Courtney E. Martin

A journalist and mother wades through the decision about where to send her first daughter to school: the closest Oakland public school, where the majority of students are Black and brown, or try to get into another public school - or even a private school - where more students are white. Martin holds up her own values and her wishes for her daughter, and chooses the nearby school - then spends some time figuring out how best to support the principal, teachers, and other families there. After only a couple years at the school, the pandemic hits, heightening the differences between the schools, both in terms of resources and community.

See also: Nice White Parents (podcast), Having and Being Had by Eula Biss, On Immunity by Eula Biss, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria by Beverly Tatum, Waking Up White by Debby Irving

Quotes/notes

Every person has to come to terms with - even if just for themselves - the gap between what they believe and how they live their lives. (18)

We act mystified by this inequity, all the while propping it up with our choices. (19)

Children of the Dream by Rucker C. Johnson (31)

"Green factors": faculty, staff, transportation, extracurricular activities, facilities (Green vs. County School Board of New Kent County, 1968) (43)

...schools like Emerson...feel unorganized to parents like me because they don't prioritize us or speak our language....We have come to equate respect with efficiency. But respect in multicultural city schools is about something else. (64)

Even while not exactly admitting that whiteness, middle-class-ness, is a culture, we elevate it as the preferred norm....But by never fully admitting that we are part of a culture, we evade critique. (76)

"You have to separate your ideology from your parenting. It's not the same." (118)

Show up, shush up, and stay put. (repeated)(131)

One of the great losses that comes from privilege is having a range of experience so narrow that it makes you emotionally bullish. (173)

Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong (173)

Ghosts in the Schoolyard, Eve L. Ewing (198)

"I'm not here to be right. I'm here to get it right." (Brene Brown, 209)

And just like that, my kid can read. Which is to say, she is practicing my religion for the first time. The world is hers. (260)

"Teaching can be a very radical thing, or it can be basically brainwashing everyone into the same false story." (Mrs. Minor, 263)

"You're not called to make decisions in a perfect world. You're called to make decisions in an imperfect world." (Dr. Yee, 280)

"Choosing an integrating school is not so much a sacrifice as it is reprioritizing what matters in building a world we want our children to be adults in." (Courtney Everts Mykytyn, 301)

"Five A.M. in the Pinewoods" by Mary Oliver: "I was thinking: / so this is how you swim inward / so this is how you flow outward / so this is how you pray." (312)

"Speak from what you know. Ask questions from what you don't know." (Lakisha Young, Oakland REACH, 342)

...even in racially diverse schools, the nodes of power - the PTA, the SSC, other spaces and times where power accrues and influences how the school runs and what it cares about and invests in - are often dominated by White and/or privileged women. The only way to disrupt that is for White and/or privileged women to cede leadership to parents of color. (347)

We are kind, or so we think, to individual people of color (this is where we feel we have control), while participating in the systems that disenfranchise, exploit, and sometimes even kill them (this is where we pretend we have no control). (358)

"One of the most important qualities a person can have in our time - a person who wants to make this a better world - is the capacity to stand in the tragic gap between corrosive cynicism and irrelevant idealism, between what is and could be." (Parker Palmer, 359)… (mais)

I enjoyed this a lot more than I expected. It's exactly what it promises: each contributor basically tells the story of when she (or he) decides either to claim the label "feminist," or realizes that feminism is important/relevant/meaningful in a personal way. The range of the contributors' experiences is pretty wide, from a girl with a conservative-Christian background coming up against the out-of-control teen pregnancy rate in her town, to an Asian engineering student confronting the intersecting stereotypes of her race and gender (Asian = smart, girl = not smart) and wrestling with questions of whether her gender and minority status played a role in her admission to a highly selective engineering college. Obviously I enjoyed (and identified with) some of the stories more than others, but that's what's great about this book: there's something for practically everyone. The voices are diverse, the tone is nonthreatening and non-dogmatic, and overall the stories provide frank, honest, and personal discussions of when each member of this impressive group of feminists, well, knew that they were feminists. I found it inspiring and heartwarming at the same time.… (mais)