Classroom Talk

Today I stood up in front of my classroom and said the police should not kill black people.

We’d just watched a video in which a man is called a “big, bad dude” for walking down the street with his hands in the air.

I told my class that I was raised to trust cops. That I expect cops to trust me. That I know that’s not everyone’s reality.

The reality is it’s been five years since I’ve been in Tulsa. It’s been five months since the last time the Tulsa police faced heat for killing an innocent man.

My San Jose kids don’t know anything about Tulsa. They think it’s in Texas. But they know something about the endless string of headlines and hashtags that have come to dominate our national conversation.

Except when they don’t. Not everyone talks about it. So today we talked about it.

We talked about how North Tulsa used to be Black Wall Street. How a race riot burned down the city. How the textbooks ignore it. How the neighborhood still hasn’t recovered.

I still haven’t recovered from Trayvon. I talked about that too. How the first time I visited California I sat in a motel room and obsessively watched Court TV because I needed to hear a prosecutor say that what happened was wrong. That it felt important to hear someone in authority say that death mattered.

It feels important to me to say that all these deaths matter. That all these people mattered. That they had families. That they had stories that deserve to be told.

We talked about how to tell these stories. How an unarmed man walking down the street isn’t a “suspect.” How the media’s instinct to dig for skeletons obscures the simple truth of a life. That something as simple as what photo you use can change the narrative.

It’s been five years since I’ve been in Tulsa, and the narrative has changed. These stories are louder, more visible. It feels like a drumbeat.

It feels important to listen. It feels important to speak out.

It feels a little too much like a ritual. Like we’re moving from story to story, from pain to pain, and the only thing changing is the hardening of hearts from those who don’t want to hear it.

Except I believe our kids hear it. They don’t know what to say. Not yet. But they’re listening.