Who is Throwing the Babies in the Water?
By Cheryl Becker Dobbertin
Imagine the scene. It’s a gray, snowy Friday afternoon in Rochester, NY, just miles from where I live. A Black woman on Avenue B, deep into an argument with her spouse, calls the police for help. She also asks for mental health services for her distraught nine-year-old daughter. The police dispatcher reports that the nine-year-old is making suicidal statements.
You may already have heard what happens next. Police tussle with the fourth-grader, a child who, had she been in school that day but wasn’t because of the pandemic’s effect on her under-resourced school district, might have just started learning how to add fractions. She cries out “I want my dad! I want my dad!” They handcuff her. The child is on the ground, in the snow, kicking and screaming, “I want my dad!”
“I don’t care what you want,” an officer says. “Get in the car.” She resists, asking a female officer to help. The police ask her to comply, they insist that she put her feet inside the car. The female officer promises she will find her dad. This blonde police woman and this Black child bargain a bit. The policewoman promises to help. The child is sobbing, she is choking on her own tears.
“What is her name?” a male officer says.” “I don’t know her name,” the female officer says.
“You are acting like a child!” a male officer says.
In what should have ended this madness, the little girl retorts, “I am a child!”
But that is not the end. Now there is the threat of using pepper spray. The little girl, her brightly colored leggings wet and covered with snow, begs not to be pepper sprayed. She, unthinkably, knows that pepper spray is bad. She is afraid and not in control. “Just spray her,” a male officer says to the female officer. “Just spray her at this point.”
She does.
I had written a completely different essay for this collection before I saw the video of this scene, captured on a police officer’s body cam and released to the public just hours later. My original essay was about things educators typically understand and deal with —curriculum, classroom climate, language. After seeing this child beg to be treated like a child, I hit the delete button on that other essay. It’s not that those things aren’t important, of course they are. But what I realized watching that video, thinking that it was unimaginable that my own four white children would ever be hurt in such a way, is that controlling what I have directly under our control is just not enough.
That little girl does not live within the boundaries of the school district where I serve as the Director of Secondary Education after years teaching English and designing curriculum and providing professional development for several non-profit organizations. Over the course of my career, thanks to the tough love of many educators and parents of color and white allies—all of whom deserved to lose patience with me—I learned that my “I don’t see color” nonsense was a horrible, pain-inducing, ignorant stance. My good friend Amy cared about me enough to send me to the Undoing Racism training through the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond in New Orleans, where by some extremely fortunate twist of fate, I actually learned, really learned, about systemic racism from one of the founders of the organization, Ron Chisolm. He was gentle and kind but matter of fact about the fact that people of color don’t have access to the powerful systems that need changing in order for racism to really be addressed. I remember taking little sips of breath throughout that training as a means of managing my emotions, recognizing for the first time that tears would be insulting and ridiculous. I literally felt the scales falling from my eyes.
After that training I rededicated myself to doing what I think I do best, teaching educators how to ensure that all of their students become fully, unquestionably, literate. My new understanding meant I had a lot to learn about culturally responsive and sustaining materials and methods. I had to figure out how to feel about standards (I fully support national high-quality literacy standards since for so long the determination of whether a children would learn to read or not had a lot to do with the soft racism of low expectations) and assessments (we aren’t there yet in terms of equitably designing or using them as they are intended to be used, as indicators of whether or not we are implementing the science of reading). I met this new learning with an open heart and mind. I was in my comfort zone. This is what I was going to write to you about. It may not be apparent to those who don’t work in school every day, but right now education is a system in which we mostly talk about and plan for and learn about how to improve what we believe only happens in school. Ongoing professional learning about topics that seemingly lie outside of the school walls has been absent throughout most of my professional career. And in that way I have been part of creating the perfect closed system that continues to replicate itself. A system designed to get the results it is getting.
Then I saw this little girl who had the wherewithal to shout, “I am a child!”
In that moment I realized that this little girl—all of our little people—aren’t just students in our school districts. They are children in our whole, damaged American system. I can’t help them in school if I don’t help them in my neighborhood, my community, through my grocery stores and pharmacies, through my churches and synagogues and non-denominal spaces, through my votes and ensuring representation in the local, state, and national governments, through my doctors’ offices, and midwives’ rooms and hospitals, through my systems of protection and order, through my banks and credit unions and the stock market, and through the teachers, bus drivers, school secretaries, custodians, and leaders that I serve and work alongside of. We are all part of a deeply interlocked, connected web of racism that’s been baked into our being. And if we educators really want our children’s lives “to reach their full potential” we need to do much more than choose books that have children of color in them. We need to understand and challenge other systems.
Granted, this is a tricky space for educators to navigate, given the various laws and cultural norms that are designed to protect students from a teacher's political influence and perhaps to maintain the status quo. As the “anti-CRT” rhetoric has heated up, I’ve worried that becoming visibly involved in anti-racist work could result in concerns being raised by my Superintendent or the School Board about my actions or messages, even though they clearly support my efforts. There’s some kind of line that feels like it shifts back and forth right now as I try to stretch myself and my system into greater understanding yet remain below the radar, even though I feel like I shouldn’t have to remain below the radar about doing the right thing. Nevertheless, I listened in horror at the anonymous threats my superintendent started receiving from people who don’t even live in our community because of our commitment to diversity in our curriculum and inclusiveness in our teaching methods. Although (knock wood) this hasn’t happened at our school board meetings, the school boards around us have been verbally assaulted by people who literally don’t know what they are talking about. At the same time, a colleague in my community was placed on leave for several months after videotaping himself at a local protest saying ”f*** the police” (he had just been, ironically, pepper sprayed) and posting it on social media. Although I don’t imagine myself videotaping a message like that, who is to say that my social justice oriented Facebook posts won’t become someone’s target? Then what? I am conflicted about my fear of the shifting line. I can’t believe I have to think twice about publicly and louding doing or saying the right thing. But that’s the way systemic power works, right?
Despite now regularly second guessing myself and trying to use my power quietly, I remain committed to learning more about systemic racism and teaching it to others as a regular and ongoing part of my job. This isn’t the typical work of many people in my role. In fact, this kind of teaching for adults is being questioned and even outlawed in many states.
I used to think about “professional development” as work that extends knowledge in pedagogy or curriculum or assessment. It’s pretty vanilla and certainly doesn’t, since I have been in the education field, include discussions about redlining or policing. I have also known, however, that the best teachers know their students well and understand the community dynamics that their students experience. My own learning in the past couple of months revealed that my home, the community in which I have lived from nearly all of my life, has been structured by systemic racism in ways that many of our families of color knew about, but I did not. And what the last couple of months have shown me is that many educators, despite being amongst the most academically educated in their communities, do not know these truths. And therefore they do not teach them to their students. And the cycle continues, racism begets racism, exactly as it was designed to do.
I found out that the neighborhood in which a child was pepper sprayed —just about 12 miles away from where I live—is a neighborhood that was deemed “definitely declining” by the Homeowner’s Loan Corporation in 1940 as part of its residential security mapping project, a New Deal effort to ensure government secured home loans. Only a few blocks stand between that child’s street and an area, labeled “dangerous,” and called “redlined” because a red line literally surrounded the area on banks’ maps, cutting it off from the mortgage security being offered to more affluent, and more white, areas. By 1950, about 80 percent of the people of color in our Rochester, NY, community lived in two redlined areas. The long-term impacts of redlining are well described in Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Government Segregated America (2017) and she is living them—her school district is underfunded, poverty is concentrated there, there are few basic services like grocery stores and people’s health is poor, and according to Rothstein, people’s mental health is poor and unlikely to be addressed. When I learned about redlining I had to give up my belief that my hard work alone is what made it possible for me to help my children buy their first homes and that only lazy people live in poverty. I had to reconsider my own modest upbringing as one of actual privilege. Our school district just had a system-wide professional development day and the history of redlining and the paired sin of covenant deeds and how they conspired to shape our community was on the agenda, taught by me. My audience -- vastly majority white middle class educators like me -- had largely not known or heard about redlining before, even though we live in a redlined community. In Monroe County where I live and work, only about fourteen miles separate a school in which every single student is eligible for free and reduced lunch and a school in which only 2% of the students are eligible. This reality was created by redlining and it stubbornly persists, ensuring that children living in historically redlined areas attend underfunded schools while kids just across town attend relatively well-resourced schools. I learned about the website EdBuild.org, which makes data about school funding easy to see and understand. School funding is tied to property values, and property values, as just discussed, have been manipulated through something that occurred at least a generation ago. I learned that the dividing line between the school district our nine-year-old attends and her neighboring district, Penfield Central School District, is currently the most economically segregated division in the entire country. In 1975, the Supreme Court affirmed the dismissal of Warth vs. Seldin, a case in which residents and housing organizations in Rochester sued Penfield’s Zoning, Planning, and Town Boards because of their exclusionary housing practices. And so here we are, students literally living on one side or the other of an invisible, man made line have different resources and different prospects. Separate is still not equal. I shared this information in my recent professional development session too, despite the fact that this is not typical “PD” material. People did not know. Some were horrified. Some were confused. Some asked for a retreat to the safe world of PD that they expect -- teaching strategies, classroom management tips, “how tos.”
I took the 21-Day Equity Challenge from the United Way, which taught me a lot but most importantly, about adultification bias, which a 2019 Georgetown Law study describes as the tendency of white people to see Black girls as more developmentally mature than they are and to have less empathy for Black girls. When I listen to the black girls in my district shout and sing at lunch or in the halls, I wish for them to be “more mature,” and “focused on school.” Adultification bias is what makes me think that. Adultification is what might cause an adult white male to shout “you’re acting like a child,” to a little Black girl. I offered the 21-Day Challenge as professional development in our district, far outside of the norm of what fits the mold of typical “PD.”. I arranged for one of my colleagues to teach about adultification bias and disproportionality on that same recent Superintendent’s Conference Day that I taught about redlining. Many of the teachers in my school district, which despite the diversity in our student body are mostly white, had never heard of it and reacted with horror when they learned there was a name for that certain irked feeling that might occur when white teachers see Black children playing. I have felt that horror, and I needed to feel it that strongly before I could recognize my bias.
Just last summer I worked with a group of educators from across my region to plan and implement multi-school professional development sessions focused on systemic racism in our community. This isn’t typical work for us but I am clearer and clearer that the real work that educators need to do is learn about what is happening beyond the school walls in order to better understand what is happening inside of them. We are also built an anti-racist curriculum for students which superintendents and school boards from across Western New York have pledged to adopt and support teachers in using. We built this curriculum as thoughtfully as we could, making room for students to ask questions and examine sources and draw their own conclusions. Regardless, many teachers in the area refused to teach it. They said they were uncomfortable talking about recent events such as the 2020 death of Rochesterian Daniel Prude while in police custody, despite the fact that their students watched that death on YouTube over and over, that they know the street on which it occurred, that they may have been in one of the buildings that was the backdrop for the scene. Bringing students’ lived experiences into the curriculum seemed a bridge too far. Some angry parents demanded to see it and refused to allow their students to participate in it, even after they saw that there was no indoctrination involved, that students were given primary sources and supported to make their own judgements. Some superintendents backed down and allowed the project to quietly disappear. I tried to meet those people with grace because I can’t believe most people aren’t good people who just don’t know what has been happening just across town for so many years, including right now. They don’t know their part in it; how their ignorance perpetuates it. I didn’t know either, but now I am beginning to. I’m figuring each project that’s a bridge too far is keeping the conversation alive, even if that conversation comes with refusals and threats and my own feelings of fear and uncertainty.
I will be a better voter because of the things I have learned and taught of late. I will be a more critical consumer of social media. I better understand the dog whistles of “keeping our neighborhoods safe” and “maintaining our good public schools.” I am using my privilege to make sure others learn what I have been learning, even when it doesn’t fit the narrative of what schools are supposed to do, what teacher training is supposed to be. I know it’s not enough but it’s what I have to give right now.
There’s a parable illustrating this mindset, credited to Depression-era social reformer and Chicago-based activist Saul Alinsky. He told a story about a group of people camping on the banks of a river. One afternoon, one of the campers saw a baby floating in the river and leaped into action to save her. The next day there were two babies, then 10—the campers swam out against the current, they set up a human chain attempting to save all the babies. They created an elaborate net and set up a schedule to guard the river. No baby was to get by, they pledged. They would save every single baby in the river.
We educators have been like the campers focused on rescuing babies from the river. Our attempts at rescue have come in the form of school reforms, culturally responsive curriculum, restorative practices and the like. And that is worthy and important.
But we will not save our children of color unless we do what the wisest of the campers did. He left the group and began to trudge upstream. “Where are you going?” the other campers shouted. “We need you here to help rescue these babies!”
“I’m going upstream to see who is throwing the babies in the river!” he replied.
Our country and its entire interlocking systems of government, housing, policing, health care, schooling, banking, and so much more continues to throw children of color into the river of racism. One little Black girl—pepper-sprayed by a blonde police woman who promised to help her—represents that truth for me. Only when we educators stretch to truly understanding what is at work in our lives and oppressing many Americans, only when we move beyond the simple conversations of more multicultural literature and celebrating Black and Hispanic histories, will we ensure that our black and brown children thrive.