Judy Sunde Hanawalt

Things I'm Thinking About

Tag: Black Lives Matter

The Berkeley High Walkout

September 21, 2016 / / 2 Comments

On November 5, 2015, students at my son’s high school, Berkeley High, walked out in protest of a hate crime. Read the article about it in Berkeleyside, with pictures and videos.

Today, a new article came out in the Daily Cal, Racial Achievement Gap in Berkeley Public Schools Persists. I left my blog post sitting in the draft box for a year, but the problem didn’t go away.

This is my experience that day and in the following week. 

The phone rang about 8 in the morning, but I missed it. I listened to the message a few minutes later; it was the Berkeley High principal calling to inform the school community about a hate-filled, racist threat left on a computer screen in the school library.

The news was already out in the school community, circulated by students who had heard about it somehow last night. Before my son left for school, he knew about a rally that was already being planned. By mid-morning, the Berkeley High students, along with some teachers and staff, were walking out of school, and the peaceful crowd of at least 700 moved in a large, chanting group up to Cal, rallied there joined by students from Cal and Berkeley City College, and then came back to BHS.

My son was texting me with updates.

“There is a walk out.”

“I’m at it.”

“Principal Pasarow is speaking”

“We’re on the move.”

I was out around town, hearing the helicopters, maneuvering around the crowds and police cars near Cal to meet a friend for lunch. After lunch, I watched the crowd of chanting students pass on their way back to the high school. I walked with them for a few blocks, moved and proud of their unity, kids standing up for their friends.

I came to BHS a little later for my volunteer shift at the desk in the front office. It was quiet, except for a few parents calling or coming by to ask what was going on. Some of the parents were upset, challenging the principal for letting the students walk out.

Should he have stood up against the protesters, stopped the rally, squelched the students’ uprising?  I’m glad he didn’t stand anywhere except with the students–anything else would have made him an opponent. Engaging with the world around them and speaking out against injustice is a virtue. Peaceful demonstration is not something to be punished.

A few days later, I was filling a friend in on the details at a coffee shop and an African-American woman sitting nearby overheard me. “Do you work at Berkeley High?” she asked me. I told her I’m a parent and a volunteer there. I expected her to agree with me that the walk out was great.

She didn’t.

She told me that if something should be protested, it’s not a prank on a school computer. Someone should be walking out over the systemic injustices that contribute to the appalling achievement gap between white kids and kids of color. She quoted some statistics that left me feeling both defensive and helpless.

“You have to start somewhere”, I told her. “I’m at the school trying to do something”, I told her.

I left with a heavy, hopeless feeling where there had been a smug sense of rightness before. The friend I was with comforted me, “You can’t change people’s minds sometimes.”

Thinking about it later, I realized that I don’t want to change that woman’s mind. I want to listen to her, even if what she says hurts, even if it feels like too much, especially if it shakes up ideas that I have let settle into a solid, useless mass.

The next day, I searched for reported test scores in my school district, looking at graphs comparing the achievement levels of students at our school broken down by race and income.

She’s right.

How can it be that less than 30 percent of minority students in our high school can do basic algebra? Why does the math program work for 80 percent of white kids? Why aren’t we teaching math to all the students? Statistics for reading and writing are no better.

I’m mystified, I’m upset, I’m uncomfortable. I’m angry. I’m forced to look outside my self and my own interests, beyond the success of my own children. I don’t  have the answers, but I’m finally hearing the problem. Our school does not work for everyone.

It’s not just about an isolated event, it’s not just about appreciating another culture, or about being a decent human being to other human beings. It’s not about working harder, acting better and taking the opportunities that come.

It goes deeper than that, to the very core of how our society works.

Still, I’m proud of the Berkeley High kids for speaking up, for not allowing one more incident go by unnoticed. They stood with their classmates. It is doing something; it is a start.

Stories We’re In

March 20, 2015 / / 1 Comment

“Love, no one cares about the stories they’re not in.” Matt Nathanson

Sometimes we enter a story, stumbling into it without realizing it will become a story we care about. There’s a choice at the beginning, but it leads to unexpected places. A door opens, we walk into a new place, and suddenly our story changes.

Our youngest boy was 12 and wanted to play football. We had put him off for a few years, not wanting him to get hurt, but decided to let him try it. There was a Pop Warner team in Berkeley, so we went to the open sign-up event without knowing much about the program. After we talked to one of the coaches and he addressed our fears about safety, we joined the team. It was one of those unmarked doors that leads to a place that undoes and remakes your heart.

Our son was one of two white boys on the team, the rest mostly African-American. We joined their families at practice, parent meetings and games. This is a football community focused on keeping their boys off the street and out of trouble, giving them good role models and providing the skills and exposure that might give them a shot at going to college with a sports scholarship. Our son was there to play for fun. He will have the opportunity to go to college without a sports scholarship. He isn’t in much danger of getting into a gang, or of encountering violence the same way many of his teammates are.

Out on the field, though, he became one of them, and in the stands we became part of the parents’ group. We came to the field from a different place, but once there, we were part of the football family. We loved it. We saw a genuine care for the kids, the community coming around the kids to protect them and lift them up. Joining them, we were invited into this caring: the anxiety of an uncertain future, the fear of losing a child to violence or jail, the pain of being ignored or treated with suspicion with no explanation except for racial bias and the fierce belief that they can make a better life. There is an openness, hope and positivity in the face of hardship in that community that is contagious.

I began to see my own white community from the other side. When our team from a more urban setting went to play the richer and less-diverse suburban teams, the way the players and parents looked at us and treated us seemed so obvious and ignorant. I’ve been on the other side.  I know the feeling– the unease and apprehension when the tough-looking team from the bad part of town shows up, the brave posturing to hide the fear. Seeing it from the other side, though, was hurtful. Now these were my kids.

I know their names and their families. I drive them to games, I cheer for them when they succeed and encourage them to keep going when they fail, just like their parents do for my son. Can’t the people from the other team see that our players are kids like their kids–the same age, the same size, the same goofy sense of humor, the same love of video games and junk food, the same insecurities about hair and acne and crushes, the same dreams for a future? No, because our kids are scary.

One time in particular, the racism was overt–the name-calling, the trash-talking, the accusations. Our kids and coaches were maligned, our parents not trusted to do the usual volunteer jobs, like moving the chains to measure first downs. There were threats of calling the police. Assumptions were made, stereotypes were believed, cultural differences were misconstrued.

My husband and I were shocked and confused and angry. We were scared for our kids. We were saddened that our boys now had one more reason to believe they wouldn’t be treated fairly. How could this possibly be happening? It was not right.

The other parents were angry, but not surprised. One of them said to us, “This is what happens when you let your son play with black kids.”

It was a holy moment. We had the privilege of being included in their community, of suffering what they suffer, of seeing in a new, profound way what we had heard about but could never really understand. Their story became my story, and I haven’t been able to forget it.

Vinegar and Milk

February 12, 2015 / / 1 Comment

“Why does it smell like vinegar?” I asked Tim. “And why are those people carrying jugs of milk?” It was our first protest. My son and I came out on the third or fourth night of protests in Berkeley and Oakland after the Ferguson policeman who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was not indicted by a Grand Jury.

We rode the bus from our house to downtown Berkeley, nervous. After finding only a very small crowd at the Berkeley Police Station, where the march was supposed to start that night, we followed the route we thought the protesters were taking. Hurrying down University Avenue, eerily empty of traffic, we were afraid we had missed it. We finally caught up to the crowd near the freeway.

They were bunched there nose-to-nose with officers in a police line, a physical barrier to keep protesters from stopping traffic on the freeway. After lingering and chanting slogans, the loud but peaceful group moved on, Tim and I with them, and found a different route to a frontage road. We stopped traffic on busy San Pablo Avenue, we brought a passenger train to a horn-blowing standstill at an intersection, we piled onto  a chain link fence and pulled it down and we scrambled up onto the freeway, blocking traffic in both directions. It was a feeling of power, with cars and trucks honking in support, and the police looking on from a distance.

I use the word “we” loosely, because I wasn’t out front pushing through barriers and laying down on train tracks. I was trailing along, ready to turn around if it felt too risky, trying to decide if I was willing to cross the line from protest to civil disobedience. When we heard a rumor in the crowd that the police were putting on their gas masks, I told Tim I couldn’t stay. Scrambling back down the embankment, I scratched my ankle on the barbed wire from the fence. We made our way back, passing a steady flow of new marchers joining the group.

The next day, back in my sunny, care-free life, my scratched ankle reminded me that the experience had been very real.

I joined the group not just as an observer. I felt a kinship with my fellow protestors. We were a diverse group–young adults, parents with small children, teens, old folks using canes–and a beautiful mix of black, brown and white skin. We called out together for justice, demanding that the world notice that the monster of racism still rages, and not just in some deep, dark back-woods, but in our everyday lives, even in our justice system.

I also saw angry young men and women of color shouting at the police, their desire to strike back at the system that treats them with fear, distrust and disrespect thumping just below the surface. Everyday, they feel backed into a corner in our culture; they are told they are scary, bad, too much or not enough in ways sometimes subtle, sometimes direct, always destructive. Tonight though, they were anonymous and safe, in this large group on the world stage, to throw insults and curses at uniformed officers, the same ones who usually represent a threat to them.

“They’re not bad kids,” Tim reminds me. I know. I don’t feel afraid or angry. As tears run down my face, I feel helpless. I love them. I wish I could reach out to them. They are kids just like my kids. They are my kids’ friends and teammates and classmates. They are my daughter’s husband and his family. They are my grandchildren. They are my family.

I joined the protest because I want to be a part of this moment in history, I want to contribute to the momentum of the march toward justice. Black lives matter,  yet they are often treated as if they are worth less than white lives, as if they don’t matter at all. It felt scary to be out in the street, tip-toeing over lines into civil disobedience, but I want to stand with my community.

I am a witness to the injustice.

I learned later that vinegar-soaked bandanas to cover my mouth and nose and milk to rinse my eyes are protest-proven protection from tear gas. Good information for my next time out.

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