Recently, Gloria Ladson-Billings was asked whether the interpretation of her works has changed, to which she quipped: “I think that people don’t actually read the work.” In the last few years, people have interpreted culturally responsive education through mostly singular dimensions: implicit bias, diversity trainings, or recruitment and retention of staff and curriculum, all valid. Where people get lost, as Ladson-Billings states, is that there are three pillars of her praxis: student learning, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness. She adds later on:
A hallmark for me of a culturally relevant teacher is someone who understands that we’re operating in a fundamentally inequitable system — they take that as a given. And that the teacher’s role is not merely to help kids fit into an unfair system, but rather to give them the skills, the knowledge and the dispositions to change the inequity. The idea is not to get more people at the top of an unfair pyramid; the idea is to say the pyramid is the wrong structure. How can we really create a circle, if you will, that includes everybody?
People need more cogent examples of this “circling up.” Insert Monique Morris. Best known for her best-selling book Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, Morris takes a deeper, metaphysical dive into the work to liberate, unapologetically, Black and Brown girls in our schools in her latest book Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues: Education for the Liberation of Black and Brown Girls. Couching the work in “blues women,” Morris provides a plethora of examples that schools can start implementing on Day 1. Check her ‘graph on the ideas of restorative justice:
… While most children may not be of actual royal lineage, when they believe they’re “fit to wear a crown,” they’re likely to feel worthy of redemption. Even when they make a mistake, they understand that the response is not intended to derail their learning or their lives, but rather to reconnect them to their true purpose. The neglect – or erasure – of this identity can lead to girls internalizing harmful historical narrative about their inferiority, and could even leave them feeling as if no one cares about them.
The easy thing to do with texts like Morris’ is to say that, because it applies to Black and Brown girls explicitly, it can implicitly apply to everyone. While there are arguments to be made on either side, I appreciate the specificity. From the operations of the school to the attitudes we as adults display towards them, Morris’ voice projects authenticity, resolve, and urgency about our girls’ needs in our work at school. Consider this verse about schools and how Black and Brown girls perceive their own participation in it:
“[In schools] you are not here,” [Brittany Brathwaite] continued. “We are going to teach you about other people, about other people’s history, other people’s experiences. You don’t exist.” Many youth of color are like, ‘We go to school, but we’re not in school’ – meaning, we’re not in any part of the school outside of our mere presence there.”
Sing a Rhythm, Dance a Blues: Education for the Liberation of Black and Brown Girls is not a research review; it implores researchers to look at the intersections of race and gender to better serve all of our children and incorporates stories from multiple voices for multiple perspectives. It actually explores liberation in essence, and how we as adults have a crucial role to play in this abolition work. On Day 1, schools must have their minds set – yes, I know, but not that kind of “mindset” – on how our students truly build relationships with our students with a deeply contextual understanding of our students as people. Morris argues convincingly for our girls through an educational, relational, and sociopolitical lens, all three no more important than the other:
To be free of criminalization, they need a place to be the leaders, to repurpose their pain, and to apply the lessons they learn in life to the theories and concepts they learn in the classroom. They need school to be a place where they can tap into the source of their healing.
Yes, it’s worth your time spending a few professional development sessions reading this work. As reflective practitioners, we should always look for systemic and tangible approaches to helping our most vulnerable and traumatized students. This can apply to any number of students across gender, race, class, sexual orientation, religion, and other identity markers. Morris’ book feels like an invitation for researchers and practitioners to love the people they’re writing narratives about the way Morris loves the girls she works with. And it’s also a marker flag that tells the world, “Should you forget my girls, I won’t.”
The book is so fierce and written with clarity that prison-like conditions for schools are not the pathway to justice. Actionable love is.