English teachers’ racial literacy across multiple schools, she observed that teachers of Color approached their relationships with youth of Color in their classrooms in “sustained and strategic” forms (p. 324). These educators used their classrooms to recognize and make sense of the distinct racialized experiences that youth of Color were required to navigate every day, and then critique and act against racial oppression. Vickery’s (2016, 2017) studies of Black women educators examined how their own civic exclusion produced an acute awareness of the United States’s history of excluding Black communities from the rights and protections that come with U.S. citizenship and motivated them to imagine citizenship in ways that honored Black youth in their classrooms. In turn, these Black educators reimagined citizenship to be more inclusive through a centering of Black feminist theories and histories of resistance. Oto and Chikkatur’s (2019) action research study illustrated how an affinity group for students of Color in their high school class about U.S. history and race provided a strategic space for students to plan and support one another in combatting the various forms that racism took in the class itself. While anti-Blackness remained hegemonic in the school, constructing spaces to process and strategize against racism mitigated the impact it had on students of Color.
These studies signal the complex ecosystems of schools in which politics of belonging are webs of harm and healing. In turn, there is more to understand about how these competing projects of racial violence and care exist simultaneously and how teachers of Color navigate the double bind (Gist, 2017) of their professional labor. Specifically, the question remains to be answered in what ways teachers of Color come to find reprieve from anti-Black racism for themselves and the nuances of doing that work.
Methodology
This study’s central question is: How does an Asian American teacher enact their own politics of belonging to contest the hegemonic presence of anti-Blackness for themselves and with youth? Transparently, I have always been drawn to understanding the politics of belonging because of my experiences as an educator. As a cisgender multiracial Asian American male classroom educator for 13 years in a variety of K–12 contexts, I was fortunate to build relationships with young people of Color that pushed me to better understand myself as a person, leading me to grow as an educator. Until my teaching career, I lived within the model minority trope, having my racial identity tethered to the white logics of academic achievement that deracialized my consciousness (Au, 2025; J. Kim & Hsieh, 2022). These experiences were humbling, nurturing my racial consciousness along with my political purpose as an educator. I regularly found myself in stronger community with youth of Color than with white adults in the schools where I worked. More than 15 years later, I owe much of who I am to the young people I shared spaces with, and I came to this project hoping to understand more about what I experienced and the lessons I might learn from other educators of Color who found themselves in similar situations.
Drawing on my experiences, I knew that making sense of the politics of belonging meant using a methodology that honored a commitment to community. Thus, this project employed the critical ethnographic methodology of portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997). As an iteration of critical ethnography (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997; Madison, 2020; L. Smith, 2012), portraiture counteracts the colonial tradition of ethnographies pathologizing Black and Brown communities (Kelley, 1997; Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997; Madison, 2020), demanding an “ethical responsibility . . . a compelling sense of duty and commitment based on principles of human freedom and well-being” toward participants and their community (Madison, 2020, p. 4). Specifically, portraiture enacts this ethical responsibility to people and communities by answering the question, “What is good here?” (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997, p. 9). This does not mean ignoring challenges or harms as they appear in the field, nor does it mean portraying participants as exemplars of goodness—in this case, anti-oppressive politics of belonging. Rather, it is about elucidating how expressions of goodness are intimately connected with harm and oppression and can produce oppression in other forms (Kumashiro, 2002). Therefore, examining anti-oppressive politics of belonging cannot be divorced from the possible harms the work also inflicts and reinforces.
School Context
The data presented in this article are drawn from a larger ethnographic study that took place over the course of the 2019–2020 and 2020–2021 school years at Racial Justice Community School (RJCS). RJCS, a K–12 public school, is located in a first-ring suburb of Blueston and has been impacted directly by gentrification pressures in a nearby historically Black neighborhood in a major midwestern urban center. While Blueston’s population remains a narrow majority white (52%), RJCS’s student demographic data indicate that only 11% of the student population is white; the majority of students (60%) identify as Black/Black African, followed by those who identify as Latinx (21%). Additionally, 92% of RJCS’s students qualify for free and reduced lunch programming.
Anti-Blackness was an intimate part of RJCS that reflected the matrix of domination (Collins, 1990). Structurally, the gentrification pressures rapidly changed the school’s student demographic makeup; this, paired with open enrollment policies of the state, failed efforts at levying higher property taxes, and over a decade of enrollment declines as white families left for more affluent and white schools, led to general funds for RJCS declining in real terms. The demographic shift toward Black-majority schools coincided with the use of suspensions and expulsions of Black youth from the high school, middle school, and elementary school. These policies caught the attention of the state’s department of human rights in 2017, which resulted in the district entering into an agreement with the state to reduce racial disproportionality in discipline by 2021.
This framed RJCS’s understanding of restorative practices, and while white school leaders lauded the decline of expulsion and suspension numbers, white teachers anti-Black attitudes remained largely unchanged. As was explained to me in my new teacher orientation, teachers were still permitted to kick students out of class, just not out of school. This loophole was exploited daily as teachers and administrators created complex hall pass systems to signal when a student would be punished throughout the day, keeping them in school but out of classrooms. Most of the staff meetings throughout my time were spent refining these systems as teachers lamented the need for stricter enforcement tools. Relationally, anti-Blackness characterized the teaching community. It was made clear in orientation that I would need to kick students out of class or risk being labeled an ineffective teacher by my evaluations. One white colleague explained to me that effective teaching meant I needed to “set the tone right away”: “Pick the loudest kid and send them out. Let them know you mean business, and the rest of your year will be much better.” I hoped that she was an outlier, but I quickly found that she was comfortably in the majority of the teaching community and how it viewed a student body that was majority Black and Brown.
Data Collection
Importantly, living into the anti-colonial ethics of critical ethnography, I did not enter this community and immediately aim to conduct research (Madison, 2020). Rather, I taught for two year at RJCS before starting this project (2017–2019), continued to teach and work in the school full time during this data collection, and remained at RJCS until 2023 in a teacher leadership role. I offer this context to illustrate that this project was inherently community-bound and was more than a research study for me; it was an investigation into a community that I care for. While I am no longer at this school, my commitments to the people and the visions for racial justice at RJCS remain intact.
Data for this study came from an array of sources. Three semi-structured interviews (45–75 minutes per interview) with each teacher participant were formally recorded, one during each quarter of the 2020–2021 school year. Informal interviews were conducted weekly in my interactions with my colleagues, such as over lunch, during prep periods, and outside of school (three weekly ranging from 30 to 60 minutes). I collected curricular materials from teachers’ classes such as lesson plans, assessments, and student work; during the time I shared with each participant, I collected roughly four lesson plans and two assignments, which included full-class student work samples. I also observed interactions formally in classrooms (each participant was observed for one quarter twice weekly) and informally in nonclassroom sites, such as after-school programming, professional trainings they led, meeting minutes from school leadership committees (twice per quarter, totaling eight over the year), and formal written reflections they completed for this project (once per quarter, totaling four over the year).
Data Analysis
Portraiture is also a political act of “analysis and solidarity” (Featherstone, 1989), bringing together the analytic rigor of scientific inquiry with the intimacy of offering narratives that people can see themselves in. With specific attention to the aesthetics of text, portraitures are meant to also be read beyond the academy, meaning that the ethical obligations to research participants and communities extend beyond data collection and into analysis. In my case, this meant working closely with each teacher who participated in the study to member check narratives I crafted for accuracy, as well as generating new data in our conversations about what I was seeing. In turn, portraiture can generate an uncompromisingly human text meant to inspire through feelings of familiarity (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997), refusing demands to distill complex human lives and experiences into disciplinary logics.
To accomplish this task, I drew heavily on detailed reflective memos (Emerson et al., 2011) throughout the study, writing daily summaries and reflections of those experiences. I cross-checked these memos against other data sources (e.g., participant observations, interviews, informal conversations, curricular resources) to develop a “thicker” data set that illustrated the complex politics of belonging taking shape in the school (Geertz, 1973). Throughout this process, I crafted draft vignettes that captured themes that I submitted to each participant for their respective review. Participants reflected with me about what I had portrayed, producing additional data, which I included in the final versions of the portraits as ways to tease out the complex decision-making and reflection of each educator. For both ethical purposes and precision, I asked each participant to review and give feedback on their portraits once the final pieces were written. This laid the foundation for analytic moments that I returned to in the data analysis.
As noted earlier, my position in this project was intentionally more intimately intertwined with participants and the school, which shaped the data analysis. Lawrence-Lightfoot and Davis (1997) asserted that portraiture demands “that [the researcher] sketch herself into the context” (p. 50) so that readers “can better interpret the process and product of her vision” (p. 50). As has been seen thus far, my position in this research is bound to the context and projects of anti-oppressive teaching within RJCS. I also situate myself alongside those whose stories I aim to portray in this project. As such, I am present throughout the construction of the portraits, expressing my own ideological positions and discernments that provides context for my own struggles to listen for rather than to the stories I encountered.
Throughout the analysis process, I knew that I would need to wrestle with the intimacy of my positionality in crafting the portraits. So I drew on Kevin Kumashiro’s (2002) project of rereading lived experiences through different analytic positions, specifically that of looking beyond, to force myself to challenge what I thought I knew about these people and the place. Kumashiro (2002) defined looking beyond as paradoxical because while we read the stories before us, we “foreground the desires, resistances, and senses of self that otherwise could hinder our own abilities to identify, act, relate, and change in antioppressive ways” (pp. 117–118). This form of rereading emphasizes a changing sense of self rather than finding new meaning in the story at hand. Modeling Kumashiro’s questions to look beyond, I crafted the following questions specific to this project: What did I/the participant desire to see repeated in these stories? How was I/the participant seeking validation in my own political project of belonging? As I crafted the narratives and had participants read through them for their perspectives, I used these guiding questions to attend to portraiture’s demand that I listen for the story that was present: By using these questions both independently and with participants to assess the strength and accuracy of the narratives I constructed, the political projects of belonging were nurtured by the care we shared for each other as people. Consequently, looking beyond became a critical analytic approach to analyzing data from these educators to explore the ways they worked against anti-Black racism and ensure that I was not projecting my hopes and ambitions onto their stories.
Participants
Recruiting participants to this project was unique due to my position within the school as a teacher, or what scholars refer to as insider positionality (Madison, 2020; L. Smith, 2012). My presence in the school throughout the routines of teaching (e.g., staff meetings, passing time, professional development) afforded me an opportunity to purposefully recruit participants based on what they said and did, along with how youth and adults in the community viewed them. As such, I used purposeful recruiting to identify colleagues who explicitly stated their commitment to racial justice pedagogies through statements in formal staff meetings and were regarded as “good teachers” by adults and youth alike. The people who participated in this project were approached face-to-face through the 2019–2020 school year, when an informal request to participate was made; this was followed by a formal meeting that laid out the research agenda, procedures, and risks and benefits, and a consent form was signed.
In the larger study, there were four participants of different racial, gender, and sexual identities and who had been working at RJCS for various lengths of time. For the purpose of this article, only Thuy’s portrait is offered because of her explicit political commitment to cultivating “thick solidarity” among Asian American communities and Black liberation efforts (Liu & Shange, 2018). As detailed in the remainder of this article, this political purpose is deeply ingrained in who she is as Thuy challenges the anti-Black logics that she had internalized in her childhood, and subsequently drew on to inform and shape her teaching. As such, Thuy’s positionality as an Asian American educator committed to Asian and Black solidarities provides unique lessons into the broader landscape of belonging in schooling contexts.
Portrait Of Thuy: More Than A Teacher
Since arriving at RJCS in 2017, I noticed the pattern that demographic statistics at RJCS don’t tell about Asian youth and their families. Identifying as “Asian” hides the critical histories of escaping war as refugees (Au, 2025; Chhuon & Hudley, 2010). Thuy understood this intimately as someone who identified as a child of refugees and immigrants. She asserted, “I think there’s a history where Asians are often lumped together, and there’s very different experiences between different groups of Asian Americans, right?” Thuy sipped her coffee and added, I feel like that history of refugees and that context is not often talked about so depending on who it is and what we’re talking about, I’ll be very specific about whether or not I’m Vietnamese or if I’m just Asian American.
For Thuy, these performances of identity were intertwined in her own life navigating internalized white supremacy and developing critical consciousness. She came to the United States when she was eight years old and was made fun of routinely for learning English by her peers: “It was something that was normalized in school, that I should just take it and I shouldn’t fight back or fight for what I deserve.” The normalcy of white supremacy also showed up in how people talked about her school, Adams High School. She regularly heard the school described as “ghetto . . . [because] we had a lot of immigrants coming in and a lot of refugees coming in. I heard those things coming even from my family.” As she reflected, she explained, In my mind, I guess being white and wealthy was a good thing, and then having more immigrants and being poor was a bad thing . . . that belief is ingrained in me even if I don’t practice it in my everyday life saying, “white is better.” That was something that I grew up listening to and striving for thinking, like, “Okay maybe I should work to go someplace with more white folks or more wealthy folks because eventually I will learn something from them and then be able to have that.”
Instilled with the false promises of social and economic mobility that perpetuate white supremacy, Thuy attended a local predominantly white and highly selective private college. It was here, she said, that her critical consciousness was sparked when she joined the Bradford Community Scholars program. “I didn’t really know what it was, I just thought it was a program that supported first gen students of color.” However, she quickly came to realize that the program was much more and that it offered her something she yearned for that was absent from the journey toward whiteness: community.
Thuy reflected fondly that she came to understand community as something essential to schooling. She felt herself more at ease, outgoing, and happier, or, as she says, “I could be myself. I was comfortable.” On a trip to New Orleans with the program, she came to understand the ways that community cut across time and space as she met people whom the mentors in the program knew. “Instantly these people we didn’t know just opened up to us and took care of one another. It replicated how my family cared for one another in a vulnerable way.” Thuy’s sociopolitical consciousness grew through her newfound critical community: [The program] pushed me to see how my identity plays out . . . it gave me the language to explain exactly what I was observing [in schools] . . . the language of privilege, oppression, like the actual language to describe what I was experiencing.
Exploring this consciousness in the context of schools led her to see teaching as a possible career, but she remained uncertain about whether returning to contexts dominated by white supremacy would nurture her desire for a critical community. She grappled with this dilemma until the second summer in the program with Carrie, a Black woman teaching in North Minneapolis.
Hearing her stories really inspired me because she was talking about how growing up in North [Minneapolis] and coming back to teach was a really great feeling . . . she was telling me that teaching was a profession that you can really feel that connection with the student and that if these are the things you’re passionate about . . . then why don’t you try teaching.
Driven by a desire to find communities of kinship alongside her commitment to educational justice, she looked for ways to become a teacher. After teaching through her program and at RJCS for three months, Thuy’s approach to teaching remained tied to community. “I think I am much more than a teacher,” she noted. She continued, When it comes to the classroom I try to look at it in a way where if it was my kid . . . or if I’m their sister, if I’m their aunt you know, in those roles, what would I want for my child to experience in the classroom? I want to be able to be somebody who cares about them . . . when I show up, I tend to think less of like, “You need to achieve these different kinds of things.” It’s more like when you come into the classroom what are the things that you need to show up? I think well-being . . . comes first, and the academics will follow.
I’m captivated by her description and catch myself thinking back to my own conceptualization of what it means to be a teacher. My program taught me that being a teacher meant content mastery and skill development, not the humanity that Thuy’s words bring to life. I wonder for a moment what Thuy means by more than a teacher, trying to wedge the significance I assign being a teacher into her description, until it dawns on me: She understands that deep human connections move her beyond the conventions of what it means to be a teacher and permit her space to work toward an anti-oppressive pedagogy. “It's about solidarity and liberation for students who have always been oppressed, and so for Black and Brown students who have experienced schools in very oppressive ways.” She explained how this is tied into her past and unsettling anti-Black logics in her own circles of friends and family.
Mostly friends and family, they’re like, “Oh, you know there’s a lot of Black folks there,” and they think it's a bad school . . . I wanted to push back against that . . . I think I might have something to prove to my family in that. That’s not what I’m about.
Thuy’s Classroom After School: Asian Club
The sounds of the school day come to an end when I notice that one classroom light remains lit at the very end of the middle school hall. A few sixth graders I know sprint past me, gripping their backpack straps like steering wheels. Slowing right before the room at the end of the hall, they catch their breath and walk in. Laughter and excitement spill out of the room as they enter. Thuy, the new RJCS sixth-grade social studies teacher, greets me as I enter. Her smile and the timbre of her voice welcome me as if I’m a relative she hasn’t seen in months. Young people who I’ve seen keep to themselves in classrooms and hallways laugh and argue with one another. It all feels so familiar, all while being completely unknown.
“Welcome to Asian club!” Thuy exclaims as everyone settles into the space. Later, she reflects, “I feel particularly connected to students that are Southeast Asian, I actually straight-up tell them I’m Vietnamese American.” The room is filled with Asian youth from all different grades, eating snacks from a local Asian grocer. They’re planning for Asian heritage night at RJCS, the older youth sharing different ideas as younger club members listen intently through the crunching of Pocky. While they sit together in a circle, Thuy and the other adult advisor, Jamie, a multiracial Asian woman, stand with me off to the side, letting older youth run the meeting as we catch up with each other. I am taken back by the incredible feeling of kinship present in this room that I wasn’t expecting, an intimacy that I can feel—as if this community has always been here and always will be.
A few weeks later, Thuy, Jamie, and I sit down to reflect on the planning process for Asian heritage night. It is kind of them to invite me even though I haven’t attended any meetings before that one. Thuy opens our conversation by observing that in her previous experiences with Asian heritage nights, they are often superficial, typically about food and customs. “It’s hard to deal with when I look at something like Black history month and the entire thing has a political message. We have political issues too, and we need to deal with them.”
Jamie and I nod along. I’m captured by Thuy’s passion and ask her what she thinks might be worthwhile to raise with young people organizing the event. Without hesitation, Thuy responds, “Based on the conversations I have with students, I think a lot of issues surrounding refugee histories . . . like deportation, but also dealing with the model minority myth.” I feel myself pulled into Thuy’s energy and smile, thinking about the ways that Thuy’s lived experiences and criticality are coming together to shape her place in the community. Jamie nods along, expressing uncertainty about how much exposure Asian American youth at RJCS have to these topics. Thuy agrees that it is up to the club; “a student-led program will be stronger.” I feel conflicted in this moment, as if Thuy has signaled giving up on amazing ideas, but when I reflect more, I realize her words reflect her belief that the community comes first.
Last Class On A Friday
It’s the end of a Friday when the sixth-grade community energy crests as adults work to keep pace, running on the dregs that remain from their postlunch coffee. Thuy is smiling at her door during passing time, greeting young people running past her. I ask her how she is doing, and she lets out a chuckle and says, “I need coffee.” I smile and stand with her, taking in the sights and sounds of community in action in the hall and young people trying to sneak into the classroom while making eye contact with Thuy. Her smiles and theirs let me in on the secret reciprocity in the act.
The bell rings, and Thuy waits to see if any young people still in the halls need help or a welcome to class. Stepping into the class, I notice giant white pieces of paper around the room with the words “RACISM,” “STEREOTYPE,” “PREJUDICE,” and “BIAS,” with responses in different colors filling up most of the space underneath. I take a seat at the back of the class, near the “BIAS” poster, and settle in.
Students around the room talk in small clusters until Thuy comes in and welcomes everyone collectively, saying, “Alright everybody, if you can hear me, clap once.” A few students clap.
“If you can hear me, clap twice.” More claps join the call and response, but students remain captivated in their own conversations. She does this up to five claps, and I can sense my own anxiety rising. I look around, and those students who’ve been responding to Thuy start to try and catch the attention of their peers. The energy in the room feels uncertain.
Then a student, Darren, sarcastically responds, “If you can hear me, clap six times!” Thuy pauses and smiles while walking toward him. She’s thinking about her next move, and I can sense the moment stretching in her own mind.
“Yeah! Let's give it to him. If you can hear Darren, clap six times.” The energy in the room shifts as young people who were still in their side conversations are caught off guard by Thuy’s response. The whole room claps, and Darren’s grin shows his satisfaction. The room’s energy is still restless, but it’s together. It feels good.
Thuy begins the lesson about each of the terms on the posters around the room. She asserts, “I can sense there’s a lot of energy today and that’s great! I’m giving you dictionary terms today, but I know you’ve all had experiences with these words, we just gotta unpack that.” As she continues her lesson, she asks students to share out why they sit where they sit, and young people start talking again about the prompt. Meanwhile, other students are walking into the room. They say hi to friends, pick up backpacks left in the room before passing time, get a hug from Thuy, and leave. She appears unfazed by all the different interactions occurring at once, but I can feel my own anxiety bubbling up as I watch the classroom become a communal hub for so many young people. I catch myself before my anxiety becomes too loud and understand the slippery quality of unlearning the need to control young people in school.
As she continues her lesson, the class is doing their best to stay attentive, and Thuy is trying her hardest to keep it interesting. She frames bias in current events and media outlets, but young people’s heads fall to their desks. Thuy notices this and decides to mix it up: “The next word is prejudice, or whatever it looks like, English is a hard language.” Several students nod feverishly at this point. “Anyway, so prejudice, when you first saw me, what did you think?” She pauses for responses as the students sit quietly.
It feels like this might be a trap—what adult openly solicits the opinions of youth without an ulterior motive? Then, one student near me, an Asian boy, shouts, “You’re nice!” Thuy asks him to elaborate, and he thinks for a moment. “’Cause you’re Asian!” A murmured giggle makes its way around the room.
Thuy responds with compassion, “’Cause I’m Asian? Well, now you’ve known me for a while, what do you think?”
Another Asian boy shouts, “You’re still nice!” The class agrees, and several students begin telling stories at the same time about when Thuy has proved how nice she is.
Then one student, a Black girl near the back, says over everyone, “Isn’t everybody prejudiced?” The room hushes as eyes fixate on Thuy.
Thuy poses back, “Are they?” The discussion grows as the class begins deliberating around the room. Sensing the interest this retort evokes as people talk to their friends, Thuy decides to walk around the room and engage in each small conversation. Starting with the Black girl who posed the question about prejudice, Thuy nods along as the girl elaborates on her question before other students nearby jump into the conversation. Thuy patiently waits, engaged in the exchange of ideas before offering a response and making her way over to the next table. I wonder for a moment how many adults do this type of quiet honoring of young people’s wisdom. Over the next 10 minutes, she walks up, kneels, and processes what each group is discussing, with where each group is at. She is deeply present in each moment, as if each conversation offers something new and meaningful as she listens.
The restlessness in the room beckons Thuy back to center stage. I can see her trying to read the situation, trying not to give in to something, but it’s hard to make sense of what exactly. “Ya’ll wanna take a break?” A resounding “yes” in unison commands the room, and Thuy says, “Alright, let’s take a break, and we can come back to this. Go walk with a friend, grab water, take care of yourself and come back in five minutes.” Stepping out into the hall, I realize just how hot Thuy’s room had gotten. Between the energy of young people and the heat of the day being trapped in the space, the hallway feels nearly 10 degrees cooler. I express my surprise as Thuy keeps an eye down the hall as students walk with one another. “Yeah, it’s sort of always like this. I haven’t really figured out what to do yet, but between the end-of-day energy, and the heat, I get it. I can hardly focus.” We laugh together, and I suggest that maybe a bigger space, like the library, could be a good change of scenery. She thinks about it and decides to check on it. Sure enough, no one is in there, and the librarian is happy to have visitors.
When the class returns, Thuy explains the plan: “Hey y’all, we are gonna go to the library. It’s cooler and bigger, so when we go down there, we can circle up and keep going.” Students seem excited by the surprise, and as they’re packing up their backpacks, several sprint down to the library. I can see concern in Thuy’s eyes. “I worry more about other adults than I do them,” she reflects later. I wonder how often this comes up for her in a day.
Once everyone is settled in the library in a circle, Thuy continues the lesson. It feels better for some reason, and Thuy seems to be more at ease in the circle as well. She returns to the point about everyone being prejudiced. She elaborates with a couple of stories she heard while walking around, and she poses the question about what can be done. Young folks are engaged and turn to their elbow partners to think about possible solutions to share back with the circle, but the lessons of being a good student do not easily translate into combating prejudice collectively. “Not judge people?” offers the Black girl who posed the question about prejudice. Affirming nods suggest consensus is being built. “Be nice!” another person declares, “listen before you talk.” The answers start cascading into the space as if they’ve been asked this question in different ways before, and Thuy offers, “Yes! I love all of these. So what does that mean? Can we unlearn prejudice even if we all are?” While the question captures my attention, it seems to stop students in their performance of saying what they think Thuy wants to hear. It's been about 15 minutes, and the energy fade sets in once more. Thuy checks the clock on a distant wall to see there’s only 20 minutes left in the school day, and I can feel the tension of knowing that there is more lesson to teach but not enough energy collectively to teach it. “Hey everyone, it seems like our attention is done for the day, and that’s alright. What would you like to talk about instead?” One voice says the class should talk about weekend plans. Thuy nods and affirms, “We can table this conversation until Tuesday, but I do want to know what we’re gonna do this weekend. When we do this, we’re gonna respect each other by listening to each other.” She asks the class to pack up their notebooks and set their backpacks aside, and they go around the circle sharing their plans.
Young people’s lives fill the circle—quinces and sleepovers, visiting relatives, and working with their families are the talk of the moment. As the energy shifts into different side conversations where kids talk about their favorite parts of the upcoming break from school, one student, Beau, a Black Liberian boy, starts to create rhythms with his fists on a nearby table. Next to him, Tyrone, a Black boy, then begins to freestyle rap about his weekend, and the music fills the space and time. Everyone is enamored, and when I look at Thuy, she is captivated as well. When they finish, the class bursts into applause. Suddenly, the bell for the day rings right on cue. The people leave, but the feeling of joy lingers.
Thuy’s Classroom Before Winter Break
At the end of Thuy’s first semester teaching, I sit with her to process the experience. By now, the halls are mostly empty, and adults are quickly on the heels of young people to leave and begin their holiday breaks. As we process how her first year has gone so far, she notes, “I don’t know if teaching is right for me.” I freeze in this moment, my anxiety driven upward by fear of Thuy leaving teaching. I quickly gather an arsenal of diffusing thoughts: It gets easier with time, once you get more curriculum developed, it gets less exhausting. Thuy nods along kindly, but her eyes say there is more here. I leave feeling worried but hoping this is just the weariness of being a first-year teacher.
A year later, I find myself calling Thuy to catch up and see how she is doing. In her second year, she is feeling better but notes, “I still don’t know if teaching is for me.” This time I pause and let her explore her thoughts.
“I haven’t talked to many people about this, but I’m not sure if I enjoy teaching. Like, I hear people say they are alive in the classroom, and I always feel distant in the classroom.” She can sense the fear in my body and responds, “It's not really about if it's right or wrong, and I think it's an important career, I can see that.” My shoulders relax, and I can feel how easy it is to slip into my defensive positioning when Thuy speaks her truth. “You know, as a woman of color, I am always performing, and I think that the way I perform at RJCS is as close to my real self that I can probably get in any school.” I nod along but feel confused. For so many, myself included, teaching is a process of self-exploration and understanding. However, what Thuy is describing is that her sense of self is already known and that teaching isn’t letting her be who she knows herself to be. She explains, There are just things in teaching that get in the way, and like if they weren’t there, it wouldn’t be teaching then. Like I hate grading, I don’t like lesson planning, or differentiation. Like people who are way more creative than me are good at those things, but I just see those things as getting my way . . . like I just wanna talk to students and share our lives, and then we talk about stuff that comes out. I know that’s learning, but that’s not school.
On A Weekend Walk
I catch Thuy on a Sunday afternoon after a walk to talk more about what gets in the way of her teaching. I hope that maybe this conversation will allay her frustrations, or at least my own about her possibly leaving RJCS. Watching her teach and feeling her presence in the school for the past two years, I see the way that community unifies the way that she understands the world, her work, and the way she lives her life. It is a part of who she is and will always be. It makes Thuy’s pedagogy transformative because centering humanity through community with young people actively resists the anti-Black politics of the school. It is why it is so easy for her to be with young people and delve deeply into their lives, because it also creates conditions for her humanity to flourish. It is why her classroom persistently buzzes with the sounds and feelings of connection: People want to be human.
We talk about the technical elements of teaching, the loveless labor of grading, and the frustration of being expected to control young people’s bodies. As I press for depth, Thuy reveals that her frustration is not solely in the labor itself, but what it represents.
I think those things matter because I’m afraid of judgement from other teachers. The holdup is judgment from other adults. . . . So a lot of times I am just quiet, like I keep to myself. . . . It’s a self-preservation thing. I’m learning to let go of that . . . but sometimes it feels lonely at RJCS even when there’s community around because I’m not sure if I feel like I belong . . . or if I want to belong with adults.
Department Meeting Zoom
Zoom meetings are routine at this point in the year, and, like young people in classrooms, adults rely on predictable habits to make it through these virtual spaces—but predictability doesn’t make the experience any easier. In the social studies department meeting that morning, the topic of student concerns is raised, and Annelise, a white female teacher, expresses frustration. “Is anyone else seeing a pattern of kids just thinking they don’t have to do any work and that they deserve an A?” The question is met with silence, and the stillness puts people on edge. “Like all these seventh graders I have come in expecting A’s. Sorry that in sixth grade, you were just given good grades, but that isn’t how school works.”
Thuy’s camera shuts off immediately. She is the only sixth-grade teacher present. A few critical colleagues come to her defense, reflecting that the sixth-grade team tried something that no one else has when they replaced conventional grading with narrative comments. By now, others are chiming in, asserting the commonsense logic that “this isn’t how the real world works.” As the department chair tries to steer the conversation in a more productive direction, Annelise remains visibly frustrated, and another teacher, Bertrand, a white male, sarcastically states, “Well maybe you should just write a narrative about it, I bet that’d get read.” Annelise chuckles, but the rest of the department is silent. Thuy logs off.
I receive a text from Thuy—“What the actual fuck is wrong with people?”—and I feel my blood pressure rise and my stomach sink. The interaction is predictable, and so is Thuy’s marginalization.
Reflecting On Thuy’s Politics Of Belonging
The explicit and hidden forms of white supremacist surveillance made belonging within the teaching community at RJCS a struggle between maintaining and disrupting anti-Blackness. While early-career teachers routinely choose fitting into the community over their own pedagogical values (Picower, 2009; Skerrett, 2011; Woodson & Pabon, 2016), this sociopolitical conflict evokes something deeper for Thuy that she describes as the performance of being a teacher of Color. To belong in the adult community meant perpetuating anti-Blackness that she lived through and had to learn to recognize as harm. It meant estranging herself from young people whom she viewed as community members and, in many instances, reflections of her family and her own experiences, through the acts of grading and compliance-based education. The contradiction isn’t simply one of beliefs and practice; it is one bound to her sense of self. Acting in ways to make adults see her meant sacrificing who she knew herself to be as an Asian American educator dedicated to Black liberation.
Simultaneously, Thuy understands the importance of belonging through her experiences in solidarity with young people. She asserts, “I know that classrooms can be transformative because I’ve seen young people share all of themselves. I know that’s possible.” However, her wanting to do the critical anti-oppressive labor of making young people feel human in classrooms remains entangled in an adult community that maintains anti-Blackness through its dehumanizing need to control young people. “I want to be able to have an impact on people the way that my mentors impacted me,” Thuy reflects. Left unsaid is her understanding that those elders in her life fostered her critical humanity by also occupying anti-Black institutions. They faced similar dilemmas, sacrificing parts of themselves to show up for young people in anti-oppressive ways. This tension is routinely seen as a source of burnout for teachers of Color (Kohli, 2021), but in Thuy’s framing of Asian and Black solidarity, it is a matter of healing and care (Ginwright, 2011). It isn’t burnout, it’s love.
Thuy’s description of herself as more than a teacher should be read as an act of refusal— refusing the oppressive labor that the convention of being a teacher demands, replacing it with a deeply humanizing stance toward education. Taking time to listen and share the stories of young people and adults, showing up as herself where she can, and resisting the compliance-driven pedagogies make her work a labor of community and love. She knew from her own experiences how critical a sense of belonging is to fostering critical consciousness and humanity. At the same time, she held the tension that being a teacher meant she must be marginalized each day. In that marginality, she could do beautiful humanizing work with youth of Color. Thuy does so much more than be a teacher; she practices of humanity and freedom.
Afterword: Four Years Later
I’ve been fortunate to keep in touch with Thuy since leaving RJCS and entering higher education. Thuy no longer works at RJCS, and in reflecting on her experiences, her heart never seemed to belong to the classroom as much as it did the Southeast Asian communities she grew up in and wanted to support. Currently, Thuy is in the executive leadership group of a nonprofit organization dedicated to the political education of Southeast Asian youth in after-school programs. Through mentoring, peer tutoring, and college readiness programming, the organization takes an ethnic studies approach (Tintiangco-Cubales et al., 2015), exploring historical contexts for Southeast Asian migration to the United States and advocating for resources that improve the educational experiences and outcomes for these specific groups. “I feel like this is what I was meant to do,” Thuy tells me over coffee one summer day. Her schedule is full of meetings with young people, and with the weight of being a teacher gone, her presence has grown stronger.
Discussion
Throughout this project, I routinely came back to a hope that Thuy’s political project of belonging through community building and healing could become the normative politics of belonging at RJCS. However, the relational power in the building signaled the insidious contours of anti-Blackness. Yuval-Davis (2011) asserted that the politics of belonging are often the “everyday practices” that are formalized when the boundaries of those politics are threatened. A walk down the halls during the school day elucidated the anti-Black political projects that more accurately characterized the school. In the high school wing, I heard a teacher explain to a Black student, “You haven’t handed anything in, in the real world, you won’t get away with this, so you won’t with me.” The anguish in their face tells me this is not the first time they have had this exchange. In another room, I hear a teacher tell a group of Latinx youth, “If you focused on your homework as much as your phones, you might be passing this class.” I steal a glance into the room, only to see in their eyes a sense of powerlessness. In the adjacent hall, there’s an Asian youth standing, head down, as a teacher lectures him: “You’re smart, but lazy. How do you expect to get a job when you can’t even do the work for my class?” While his face is aloof, his body is tense. When I ask young people in the halls who’ve had these encounters if they are doing alright, they respond, “If they don’t want me there, then fuck it, I’ll just leave.”
In each of these instances, anti-Blackness shapes the act of being a teacher and the mobilization of authority. Subsequently, the use of adult authority delineates boundaries that exclude youth of Color because they do not show up according to the conventions of anti-Blackness on which schooling is founded. These acts work to stabilize the interlocking and interdependent forms that anti-Blackness takes, ensuring the stability of oppression and the maintenance of power over those who are marginalized by it.
Contesting these anti-Black politics of belonging is a complex series of ideological and practical maneuvers because anti-oppressive projects of belonging remain unstable. By its very subversive nature, resisting anti-Blackness thrusts adults and youth toward the margins because it is not in keeping with the politics of anti-Black belonging. While such marginalization silences and represses those voices, ideas, and labor of the people who find themselves on the margins (hooks, 1990; Yuval-Davis, 2011), it also serves as a generative site of resistance because the further away people are pushed from the center, the more radically open they can exist (hooks, 1990). It is this move from center toward margin that acts as a conceptual unifying feature in these counterpolitical projects of belonging and afford a framework to make sense of how movement away from the center takes shape.
Ideologically, Thuy grounded her labor of making youth feel a sense of belonging in their own lives beyond school and in their aspirations for themselves as community members. Thuy saw her work in school as an extension of her identity as a Vietnamese American woman by cultivating the very sense of multiracial solidarity that catalyzed her criticality and rehumanization in education. Importantly, the politics of belonging are more than ideological constructs; they are also spatially bound and demand the “dirty work of boundary keeping” (Yuval-Davis, 2011, p. 20). The practical manifestations of these counterpolitics of belonging are characterized by the relationships of solidarity between the adults and young people. Situated at the confluence of their identity politics and their political projects of belonging, these spaces and the labor to build them took the form of homeplaces (hooks, 1990).
The formation of homeplace within her classroom allowed Thuy to move beyond her label as a teacher and the concomitant anti-Black politics of belonging. Thuy’s approach to the classroom, grounded in a family-centered approach, afforded her space to reflect and enact a pedagogy of community, where learning is the elegant and complex task of being with, and coming to know, each other. In these ways, the language of family facilitated the making of homeplaces by centering the intimacy of knowing one another in racialized forms, making the act of being in community with each other an act of resistance.
This sense of familial intimacy derived from Thuy’s lived experiences with anti-Blackness and her racial identity was reflected in the bodies and experiences of the youth at RJCS. Likewise, the anti-Black politics of belonging, and the critical consciousness to recognize it, was tied to Thuy’s past educational experiences and commitment to Black liberation. Reflecting on her childhood served as a persistent reminder of her personal project of working against her internalized investments in anti-Blackness. Hence, the way she showed up as a community-centered pedagogue is more precisely read as an act of defiance in and of itself; as Thuy asserts, “I think I might have something to prove . . . that’s not what I'm about.”
This confluence of the past and the present then created conditions for Thuy to enact her political values as an educator in ways she was not afforded in her adolescence. Thuy’s divestment from whiteness produced an agile pedagogy, as she responded to the people in front of her rather than adhering to the anti-Black common sense of teaching. Naming the grounding political value of her pedagogy, she said, “It’s about solidarity and liberation for students who have always been oppressed.” Hence, she viewed learning as possible in a myriad of ways because offering youth a place to make sense of their own lives counted as learning. The critical humanizing work of Thuy’s pedagogy created a counternarrative that validated the lived experiences of Black and Brown youth (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002).
At the margin, for these moments, Thuy could care for young people and herself in what could be termed a pedagogy of solidarity (Gaztambide-Fernández, 2012), living into her vision for Black-Asian solidarity. However, in the margins, these moments remained fleeting. Imperiled by the institutionalization of what it meant to do school as an adult and as a young person, the margins served as sites of both resistance and repression (hooks, 1994). Thuy knew this truth intimately when she reflected on her approach to the classroom: “I know this is learning, but this isn’t school.” While her labor to produce homeplaces with youth offers clarity around what it takes for schools to become emancipatory spaces, the politics of anti-Blackness remain hegemonic, and Thuy found herself using those same spaces for refuge alongside young people.
That said, the work to accomplish the task of maintaining the boundaries of anti-oppressive spaces of belonging is challenging because of the persistent threat of anti-Blackness and the racial battle fatigue that come with this project. Teaching behind closed classroom doors, avoiding the staff lounge, and walking past the copy room because she didn’t have the emotional energy to talk to particular white colleagues were daily practices that Thuy employed to survive the anti-Black politics of belonging. However, these routines of self-preservation were not sustainable, and she left three years into her role as a classroom teacher. The onslaught and unpredictability of how anti-Blackness might appear on any given day imposed a level of physical and emotional duress that was too challenging for Thuy to manage alone (Kohli & Pizarro, 2016). I saw it in Thuy’s eyes and body, and I heard it in her voice at the end of each year. I felt it in my own body when I asked to check in, and she forced smiles and checked her calendar for her availability. The work of creating space for young people of Color to belong was exhausting because it meant fighting against every instance of anti-Blackness that threatened those spaces—whether it was colleagues questioning Thuy’s pedagogy as lacking rigor, the stares in the halls that questioned why young people were not in class or were being too loud when Thuy let them out for breaks, or having to navigate the paperwork of grading, compliance laws, and school policies. Maintaining these spaces is a tentative project, contingent on the inevitable threats of anti-Black politics. These oppressive relational forces trouble the social, emotional, and political forms that anti-oppressive belonging might take. Thus, the contrastive element of belonging that Yuval-Davis (2011) described as a foundational element of feeling a sense of belonging in the context of anti-Black schooling never stabilizes nor sustains. The work of racial justice through anti-oppressive politics of belonging seems to meet an inevitable end: always too soon and never enough.
Conclusion
The process of enacting anti-oppressive change demands that educational researchers, practitioners, and leaders alike recognize that teaching is an investment in anti-Blackness, in both conceptual and practiced forms. Hoping, as I caught myself doing so many times, that the institution would change its central project and work toward anti-oppressive politics was naive at best and ignorant at worst. Moreover, the hope for the culture of anti-Blackness to change did not generate new ways of thinking and understanding the experiences of teachers of Color or the intricacies of anti-oppressive pedagogies with youth of Color. After all, scholars have consistently argued the permanence of anti-Blackness in American society (Mills, 1997; Muhammad, 2010; Watkins, 2001). Hence, simply recruiting more teachers of Color is insufficient as a solution to the problem of anti-Blackness in schools. Instead, we must continue the tradition of seeking generative lines of inquiry that elucidate the ways that anti-Blackness has shaped the very notion of schooling in its ideological and practical forms. One line of inquiry that Thuy’s portrait calls us to collectively interrogate is the salience of “teacher” as an identity and what it means to be a “good teacher.” I then discussed how moving beyond the identity of teacher can be seen in practices of resistance to anti-Blackness that inform the ways advocacy, leadership, and policy might work to address the conditions of anti-Black schooling.
Divesting from being a “good teacher”
Admittedly, I invited Thuy to this project because I believed her to be a good teacher. In the formative moments of this project, I was asked how I knew she was good, and I spoke of the intimacy that I felt when I was with her, the interactions I had seen between her and young people that felt deeply human, and the fact that her work seemed to be an extension of herself and her own journey toward humanity. However, through this project, these assumptions of what it meant to be a good teacher were shaken, specifically by Thuy’s reticence to name her humanizing pedagogies as commensurate with being a teacher. It is a tension that I still hold, part of me yearns for the work Thuy did to be seen as teaching. However, this is couched in an antagonism between learning and schooling. What I learned from Thuy was that she viewed teaching as a project of maintaining schooling, not the expression of learning as an act of humanity. I was compelled to reflect on my own training as a teacher. I remember the advice from my licensure program: Close the door promptly when the bell rings so students know not to be late. I can remember vividly conversations with past principals in my evaluations: You need to know more content to grow as a teacher, you’ll never be better if you don’t know more. I think about the conversations with colleagues about liberation and schooling: Well, shouldn’t we run our school like a prison? It’s just the most efficient choice. How can kids know more than teachers about what to learn in classrooms?
Thus, Thuy’s reluctance to take up the identity of “teacher” underscores that being a teacher is an investment in anti-Blackness. In turn, being a good teacher means more deeply investing in anti-Black politics of belonging so that recognition of goodness as a teacher can be named and honored. In this way, investments in becoming a “good teacher” do more to inhibit the anti-oppressive pedagogies needed to resist the forces of anti-Black belonging and demand a critical interrogation of how goodness serves as a veil for maintaining racial oppression. Additionally, my own desires to read her as a teacher throughout the project signal the pervasive force of the anti-Black teacher identity project. In her resistance to the label, the identity, and the politics of belonging that being a teacher encompassed, I wanted to see her as a teacher. I see this as an extension of my hope that teaching could become something that it has yet to become: anti-oppressive. After all, the exceptions do not prove the rule, and in the case of anti-racist educators, I wonder in what ways there are many people beyond the walls of classrooms working with young people that make them feel a stronger sense of connection to their communities, the work of racial justice, and supporting their senses of self. Perhaps, then, being a teacher is not something we should strive for, particularly people of Color committed to racial justice, where the label is foisted on them under the presumption that teachers “do good.”
Nurturing Everyday Forms Of Resistance
While the labor to unlearn the ways of thinking about being a teacher and “good teaching” takes time, the persistence of racial violence in schools demands action now. Although the politics of belonging that Thuy demonstrated through her commitment to Black and Asian solidarity are tentative in nature because they subvert the anti-Black politics of the school, Thuy’s experiences, along with the body of research on teachers of Color working in anti-racist ways (Kohli, 2021; Kohli & Pizarro, 2016; Young & Easton-Brooks, 2022), show that combatting racism in schools and carving out spaces of healing and care for youth of Color are already happening. As such, Thuy’s navigation of anti-Blackness and enactments of belonging offer an opportunity to critically reflect on both the challenges and the beauty of working against anti-Blackness in schools in everyday forms.
Thuy’s teaching is only one example of the potential for change in everyday forms. Consider what Lopez and Jean-Marie (2021) found in their everyday practices of mentoring collaborations that centered healing and care between administrators and teachers. Through ideological interventions between the us-versus-them mentality, adults were able to find generative problem-solving space with one another and refuse the logics of anti-Blackness in supporting young people and adults. Similarly, Sabati and colleagues (2022) drew on abolitionist theory of dismantle, change, build, to elucidate how they were able to refuse the logics of disposability of Black and Brown youth in their teaching and organizing practices. So while the scale of change is daunting, and the viability of it unnerving, it is possible when we embrace disruptions to everyday routines as a symptom of something bigger and more sustaining—an unlearning of what school is so that we have room to imagine what schools could become.
These everyday forms of resistance evoke a question about sustaining resistance to conditions of anti-Black schooling. While scholars have examined sustainability in terms of youths’ cultural and community strengths in classrooms (e.g., Paris & Alim, 2014), the difficulty of retaining teachers of Color signals the hegemonic qualities of anti-Blackness and white supremacy in schools that quell everyday forms of resistance (Kohli & Pizarro, 2016; Young & Easton-Brooks, 2022). To be clear, this does not mean that advocacy for supporting and sustaining critical educators of Color should cease. Rather, it demands that we imagine what it would mean for schools to care for teachers of Color like Thuy so that their performances of belonging are not circumscribed by anti-Blackness. Perhaps, for example, advocating for teachers like Thuy means divesting from conventions of teacher evaluation through rubrics and compliance-based teaching found in leadership programs and teacher education. It would mean refusing the demands to standardize teaching as a mechanism that is relied on and perpetuated by the state, teacher preparation programs, and school leadership to demonstrate teacher quality (Stremmel et al., 2015). For school leaders, such as principals and veteran teachers, it might sound like openly discussing the ways that missions of citizenship education relies on colonial framings of relationships between adults and youth that perpetuate oppression (Oto, 2023) and the need for relationships of care and anti-oppressive belonging to replace it. It might mean giving up the idea that we know what good teaching looks like and work with young people and adults to figure that out.
When all of the aforementioned changes are considered together, the very nature of schooling would be transformed into something completely different and, as such, might appear implausible. That, however, is the point; schooling will not change until we reclaim our collective abilities to imagine beyond what is to what could be. And while perhaps, broadly speaking, the dismantling and reimagining of schools represent something that communities of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and families are not ready for (Stovall, 2018), in the small yet significant moments, such as Thuy’s classroom, new worlds become real and prove that anti-oppressive change is possible across the cumulative effect of everyday resistance. Hence, waiting is no longer an option (Sabati et al., 2022; Stovall, 2018). It is time to unlearn collective investments in anti-Blackness that have deceived U.S. society broadly into believing that radical change means losing something that we never had in the first place: freedom. Only then can the lessons of everyday resistance be organized into campaigns against oppression.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Dr. Sarah Shear for her deep mentorship through the process of crafting this piece, along with Dr. Wayne Au and Ngan Nguyen for their continued support as thought partners.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.