Ratchetdemic ★★★★★

I finished reading Ratchetdemic by Christopher Emdin last night 📚

This book has been a revelation in more ways than one. Although this book talks a lot about what we do every day as part of my job, now I think we don't do enough—diversity matters. More importantly, it matters who is talking about diversity.

I could excerpt large portions of the book, but I will quote one page in full because it was genuinely TIL. But once I read it, it made perfect sense, and I wonder why we don't speak about it more often.

This erasure of Black teachers and Black teaching has roots in the 1954 landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, in which the justices unanimously ruled that racial segregation of children in public schools was unconstitutional. This powerful decision was intended to allocate equal resources to Black and White children because of the inequity that was present in Black schools under the previous "separate but equal" policy. The Brown v. Board of Education case led to Black students being sent to White schools en masse and eventually led to the closing of many Black schools and the displacement of those schools' Black teachers - who were not being hired by White schools, even if these schools had a new population of Black students.

The school superintendent of Topeka, Kansas, which was ground zero for school integration, explicitly stated to Black teachers that because "the majority of people in Topeka will not want to employ negro teachers next year for white children, it is necessary for me to notify you now that your services will not be needed." There was a butterfly effect- a scientific concept that can be simplified down to the notion that small things can have nonlinear impacts on a complex system- that Black folks and other folks of color have never recovered from.

We have not been the same since. Black teachers pursued other careers, and over time, collective amnesia arose about the role that Black teachers played (and play) in the lives of young people. When Black kids attending White schools became one of the chief indicators of racial progress, the Black schools and their now unemployed Black teachers were rendered useless. This broke a major tradition in Black communities that previously revered the teacher as much as the preacher.

Highly recommend this book. It's one of the few I rate as five- ⭐️