Breonna Taylor (age 26), Priscilla Slater (age 38), Crystalline Barnes (age 21), Sandra Bland (age 28), Ahmaud Arbery (age 25), George Floyd (age 46), Eric Garner (age 43), Tamir Rice (age 12).
Racism kills.
Mary Turner (age 19), Robert Mallard (age 38), Emmett Till (age 14), Addie Mae Collins(age 14), Denise McNair (age 11), Carole Robertson (age 14), Cynthia Wesley (age 14), Martin Luther King, Jr. (age 39).
It always has.
In 2020 and 2021 significant numbers of white folks started to recognize, viscerally, that racism kills. Many predominantly white institutions began saying out loud that they were joining the struggle to confront and abolish racism within their own organizations. Across the nation, businesses pledged to abolish racist systems, policies, and practices, and many took action.
These organizations included NASCAR, FedEx, Aunt Jemimah, and the NFL.
In the Ithaca City School District, educators, administrators, and the school board had already begun working to dismantle racism and exclusion in our schools. So in 2020, our district connected with this national moment by making our antiracism work unapologetically explicit.
Social media, reading groups, workshops, and zoom meetings bustled with ICSD folks stepping up to learn and act. As a result, genuine progress has been made.
But now, complacency has crept back in for many white folks- they’ve lost the gut-wrenching urgency that had pushed them to step out of their comfort zones and into anti-racist action.
Coded language (back to basics, dangerous schools, lack of support for teachers, misguided leadership, etc.) and the exploitation of those who are genuinely struggling with economic security has been used by a small but determined number of economically secure, white community members, along with a few current board members, newly elected board members and the ITA, to stop our progress and move us backwards. Their efforts are camouflaged in language designed to appear neutral; language designed to appeal to well-meaning folks who are busy and who don’t necessarily know the intricacies of school systems, or who do not recognize when racism and exclusion is being masked.
In 1963, while jailed in Birmingham, Dr. King wrote the following:
“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the [Black’s] great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’… Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
A few years later, in his final book, Dr. King asserted that “the white liberal must honestly ask themselves why they supported the movement in the first place. If they supported it for the right reasons, they will continue to support it in spite of the confusions of the present moment. But if they supported the movement for the wrong reasons, they will find every available excuse to withdraw from it now” (King, 1967).
I choose to share my perspective in the paper because there are far too few white people in Ithaca speaking out in public and openly challenging this group of reactionary white folks. There are far too few white people openly confronting this group’s campaign to dismantle all ICSD efforts at antiracist inclusion and to reinstate exclusive practices that will unjustly benefit their children and families to the detriment of others. There are far too few white folks calling out these people for riling up those who are truly economically insecure to vote down the budget by manipulating their circumstances; far too few white folks calling out this group for promoting widespread distrust of our superintendent and anti-racist board members by activating the implicit biases of too many white Ithacans, while they themselves are, in fact, economically and racially secure and privileged. I tell it as I see it.
Barry Derfel is a retired educator who ran as a candidate for the Ithaca City School District board of education in the 2024 school board election.