By Lexi Chitwood
On Sunday, January 27, educators from around Wisconsin gathered in Edgewood College’s Anderson Auditorium to prepare for the National Black Lives Matter at School Week and hear from one of the teachers and activists spearheading the movement, Jesse Hagopian.
Hagopian teaches Ethnic Studies at Garfield High School in Seattle, Washington, the site of the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) Test boycott. He is also the author of Teaching for Black Lives.
According to their website (https://blacklivesmatteratschool.com/), Black Lives Matter at School is a national movement with a committee of educators “organizing for racial justice in education.”
The purpose of the conference was to inform educators how to teach students during the Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action February 4-8.
The Black Lives Matter at School Week website provides extensive lesson plans for each day, which have the 13 guiding principles of the Black Lives Matter movement at the forefront.
“Black students’ bodies and minds are under attack,” Hagopian said. He addressed several recent news stories that exemplify that statement.
Andrew Johnson, a black New Jersey teen, was forced to either cut off his dreadlocks or forfeit his wrestling match.
An 18-year-old black student was brutalized by their campus cop for “smelling like cigarette smoke.”
Hagopian showed passages from textbooks that are being used in U.S. classrooms, such as “[of slaves] Many may not have been terribly unhappy or felt the lash of a whip”, or one that described the treatment of slaves by their masters as “like members of the family.”
Hagopian said that the current education system for black and brown students is a “school to prison pipeline. The assault and humiliation is all too real and all too daily.”
He cited that nationally, black students are suspended at four times the rate as whites. Black girls are suspended at seven times the rate as white boys or girls. This is due in part to the “angry black girl idea that holds administrative perception.”
“We label kids as defiant, but they’re defying racist curriculum,” said Hagopian. “We should relabel that as resistant.”
The Black Lives Matter at School has four main goals. The first is to end zero tolerance policies in schools and instead adopt a restorative justice policy.
“This limits problems from happening to begin with, not just repairing,” Hagopian said.
The second is to hire more black teachers. Third is to mandate Black History and Ethnic Studies education.
And the fourth is to fund counselors, not cops.
“1.6 million students attend a school where there’s a cop and not a counselor,” said Hagopian. “Students scribble on the wall and they’re now in the juvenile justice system and charged with destruction of property.
“There’s trauma of living in poverty and trauma of racist curriculum. We need support for these kids who are trying to figure out where they’re going to sleep at night.”
Hagopian also emphasized that discrimination is far reaching and impacts multiple groups: “Nobody has a singular identity. We need to understand how intersectionally the oppression plays out.”
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