The Sunday Read: ‘Daring to Speak Up About Race in a Divided School District’

The Daily

The New York Times

News, Daily News

4.5 • 97.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In July 2020, Stephanie Long, the school superintendent in Leland, Mich., wrote a heartfelt letter to her students and their families after George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officers. Haunted by the images she’d seen in the media, she wrote: “Why be in a position of leadership,” she asked herself, “and not lead?” “All people of color,” Ms. Long typed, “need us to stand with them to clearly state that we condemn acts of systematic and systemic racism and intolerance.” She envisioned profound pedagogical changes in her school; she imagined creating illuminating discussions within classrooms and searching, transformative conversations in the community beyond. She hit send. A degree of support came in reply. A letter of praise signed by 200 Leland alumni was published in a peninsula newspaper. But angry emails, phone calls and letters poured in from within the district and, because Long’s message made the local news and spread over the internet, from across the country. They labeled her “a disgrace,” “a Marxist,” “a traitor.” Daniel Bergner, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, wrote about what happened when a superintendent in northern Michigan raised the issue of systemic racism.

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0:00.0	When I first started reporting this story over a year ago, there was a lot of noise around
0:10.4	how and what our public schools were teaching on issues of race.
0:16.5	On one side, the right was leveling relentless accusations that schools were indoctrinating
0:22.8	children with radical views with critical race theory.
0:28.1	And on the other side, the left, and we should acknowledge the mainstream media, was responding
0:34.9	with blanket, embellished denials.
0:38.6	We were seeing clips of Iraqis school board meetings.
0:42.2	The attorney general empowered the FBI to help monitor threats against school employees
0:48.0	and board members.
0:50.0	And last year, the governor's race in Virginia was partly decided around how topics of
0:55.8	race were being addressed in Virginia schools.
0:59.7	Yet, for me, what was missing amid all the den was any discussion, any knowledge of what
1:07.0	was actually happening inside K-12 classrooms.
1:12.0	And for this magazine story that you'll soon hear, the classroom was where I wanted to
1:17.8	be.
1:20.8	My name is Daniel Berdner and I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine.
1:26.3	I'm also a former teacher.
1:28.3	I still volunteer as one.
1:30.7	The classroom feels like home to me.
1:34.2	But reporting from inside the classroom was difficult and difficult might be an understatement.
1:41.2	Because district superintendents and principals were extremely wary that any attention whatsoever
1:47.4	on the teaching of race, even what I hoped would be measured, balanced attention, was going
	...

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