We just eat and hang out with all the cousins and everybody.” “My family and I are all together and everyone is talking and laughing. “I imagined the family parties we have at my grandma’s house,” said Esmerelda. “We are like one big family and I love being outside.” “My happy place is the soccer field,” Jonas said. I asked students to share out where they went and why it feels like home. It also reminded them of the value of having somewhere they can be accepted and loved for who they are. What do you see?” This guided visualization helped them think about the comforting and positive imagery that they would later use in their own poems. In your mind’s eye, look around this place. “Now go to a place where you feel at home. “Close your eyes or let them rest softly on your desk,” I said, and the class fell quiet faster than I expected. To kick off the lesson, I asked students to visualize a place where they felt at home, somewhere safe and welcoming. We did this lesson while reading The Book of Unknown Americans, a novel by Cristina Henriquez that weaves together tales of a diverse group of Latinx and South American immigrants as they seek safety, education, political freedom, love, economic security, and hope. I first introduced this lesson to students early in an immigration unit. This activist poetry lesson is part of my classroom-level effort to talk back to hate speech in our schools. Many teachers then developed their own lessons or used a staff-created schoolwide climate lesson about identifying and stopping hate crimes. More than 20 of us showed up, and we won our demands. I found out that the slogan and campaign started on 4chan (an online alt-right message board) and became a national white supremacist offline trolling campaign.Īfter talking to more students and staff and uncovering a rash of other posters, graffiti, and even more nooses violating our spaces, a group of teachers called an after-school meeting with administrators to demand public acknowledgment, better methods to report hate speech, and lessons for every classroom. It’s some, like, internet thing.” I immediately grabbed my phone and started Googling. Naima spoke up first: “I was down by the bus stop and I saw another ‘It’s OK to be white’ sign.” “Yeah,” Braden added, “I saw one of those, too. I first heard about it during a lunchtime Black Student Union meeting. Earlier that week, a group of us teachers called a meeting with our principal, pushing for a schoolwide response when nooses, white supremacist propaganda, and “It’s alright to be white” posters were found around our high school’s campus where about 75 percent of students are white. Headlines like these filled page after page of search results, making my quest for articles about hate speech in local schools disturbingly, though not surprisingly, easy. “Fed up with anti-Latino sentiment, hundreds of Portland high schoolers leave class” “Racist slurs written on Lake Oswego High School bathroom walls” “Gender-neutral bathroom at progressive Portland high school tagged with death threat”
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