This isn’t the right time but it’s the only one left. It’s 1 a.m. and I’m doing the work of every small business owner—completing mundane tasks while worrying about a recession while dreaming of the next idea. Micah may be sleeping peacefully next to me dreaming of candy salads or ninja adventures, but I see the crushing reality all over his little face. The world out there is failing him, failing you, failing us.
Like all the other English teachers, I’m anxiously waiting for the masses to rise up and reclaim language. Diversity is not discrimination. Equity is not discrimination. Inclusion is not discrimination. Instead, take the opposites of those words and you’ll see discrimination staring back at you. Need everyone to be exactly the same? Then we need to reject our cultures, our religions, and our families. That’s actual discrimination. Feel safer when everyone gets the same thing regardless of what they need? Then we need to watch our children, veterans, disabled, and elderly suffer because that’s what the rich decided to call “fair.” More discrimination. Need to exclude people from the decision-making table to ensure your place? Our whole history has sheltered and protected mediocre white men simply because they were white men. Again, discrimination with an extra dash of irony.
The words matter. Turning diversity, equity, and inclusion into their antonyms made it possible to begin rewriting history, which is currently underway. As our own histories become unrecognizable and our own stories become unfamiliar, the space exists for new values and expectations to be established.
That kind of widespread cultural and political gaslighting can only take root in fear and hopelessness. If our cultural awareness of the last decade required the courage of community members turned activists, this dark chapter will require thoughtful leadership from our scholars and then popular translation from our artists. We need people to understand the troubling historical parallels of authoritarian rule, to hear the stories of marginalized communities to preserve them, to navigate the data on everything from homelessness to climate change, to understand our legal procedures and limits of the executive branch, to read the classic dystopian novels, and to commit to learning something new in defense of our democracy.
My own contributions to the discourse are admittedly small and generally limited to public education. Here in Wisconsin, we face the devastating possibility of funding cuts at the federal level combined with deliberate underfunding at the state level. Our election for state superintendent is just a few days away and it has barely broken into the news cycle. One of the candidates is woefully underqualified but extremely well funded. Ask Kinser any question about any topic and she will tell you that kids need to be able to read. There have been lots of cringe-worthy answers, but the civics answer was probably the worst. Asked about a proposal for a required half-credit of civics, Kinser only used 20 seconds of her allotted two minutes to say she was “pro civics” but didn’t know anything else about the proposal. Meanwhile, Underly walked us through all the implications—existing scope and sequence, teacher licensure issues related to government, needs of rural districts, the legislature’s history of unfunded mandates, the PD and resources needed, etc. It was obvious that only one candidate had any substantive experience at the district or state level.
Of course, the most dangerous prospect is that Kinser isn’t even a public education advocate. She supports the voucher program and has suggested that the program should see increases in funding. She has offered no criticism of the Trump administration’s move to dismantle the Department of Education. Her silence is to be expected because the Republican Party of Wisconsin contributed nearly $1.7 million to Kinser’s campaign (roughly double the financial support Democrats gave Underly).
There’s much more to all of these anecdotes. Connecting all of these threads are the larger questions: Who are we as a people? What is the purpose of government? What is the value of public education? Who will tell our stories?
I’m worried that my own answers to those questions may become unreliable memories instead of obvious realities. Having grown up in a way that felt like I couldn’t fully decide my own story, I refuse to give up my voice. I’m not trading in the present tense for past tense. There’s no other pathway, no other conditions, no other time—just progress. Now.