The Collective Power of Moving in Silence: A Practical Response to the Codification of Anti-DEIA Efforts in Public Education

The Collective Power of Moving in Silence: 

A Practical Response to the Codification of Anti-DEIA Efforts in Public Education 

by Colin Seale

Any parent, relative, or temporary caretaker of rambunctious young children knows how loud and noisy they can be. But if you really understand child-rearing, you also know that the most ominous sign of danger is not the crashes and the bangs – it’s the silence. Because when they are silent, you know they are up to nothing but trouble! 

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As is often the case, we can learn a lot from the way young people operate. Especially now, when the policies implemented by our new President present many marginalized communities in the United States with a two-layered problem: (1) intentional, direct, and significant attacks on their safety and well-being based on their identity and their status and (2) the codification of policies that create great risk and meaningful consequences for those who speak out, speak up, and in some cases, speak at all regarding the inherent worthiness of our fellow humans.  

With so many communities feeling existential levels fear and isolation right now, doing nothing and saying nothing is not a viable option. But there is a crucial difference between being silent and moving in silence. Indeed, the acclaimed poet Dwayne Michael Carter Jr. once opined that “real Gs move in silence like lasagna.” In other words, rapper Lil Wayne’s quote suggests that making impact often requires our actions to speak louder than our words.  

Education, specifically, is an area where we would be much better off if we allowed our work to say more than our words. In the work I lead with thinkLaw to help close the critical thinking gap in education, I’ve always been reluctant to classify my work as equity work. I was reluctant because I often felt that so much equity work was just talking about how important it is to do equity work. It was all about the anti-racist commitment statements, the equity audits, the equity workgroups, and the equity committees. But when I look at the academic data for the most unapologetically equity-focused districts, I still see vast (and growing) inequities impacting the most marginalized student groups. In his 1967  “Where Do We Go From Here” speech, Dr. King highlighted inequity in education, noting that Black students “lag one to three years behind whites” and receive far less funding. Almost 60 years later, these achievement gaps still persist, and have gotten worse since the pandemic.  

Sometimes noise is necessary. But the true heroes of this movement didn’t need a microphone and never stood in front of a podium.

To be clear, sometimes noise is necessary. The Civil Rights Act would not have passed without tremendous efforts to shift public sentiment that played out over the course of years of unilateral nonviolent protests (we need to qualify that with “unilateral” because of the tremendous acts of violence nonviolent protesters faced). But to be even clearer, the true heroes of this movement didn’t need a microphone and never stood in front of a podium. It was the silent people during the Montgomery Bus Boycott like those who skipped taking the bus for 13 months and the 300 drivers who helped people make their way to work with a complex carpool system who transformed the consciousness of America. 

Whenever I work with schools in Ohio, I always point out the tremendous courage of ordinary people who could not stomach the way it is; people who insisted on creating the way it ought to be. People who silently risked life and limb to create Underground Railroad stops to harbor enslaved people journeying towards freedom. This was hundreds of years ago, but if it were today, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have a TikTok account. The family that protected Anne Frank’s family wouldn’t be posting IG stories about it. 

The Black Panther Party started their Free Breakfast for School Children program in Oakland in 1969 by focusing on the work: getting donations of nutritious breakfast items from local grocery stores and getting volunteers to prepare and serve this free food. Even with prioritizing moving in silence, BPP’s breakfast program eventually expanded to 45 sites and became the precursor to the national school lunch program that now feeds millions of school children. When collective action happens, the impact can be heard loudly for generations. 

In contrast to these action-based equity efforts that timelessly resound, other actions involve a lot more crashing and banging, but a lot less impact. In the tech sector, for instance, GitHub – a platform software developers use for creating, storing and sharing code – loudly decided to change the name of their default repository from “master” to “main” in response to the murder of George Floyd and the #BlackLivesMatter protests that followed. Meanwhile, although Black folks represent 13% of the population, Black folks only hold 7% of tech jobs, and most of that 7% work as computer support specialists (i.e. they do not code or work in software development). Interestingly, a shift like GitHub’s likely required thousands of hours of software developers’ time and required tech companies who interact with GitHub to make similar investments. That’s a lot of time and resources to commit to a policy that is intended to help Black folks when there are so few Black folks in tech who would even interact with this level of code. 

What if instead, GitHub and tech companies who interacted with GitHub committed a fraction of those resources to send their software developers to middle and high schools, silently, to work specifically with Black students to expose them to coding through an after-school program? What if they offered targeted, paid summer internships to Black students without any press releases or social media posts? It would not be as noisy. But I’m sure whatever minuscule level of oppression a newly-minted Black software developer would feel seeing the word “master” in code would be outweighed by the transformational economic opportunities presented by being in this lucrative and impactful field. 

Remember what I said earlier about the relationship between silent children and likely trouble? I would argue that for “good trouble” of the John Lewis variety, tactful silence is even more important.    

For the “good trouble” of the John Lewis variety, tactful silence is even more important.

So what does that look like in education? 

It looks like Rule #2 from the wise scholar Christopher Wallace’s ten rules of advice for street-level entrepreneurship: “Never let ’em know your next move, don’t you know bad boys move in silence?” So yes, this is a time where we need to be affirming and proactive about ensuring that our families with undocumented members feel safe coming to school. But this is not a time where we need to broadcast every move we plan to make to protect children and families. That unhelpful crashing and banging draws potentially dangerous attention to the populations we are working to protect.  

It looks like defiance disguised as compliance. One of the most interesting factoids about slavery in the United States is that most owners of enslaved persons believed that the people they owned were happy and joyful in their position. It wasn’t random when Senator Ron DeSantis claimed that “slavery was a good thing.” This was a direct result of subversive actions. For survival purposes, it made sense that enslaved people would sing joyfully as they worked, act overly happy, and show excessive overtures of grace and appreciation to their masters (not a computer code heading, but actual masters who owned them as property). All the while, enslaved people were intentionally slowing down the pace of work, secretly learning to read and write, secretly plotting their escapes, and singing songs that secretly mocked and ridiculed their masters.   

In education, this could look like feigned compliance to the federal standard of only acknowledging two genders: male and female. If we know that anti-transgender laws have been associated with up to a 72% increase in transgender suicide attempts, and we also know that gender-identity acceptance from at least one adult can lead to up to a 39% decrease in transgender and non-binary youth suicide attempts, maybe it doesn’t make sense to make big, bold statements about pronoun usage or to openly defy federal pronouncements. It’s about the collective work of intentionally affirming the young people in our schools for who they are and understanding that we all have the power to be that one adult.   

The most important equity efforts happening in our schools are the things no one will ever hear about.

The most important equity efforts happening in our schools are the things no one will ever hear about. You’re never going to hear about the middle school principal who saw that her 6th grade Black boys were always coming into her school multiple grade levels behind in math, so she decided to group them all together with a phenomenal Black male math teacher who taught them accelerated math and had them close 2-3 years of gaps in one year, successfully preparing the majority of them to take Algebra I by their 8th grade year. 

You’re never going to hear about the gifted coordinator who would ask her kindergarten and 1st grade teachers to give her the list of the students they believe should be tested for gifted and a separate list of kids who should be tested for behavior disorders. No one will ever know that this teacher’s subversive act of administering gifted assessments to 100% of the kids that teachers believed should be tested for behavior disorders dramatically increased the number of Black and Brown children in her district’s gifted and talented program. 

Crashing and banging has its place. But we are in a time where the work simply matters so much more than the words. The current level of injustice we’re facing requires us to do our equity work as silently as possible, prioritizing collective action for the type of impact that will be heard resoundingly for generations. 

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