A few weekends ago, ARRAY Inc. invited EduColor to a screening of Origin, a movie based on the events surrounding and within Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Before the screening started, Hank Azaria thanked everyone for coming and to introduce a new initiative: to make sure as many 16-year-olds as possible got a chance to view the film for free. Shortly thereafter, though, he described the movie as great in the movie sense, but “it’ll change you.” The movie was rated as PG-13, I steeled myself for what I perhaps should have seen coming.
Without giving too much away, one of the scenes in the movie depicts George Zimmerman’s murder of Trayvon Martin, including the shot that catalyzed a movement. My son and I were moved, too. We stepped out of the theater so we could talk out the shock. Instantly, I recalled where I was when Judge Debra Nelson and a jury of Zimmerman’s peers acquitted Zimmerman of all charges. In fact, Alejandro was two years old and our family was a few miles away from where the tragedy happened. An hour after the verdict dropped, I was expected to attend a STEM professional development with my colleagues.
The dread of facing colleagues from across the country when my mind felt chaos was in alignment with how society expected Black people to endure systemic suffering. Worse still was that I had no one to process the grief with at the PD because professionalism is ostensibly separate from our shared humanity.
Nevertheless, Alejandro wanted to watch the rest of the movie after the moment. Luz and I looked at each other, and for a minute, I winced. She knew better than me that the subject matter might traumatize him. She and I tried hard to anticipate which parts of the movie our little introvert shouldn’t watch. We also took a minute to set aside our own skepticism about what he can handle and the lessons he’s bound to learn with us. We remembered the movies we watched in our youth that grounded our critical lenses.
For me, that was the seminal work Eyes on the Prize. The women at the Boys Club of New York who showed it to us fed us cookies and other snacks. The public lynchings enrage me to this day.
Maybe they knew like Luz and I know now that we’d rather Alejandro learn this from us than from the noise we’re seeing now. Back then, our schools could only afford social studies textbooks from three presidential terms ago. Conglomerates started buying up news stations large and small, distorting how we received news and concretized knowledge. The prison industrial complex and the crack cocaine epidemic swept away so many of the knowledge keepers, and the few left in my neighborhood spoke in whispers to tight and small collectivities.
In the midst of this, my parent pushed me to focus on our studies because this was the only took they felt they could wield against the outside world. Things are different and the same all at once.
We can place the blame on social media, the lack of civics education, and the disruptive ways our students have processed the world now. Yet, both as a veteran educator and a parent, I rather not wait for my students to have a deeper knowledge of chattel slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the other amoral histories that got us here, and the victories towards a better world despite and because of this. We have school systems that reflect this history, too. Any time we teach toward truth and reconciliation, we set up more children to create a better world than the one we inhabit now.
For all the pundits and charlatans who decry liberalism in our school system, there’s another set of us who’ve seen how even our fellow educators perpetuate racial castes reflexively and intentionally. And “us” feels like a fraction of the educator workforce.
As we exited the movie, I hadn’t been in a theater full of sobbing people since Fruitvale Station. I wholeheartedly recommend watching it. The cinematography is amazing, and the stories Wilkerson shares about her life while writing the book were also heartbreaking, but purposeful. Some of the things we learned within the movie were new to me, too. The people who need to see it the most have ostensibly been enraptured by revanchist narratives about a country that was barely theirs, either.
This is a story less about how we were done, but how we get over. That’s different.
Also, we would do well to consider how our pain and suffering is interconnected rather than separate, interwoven rather than isolating. I still believe that our world needs an overabundance of empathy and love in the midst of derision and hate. When someone chooses to point at a group of people suffering atrocities and finds multiple ways to consider them less than human, the inhumanity they seek in others is often found within that someone. To this day, we struggle to name injustices large and small. We see people engage in bad faith and whataboutisms because contrarianism is more comforting than harder work on ourselves and our peers. When we peek just outside of American borders, we see how our world is so much smaller because of our collective hurt and a majority of people who want to see it do better.
But Alejandro will know this early and often. My generation and so many generations before needed someone who held themselves as the standard bearers for keeping the stories straight. Like so many children in the lower rungs of this racial caste, my son has gotten multiple talks as he should. Some might say the truth is infectious. I prefer to say it’s like a vaccine: it might swell at the site of injection, but it keeps us safe from deadly diseases over time.
Hopefully, Alejandro will be here long enough to see a world where we won’t need them anymore. I’ll do everything in my power to make it so.
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