Editor’s Note: The following opinion piece was sent to the Voice by Letitia Burton, a Paly teacher:

I have been a teacher in the Palo Alto Unified School District for 12 years. During this time, I have witnessed a community which prides itself for its commitments to academic excellence, progressive thinking, and the embracing of diversity. We send students to Camp Anytown. We have a district Strategic Plan Goal, 1b, which addresses the achievement gap. The Equity Team, comprised of teachers, administrators and classified staff from across the district, meets regularly to engage in critical conversations about the ways in which racial issues impact classroom learning, and to develop strategies for raising the level of awareness among our individual school communities. The District now has its own equity and diversity workshop series (Equity is Excellence: Race in the PAUSD Classroom). The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Questioning (LGBTQ) Committee meets regularly to provide training for and dialogue among staff in order to assure the health and safety of all LGBTQ students.

Despite all of these efforts to create a community that is free of the kinds of social injustices that plague other cities, several events indicate that there is an undercurrent of overt racism and social intolerance moving through our community. Last summer, an African-American Social Studies teacher at Gunn High School received 3000 e-mail messages containing overtly racist comments on her PAUSD e-mail account. More recently, an African-American Living Skills teacher at Palo Alto High School received a question with racist content in the classroom question box. (“I want to have interracial sex. Is that against the law? After all she is black…and I don’t want to get AIDS from the monkeys.”) A poster of Dr. Martin Luther King and another poster about having an open mind were vandalized in the upstairs hallway bulletin board of the Tower Building. On the “Day of Silence,” a day in which people across the country turn their attention to the issues surrounding our LGBTQ students, the Gunn High School community arrived at school to find that their campus had been “bombed” with racist and homophobic graffiti. Some may see these events as isolated incidents, or as obnoxious adolescent pranks. However, our community cannot afford to be this naive. It is important to view these events as a whole and to see them as indications that Palo Alto, just like any other city in America, is not immune to racism and social injustice. These events are also an amplification of the daily and more commonplace injustices that many of the adolescents in our community must endure on a daily basis.

It is commonplace to hear students make racist jokes or comments. It is common for our students of color to be met with suspicion and mistrust by some of the adults and peers in our community. It is common for some of our parents of color to feel uncomfortable and out of place in our community. It is common to hear terms like “faggot,” and “that’s so gay,” roll off the tongues of our students. These commonplace injustice often go unnoticed and /or unchallenged. There is an underlying attitude of, “What’s the big deal? They are just words.” No one wants to make “an issue” out of it. However it is exactly this lack of “making an issue” that gives silent approval and permission to behave in racist and intolerant ways. Failure to challenge what is commonplace opens the door for the more overt actions. The seemingly inconsequential words, jokes, or phrases contribute to the creation of an environment in which the members of our community feel isolated, unsafe, unheard, or unacknowledged.

Because we are a community that expresses and demonstrates its commitment to assuring the health, safety, and well being of all community members, we cannot afford to continue this pattern of turning a blind eye, or a deaf ear. What will it take before we recognize that Palo Alto is no different than any other place in America? Does Palo Alto have to become another Jasper, Texas, or Laramie, Wyoming, or Newark, California, before people take action? Each of these cities are still grieving the murder of a person who was deemed to have either the wrong skin color, or the wrong sexual orientation, or the wrong gender identity. We already know what it is like to be a grieving community. We have twice felt the sting that comes when a member of our own community dies too young and for reasons we cannot truly understand. In the wake of these two deaths, our community found the courage to be self-reflective, to look at the stressful demands we place on our students, to examine the cost of our high academic expectations. When will our community become similarly self-reflective about our issues of social injustice? What will it take for our community to engage in on-going, honest, courageous conversations about race? What will it take for all members of this community to find the moral courage to stand together and say “Not in my classroom!,“ Not at my school!,” “Not in my community!”?

Letitia Burton

Teacher

Palo Alto High