Teaching & the Voice of Conscience | Paul Rossi | EP 164

Hello! If you have found the ideas I discussed interesting and useful, perhaps you might consider purchasing my recently released book, "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life," available from Penguin Random House in print or audio format. You could use the links we provide below or buy through Amazon or at your local bookstore. This new book, "Beyond Order," provides what I hope is a productive and interesting walk through ideas that are both philosophically and sometimes spiritually meaningful, as well as being immediately implementable and practical. "Beyond Order" can be read and understood on its own but also builds on the concepts that I developed in my previous books, "12 Rules for Life" and, before that, "Maps of Meaning." Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast.

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Today, almost 70 years after Brown versus Board of Education ushered in the civil rights movement, there is an urgent need to reaffirm and advance its core principles. Fair is the foundation against intolerance and racism. Fair gets that our civil rights and liberties need to be protected. It's not enough just to be anti-racist; we also need to be pro-human, to insist on our common humanity, to advocate for fairness and understanding, to demand that we are each entitled to equality under law, to bring about a world in which we are all judged by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin. That's where Fair comes in: moving forward together as one race, the human race. I support Fair. I support Fair. I support. Support. I support Fair. Join us.

I'm pleased to have with me today Mr. Paul Rossi. Paul Rossi is a high school mathematics teacher and writer. He graduated from Cornell University with a BA in French Literature in 1992 and from Hunter College in New York City with an MA in Educational Psychology in 2010. He's been teaching mathematics, including Algebra 2 and calculus, at Grace Church High School in Manhattan since 2012. His April 2021 essay, "I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated," was recently published on Substack, Common Sense with Barry Weiss. Ms. Weiss is a former New York Times journalist who resigned over differences with her employer and began to function as an independent investigative writer on Substack.

Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today.

It's a pleasure to be here.

What's your life like at the moment?

Well, I have a little more time than usual at this point. I would, you know, be teaching classes. I would have, you know, up to three classes a day, but they've taken my classes away and assigned them to some other folks. So, I basically have no more teaching duties right now. So, I have a lot of time for volunteer work and some other things like this, which has been a good chance to tell my story.

Okay, so you're working at Grace, um sorry, it's Grace Church High School. Walk us through what happened. You're a mathematics teacher there and you published an essay with Barry Weiss last week. Tell us about the school first.

Well, we're a K-through-12 school that opened up a high school in 2012. So, it was K-through-8 and then they opened a ninth grade, and then as the ninth moved to the tenth, they brought in another ninth grade, and so we had a complete high school by 2016. Our high school is a prep school, but over the course of the, you know, particularly the last five years, we've been implementing an anti-racist curriculum programming for our students, as well as, you know, because as we were told in 2015, diversity, equity, and inclusion is not enough and we needed to move towards a so-called anti-racist pedagogy and program.

So that was beyond diversity, inclusivity, and equity, right?

It's a private high school.

Private high school, that's right. It's called independent. The tuition is approximately how much a year?

I believe it's up to $57,000 a year, I think. It's somewhere between $50,000 and $60,000.

And how big a school is it?

Well, our high school has about 340 students in it and, you know, maybe 100-120 faculty. I'm not really sure what the ratio is of my faculty and staff.

Did you enjoy teaching there?

I did! I love teaching math. It's just a wonderful thing. And I, you know, I didn't get into teaching math late, but it's something that I really enjoy. This year has been hard because we've been teaching, I've been teaching hybrid, which means I teach both on Zoom, or, you know, I guess until recently, to students in the classroom simultaneously. So that's been a technical challenge. It's also been, you know, a challenge to keep everybody engaged and also to focus my attention where it needs to be. So this has been a difficult year.

Yes, I imagine so. Would you have considered your relationships with your faculty peers and the administration and the students essentially positive during the duration of your tenure as a teacher there?

Yeah, I mean, I would say it has been positive. I mean, my colleagues, they sort of know where I stand. I haven't taken great pains to hide my thinking. In some cases, I've gotten into some spats with them over, you know, differences in the way that the programming has been delivered and, you know, the essentially the foundations, the belief system that animates it. But I will say, you know, I've had very cordial relations with, you know, the dean of equity and inclusion and the office of community engagement as people, you know, I find I finally get along and with the students. And the students, you know, I had a difficult first couple years as a teacher. It took me some time to really settle on a personality that worked for me. But I kind of, you know, by hook or by crook, you know, worked out a kind of performative self that functioned well enough, you know, to teach pretty well. I mean, I won't say I'm an excellent teacher, I'm decent, I'm pretty good by now, but you know, it has taken a while.

And is this something that you had planned to continue pursuing? Did you see yourself, apart from, let's say, this incident, did you see yourself in the teaching profession?

Yeah, I could. I was thinking I would want to be a teacher for the duration, you know, and I didn't really ever consider leaving teaching until probably this year.

What did you like about teaching?

I like the energy. Yeah, I like the energy of the students and I like to, you know, communicate with them about, you know, what I find true and beautiful about mathematics. Mathematics was, for me personally, when I got back into it and teaching, I found that it was a sort of island in the storm—the storm of the culture wars and the sort of general epistemological chaos which, you know, I find in language and discourse.

Right, because you had a BA in French Literature, and I can't presume that your M.A. in Ed Psych was math-focused, but I could be wrong. Was it?

No, it was not.

It wasn't? Okay. So it's interesting that you ended up teaching math, and also it's interesting that you found an island in a storm. And I suppose that the way that you talk about it makes it sound like that was a relief.

Yeah. From what exactly?

Well, it's a bit of a long story. At Cornell, I studied the humanities. I had a history major, English major, and French lit major as an undergrad. My merry band of friends and cohort of, you know, compatriots, we were really into postmodernism. We really loved the paradoxes of language. We studied Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard, and Baudrillard. There was a certain enthusiasm, even a lust for paradox that we had and I personally had reading texts and sort of finding out how words can mean their opposite, how meanings can be seen to be taken different ways.

And I guess I would say that I kind of had a breakdown from that, and that I didn't really—once I realized I didn't want to become a professor or go into the academic world because I found that even then, I was being pushed to say things I didn't believe. I kind of drifted for a decade, I would say, trying to find something that was meaningful.

So back when you were an undergraduate, you found the postmodernists emotionally, motivationally, intellectually engaging, and you talk about that as something that was also true of the people that you were associating with. So I get the sense that there was some sense of intellectual adventure. And what was it—what did postmodernism mean to you, and why do you think you were attracted to it? What was exciting about it?

Well, it was a poetic sensibility. It was non-political. In fact, you know, the true materialist Marxists that were sort of in our social milieu would scoff at us and say that we were bourgeois.

Oh, that's what Marxists do!

Yeah, right!

So we were just playing with language, and there really was no there there, and actually what would deliver us from our current predicament was some revolution in terms of material circumstances.

But I was really, you know, I was really drawn to the creativity of reading a text in a way. It was—I looked at it as a way like I wasn't talented enough to be a writer, but I could critique something in a creative way and sort of get my revenge in a sense, like on the text.

Right, because that's a hell of a way to put it! When did you figure out that that's what you were doing?

I think I kind of knew it at the time, but later on reflection, I felt when I tried to be a writer in my 30s and got nowhere and became very frustrated, despondent, and depressed, I thought back at that time and I realized that a lot of criticism itself is a kind of—a kind of criticism that we were doing is a kind of shaking your fist at the creative process and sort of gaining power over art by interpreting it in a way that you found—you know, that I found fit my worldview.

So it is—you know, what do you think the pleasure is? I mean, you're making a case for the pleasure in that. You said to some degree that you think it was born out of—well, it's something like frustration at—and I don't want to put words in your mouth; I truly don't. I'm trying to extract out exactly what you're saying, and so if I'm wrong, please correct me. You had, and perhaps this is not rare among people who were studying literature at elite colleges, some desire to think philosophically, to be seen as a philosophical thinker, to be seen as a creative writer. To be a creative writer, there's a romanticism about that. And of course, that ability is what the whole enterprise depends on, so it's sort of at the apex. But you describe what you were enthralled by, at least to some degree, as revenge against not only the text but against the creative process itself. As a consequence of what? What would the emotion be?

Because it would say like, I didn't—I wanted to be creative, but I just couldn't. I didn't feel like I had anything to say, and I felt that my authority was deeply compromised just by my privilege or my place in the world. But I could actually—I could reach back into Shakespeare and reinterpret Shakespeare in a way that, you know, made me feel powerful. You know, I could expose the contradictions.

Think of your peers and what about your professors?

You know, I think it was—I think I don't know their state of mind, but I feel like a lot of what animated that high postmodernism was, you know, but it also had an element of appreciation. You know, just like in the way that Marx admires capitalism, it was also there was an element of, you know, “Wow, this is amazing,” but it's kind of actually saying the opposite and just dwelling in that, right? You wouldn't be attending to it at all if you weren't in some sense in awe of it, right? Because why attend to that and not something else? So that has to be there at least implicitly.

So and then you, after you were finished with college, you said you weren't sure exactly what direction to go in and you tried writing and oh, you also mentioned—let's get back to that a minute—but you also mentioned that you discovered that you didn't have anything to say and also you felt that your authority was compromised.

Okay, so those are two different things. They're worth delving into.

It's not that surprising that you didn't have anything to say in some sense because, I mean, you were an undergraduate. I mean, there are staggering geniuses that come along who seem as an intrinsic part of them to just overflow with brilliant creativity, but that's pretty damn rare. And it's hard to have anything to say when you haven't lived much yet. But then—so it sounds like you were hard on yourself because of that, but also your authority—you said you thought it was compromised. What do you mean by that exactly?

Well, even then, I mean there was—in my—I took some creative writing classes, and even then there was a consciousness of identity politics and that the real stories that would advance society would not come from a white male perspective. So I kind of bristled at that. I didn't feel like the experience wasn't of what would you call interest. It wasn't of redemptive interest, right?

I had things to say, but people didn't really seem to value my perspective, so I kind of swallowed what I had to say. I had a friend—I wrote about him extensively in my—not this last book I wrote, but the previous book—and he was very guilty for his existence as—this is years ago—as a white male, and he virtually refused to participate in society at all because he had swallowed hook, line, and sinker, I suppose, the proposition that any manifestation of ambition on his part was to be viewed as part of the world-destroying force.

Now, it eventually killed him. There, it was complicated, but that was certainly a motivational—let's put it that way—or anti-motivational in a very profound way. So some of that was his own cynicism, but some of it was a certain emotional sensitivity to the potential impact his existence had on oppressed others, let's say. At least that's how he came to view it.

So, yeah, I mean I also had a lot of rage in that, you know, I felt like when my friends were organizing things like Greenpeace and so on, I would be kind of a larping. They would call it larping today, but I would say, you know, well, you just tell me when you're ready to throw a bomb. You know, I was obsessed with things like, you know, violent revolutions. I wanted—you know, I was—I wanted to learn how to hack and freak with phones, you know, without any real goal in mind other than to disrupt and break things.

And so I guess, you know, I'm actually lucky there wasn't an Antifa back then; I probably would have been a part of it.

And what do you think attracted you to that? I'm very curious about this because Antifa, for example, I understand the attraction. There's a romantic attraction to revolution, you know. I had a debate with Slavoj Žižek about hypothetically about Marxism, although it didn't really go that way. But when I was unpacking the Communist Manifesto, I mentioned that it was a call to bloody violent revolution, and the crowd, which was a very poorly behaved crowd in many ways, broke out laughing and clapped—which really took me aback because I wasn't promoting violent revolution in any positive sense, and I knew exactly or know exactly where those revolutionary sentiments got us in the 20th century. But by the same token, there is a romantic attraction to rebellion, right?

I mean, and it’s linked to something very deep, which is the sense that we all have to some degree that we are a minority of one against a faceless bureaucratic tyrant hell-bent on at least shaping us into the form that it demands and commands and that that structure is to be viewed, even realistically, with a certain degree of skepticism and regarded, at least to some degree, as an arbitrary tyrant. And to stand up against that—well, there is something intrinsically heroic about that, although it can go very dreadfully wrong.

And it's something that, I mean, young people are called to that. I mean, the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget pointed out that there's a messianic stage of late adolescent development where not everyone hits it, but a certain number of people hit it, and that manifests itself in a laudable, perhaps, concern with broader issues in the world as part of identity formation that is all supposed to be catalyzed and shaped in universities so it doesn't find channels that are fundamentally destructive psychologically and socially.

So anyways, back to you. So you were stymied to some degree in your creative endeavor, and you found some outlet for that frustration with postmodernism. But then there was also this deeper and darker attraction to some degree that you just described. How have you made sense out of that in the intervening years?

I think it really was a resentment at not being able to be creative in my own life, not being able to have a generative, healthy, creative life. I mean, a way to deal with certain impulses and channel them productively.

Why do you think you believed that that was the appropriate destiny for you to begin with?

Well, you know, the great thing is that, you know, I was able to work out issues with my father, and, you know, if you have problems with authority, there's nothing more attractive than, I feel for myself anyway, like a moral blank check. Because then, if you're doing things for the benefit of the world, well, then you can take out all kinds of debt. You can say, "Well, you know, I don't have to be a good person because I believe in all the right things, and I can do whatever I do is instrumental to the coming of a better world."

So, you know, I made my mother's life miserable, I would argue. My father, I was, you know, I was posing, but I was inhabiting the pose so deeply that I would give myself some, you know, I could justify anything by the fact that everyone else was wrong, and I was right. And, you know, I found that as a way to deal with things, and it's a real high. I mean, it's a really wonderful, thrilling thing to inhabit, even though, you know, now today I look at it and I look at it very—I'm very embarrassed by it.

But it's understandable. I mean, I don't—you know, it could have been no other way, really.

Why do you think you're not like that now? What changed for you?

Well, you know, I went through, I would say teaching changed me a lot because teaching was a way for me to express myself creatively and be engaged in the world in a regular, habitual, productive way where I could tangibly see the benefits of my efforts.

And it was a social thing. It's a social thing, teaching, and it's a performative thing teaching, and it's very creative. And, you know, every day would be different. There would be new kids, and they would have different problems, and, you know, they would bring to me, you know, their own cultural reference points.

So it's constant renewal. Teaching is just a constantly renewing and self-renewing endeavor.

So, I know, you know, I realized that with other jobs that were technical or, you know, that were rote, those became boring very, you know, within three or four years. But after teaching for over, you know, six, seven years, I was like, "This still isn't boring. I could do this forever."

You found a way to contribute that was concrete and habitual and regular and routine, and that actually sufficed to satiate your creative impulse, and that removed your resentment, would you say?

Or I would say it just kind of—it just kind of tempered it and made me not worry about it so much. I can't say it evaporated totally. I mean, I still have an oppositional—I guess I'm an oppositional guy in some sense, but as far as institutions go, but I was able to just focus on my work and on the kids and trying to be good at what I do and enjoying it.

And were you teaching before you went back to Hunter College or after?

No, I had been tutoring for a while before that, and I turned to teaching when I—the reason why I actually got the degree in educational psychology—it's a story in itself, and that was one where it was a jet—it was a desperate attempt to avoid suicide, essentially. I was so depressed at that point in my life that I felt just compressed into this tiny little ball, and there was no way out. I was just—you know, how I got to that point is all the thing, but I just went on the Internet, and I was like, "What is the last thing that I remember enjoying in my life? When is the last time I actually felt a part of something?"

And it was when I was tutoring kids, and I had done some light tutoring, and I was like, "Okay, that's really crucially important."

So, because what you just said is you were in despair, and then you were looking for something that was genuinely redemptive, and you were searching your memory for that, and you found that in mentoring.

Okay, why? What was it about mentoring that had enough value that it pulled you out of that pit or that you could see that as a pathway out?

It was just the experience that I remembered of being with, you know, with a young person and, you know, having them focused on what they were doing and me feeling connected to what they were doing and just that—it wasn't even a specific image. It was just sort of a, you know, something in my body that felt good. I mean, I really wasn't thinking about it any more than that at that point. Like, it was just—it was literally just totally selfish.

When was the last time I felt any reward in life, right?

Well, that's a dead serious empirical question. You know, if you're seeing a good therapist, if you're depressed, one of the things that therapists will ask you to do is to watch your life and see if there's anything that lifts you out of your miasma. It's not a matter of thinking about it exactly; it's a matter of paying attention, and it's often surprising. You stumble across something, you think, "Oh, that makes me happy," or "That alleviates my misery," and I really didn't notice that before. It wasn't part of my theory, you know; it just happened to be a fact that I was overlooking.

It's dreadfully important to—well, it can be life-saving, as you found out.

So, okay, so you went back to, you went to Hunter College and you did an MA in Educational Psych. What was that like?

Oh, it was—you know, I almost bailed out of the application process. Well, you know, I had chosen education in the Google search, but then I think, "Well, I got to pair it with something else that I like," so I just put psychology down. I was interested in psychology and the first thing that popped up was an educational psychology degree, and I found like, "Oh, there's something here. It's a city college. I can get the degree, and you know, if I spend ten thousand dollars, which I saved up from my previous job, I could get this thing."

So I go—I almost fill out the application, and then I kind of get wobbly and tell—what's the point? I'm not gonna—it's not gonna do anything.

And then, you know, I remember calling my mother. My mother called me, and she, you know, they worried about me because I was, you know, really lost in my 30s and 40s, and she said, "You know, you've got to go through this. You know," she kind of got hysterical because I think she just couldn't handle like another failed endeavor on my part or just getting my act together. And I, you know, just to calm her down, I went through with it, you know, just to sort of—because she was getting hysterical.

And yeah, well, it's good to have people around that will actually support your attempts to move forward, especially when you're fighting with yourself.

And, you know, I've seen so many people, they're 51-49 about moving forward, you know, or 49-51, and so they're not doing it, and someone else can come behind them and give them a little tap. But there are lots of people who don't have that, and so then they don't get that little tap, and, you know, it wouldn't have taken much to push them over the threshold.

So, yeah, I was lucky.

So, you know, I got in, and then once I started moving, you know, I would go to classes. I was tutoring on the side and making money that way, and I was able to do that, and then, you know, I was going to class. I was making friends. I was—I remembered how much fun school was. I was doing assignments, and I was like, "Oh my God! I mean, I just have to write this paper." Life made sense again because it brought back sort of all of the enjoyment of undergraduate life that I really liked, which is social.

And so it really was just a momentum thing, like just getting back into it.

And then, um, and what was the curriculum like at that point?

Oh, it wasn't—it was a little bit—you know, I guess educational psychology, it was more of a research-focused thing rather than an education degree. So we were considered more, you know, a science-oriented research thing, like, you know. But, you know, we studied research methods. You know, it was fairly rigorous, you know, compared to some education degree programs. So we didn't—we were sort of insulated from a lot of the nutty stuff that was going—right?

So that's like an island too, in the same way STEM fields are, or were, somewhat of an island.

So, yeah, okay, so you came out of Hunter College and you were in better shape, I presume by that time?

Yep, yep.

And then I applied to some various teaching positions. I made my bones, you know, so to speak at some different places. Like, I worked at a hagwon, a Korean summer school, eight hours a day drilling SAT stuff. I worked at a failing school tutoring SAT for a while, and that was, you know, really, really heartbreaking because, you know, those kids, they hadn't had the same math teacher for longer than six months, and they were seniors and they couldn't add fractions. It was heartbreaking.

And then I applied to Grace Church School; it was a new school that was starting up. I was able to sort of tell a little story. You know, I had also published a book out of high school called "Up Your Score: The Underground Guide to the SAT" with two friends, and that was kind of a fun little project. And that book was still selling a little bit, so I was sort of able to piece together a kind of, out of my hodgepodge life, make a little package, and I did a demo lesson. They liked me, and then I got hired in the inaugural faculty for the Grace Church School.

And so what was it like going to teach at Grace at Grace Church School?

Well, it was really nice because, you know, I was used to a corporate environment, I guess, because of my time that I had done in a previous job at HBO. I was a technical manager. It was a whole other career, and you know, I was very concerned that I reported to the right people, or, you know, what's the org structure? And they were just like, "Well, you know, just you have colleagues, and you can discuss things with them, and we're not gonna make you do anything. You can talk to us." It's a very friendly environment.

I mean, there were serious expectations. Everyone took their jobs very seriously. But there really was a sense of belonging and community. They were very—it was that was very welcoming, actually, and very energizing. I will say because I wasn't used to that. I didn't expect it, and so I would remain aloof from it, you know, at the beginning, like, "What are these people? Why are they always smiling at me? Like, what's going on?" You know, like, I don't know why I just—but they gradually loosened up, and, you know, it was kind of corny but I would kind of go along with it, and I warmed up a little bit. I felt—I did feel like I was a part of things, and I was able to sort of transmit that to others too.

And so what happened over time?

It was a very gradual change that, you know, I would say, well, within the first three years, one of the tenets of our school was that every employee and every faculty and staff member had to attend a seminar called "Undoing Racism."

That was your HR department was it, or who?

Yeah, it was a—it was a mandate from the dean of faculty at the time.

And it was a requirement?

Yeah! And, you know, so I went to that, and that was a very interesting experience. You know, it's hard to—what would you say? Refuse a call to anti-racism? Sure, I mean, what kind of monster, yeah?

And I, you know, I went into it, and I actually felt energized, and I was converted. You know, I had a sort of—you know, I am White, and I’m privileged, and you’re right, we need to take care of this. There were people in a circle, and people of all different races and backgrounds, and it was facilitated. And, you know, later I look back on it and I realized sort of how they did it. They did it in a very interesting, seductive way.

And what way was that?

Well, you know, as I recall, they started out, well it was sort of two parts. The first part was the history since the slave ships landed on American soil and then throughout time leading up to the present, and then they focused for the second half of the session they focused on, you know, how to help a community that has been shaped by all of this. And very early in the session they said, "We want you to withhold any judgment of anyone's choice or agency, anyone, you know, any of the minority black populations that we're talking about here. We want you to simply bracket or hold, you know, withhold any analysis of the choices that people make because, you know, that will often lead to a misunderstanding or insensitivity towards what's happening here."

So why do you focus on that issue specifically?

Well, because, you know, it was as they retold the history and as they talked about the present circumstances, they never actually revisited that. So you know, you're constantly focused on the oppressed population in terms of what is acting upon it as far as acting upon those individuals. And, you know, to me that’s like denying a certain agency, right? And that—but they never actually lifted the blinders off at the end like they would put these—everyone sort of acknowledged that they were gonna go along with this at the beginning and I was like really? We’re gonna do that? We’re going to treat people as less than human? Well, okay, I just—it must be like a temporary thing.

And why did you see that as treating them as less than human? I mean, I presume that the people on the other side of the fence would say, well, you know, we're all caught like corks on the sea in in the throes of vast social movements over which we have little or no control and who are you to cast judgment on people who have been the relative deprived in that regard compared to you? It’s possible to make a fairly stringent moral case that that's the appropriate mode of behavior, but you were—there was something in you that objected to that and you remember that now?

Yeah, despite the fact that you said that you were energized by this and pulled in by it. Why do you think it caught you as well?

Well, it was a social thing, right? It was—it’s people in a circle, and people are talking about their experiences, and people are saying, "As a black person, this has happened to me." And at one point they asked—they actually, you know, it’s empathy, right? You care about people; you feel if you’re sitting face-to-face with someone—of course you're going to be sympathetic and empathetic, and people are narrating, you know, but the problem, I think, is generalizing that to groups and, you know, getting you to make a different set of assumptions about those groups based on the sort of selective way that the empathy is leveraged, I would say.

Well, there’s also the implicit—there’s the implicit, what would you say, the implicit perceptual and categorical structure that comes along with it, which is the a priori assumption that the appropriate classification for human beings is by group. And that—that’s so implicit but so pervasive that it, in some sense, never needs to be stated. And as soon as you assume that the group level is the appropriate level, then you're bound to minimize or even forbid discussion of such things as individual agency. So there’s something, if you believe in individual agency, there’s something about that.

Yeah, and I don’t—you know, I remember at one point they said, you know, “What do you like about being white?” That was sort of a gotcha question that they asked the white people.

Hmm. How did you answer that?

Well, I mean, I'm trying to think of how. Some of these questions seem to come up in our society right now that no one's ever asked, you know, like, "Well, justify marriage." It’s like, "Well, wait a sec! I don't know how to justify it. We just sort of took that for granted," and maybe that was appropriate, right?

Right, and so it’s very hard when you’re put on the spot like that.

Okay, so you're white. What's so great about that as far as you're concerned?

Well, I kind of knew what they were expecting, so I kind of tried to play games with it a little bit because what they were trying to do—they were trying to go through the embarrassment of saying, "Well, hi, there's nothing special about me being white. There's nothing special." But I was like, "No, it's great! I walk into a room and everyone pays attention to me, and everyone thinks I’m an expert."

And I said it because I knew that's kind of what they wanted, but, you know, I don't usually feel that way, but I knew that's kind of what they wanted. But then I said it, too, like proudly, and then I made some other people upset. Like some people were like, "Sounds like you really, really like being white." And I said, "Well, you know, I’m not—that's how I’ve been socialized," and then it was turned into kind of an argument, and then the facilitator had to defend me because I actually had told him what he wanted to hear.

And it turned into kind of a bit of a difficult moment.

So I had to say that it was good to be white but not be too happy about it.

Do you think it's a reasonable question?

I think the unreasonable part is more interesting. Like, it's reasonable if you take—spoken like a true postmodernist—if you take racial identity as—well, this gets into a whole identity thing that I could talk about, but please do.

Okay, so you know that race is a folk taxonomy, okay? It’s not—it has, you know, groups and it—correct me if I’m wrong; this is my understanding, you know, I’m not an expert, I’m a math teacher, so this—you can be sure that no matter what you say, you’re wrong, I’m sure I’m wrong.

Yeah, but take it for what it’s worth. If you don’t like it, just stop watching now.

As I understand it from my races of folks taxonomy, groups or individuals vary more within the groups than between the groups. It doesn’t correspond in any meaningful way to, you know, I guess IQ changes over time, and things. It just doesn’t have a lot—it’s a—it’s not a true thing; it’s not a true thing.

So when people say, you know, “What do you like about being white?” it requires resemblance, a category. So a family resemblance category is a very strange sort of category. So imagine that there’s a category of 11 items, and if you have four of them, you’re in that category. What that means is that two things in that category can have two different sets of four attributes and still be in the same category. Psychiatric diagnostic categories are like that.

So maybe there are 11 symptoms, and if you have four, you’re in the category. So it’s kind of—it’s got edges like a proper set, which are the categories that we usually use in science, like triangles. You can define completely, and you can tell what is and what isn’t a triangle. There aren’t shades of triangle, essentially, and they’re very distinguishable from squares. But family resemblance categories we use a lot, but they’re not scientific categories; they have their utility and we use them a lot.

So, okay, so anyway, back to race. So, you know, there—even something that’s not true, and if you require someone to identify with a lie, you are creating this sort of fundamental distortion. Now, I understand that racism is real; that is, this is it—the lie is instantiated in the world and it’s a social construct that has had tremendous effects on history, but I have often wondered, what is it that’s obvious that racism exactly is real? Because it’s hard to distinguish from in-group preference, for example, you know what I mean, and fear of novelty, for example, and, you know, it’s complicated. I’m not saying that there’s obviously—I’m not saying that racial bias has never existed, but right, you delve into it, it becomes extremely complicated, and it’s very important if you look at things like the hypothetical racism that the implicit association test measures; it’s by no means obvious that what it’s measuring is only, well, racism at all, but only racism because of all these other issues.

And it is different. We tend to be in favor of in-group favoritism in certain situations and are very violently opposed to it in others, so it’s complicated and murky. But your fundamental point is, well, there’s an insistence perhaps that race is socially constructed and arbitrary, and yet it’s the most fundamental attribute that defines a person, right?

And that, you know, in our school after we adopted a curriculum, you know, in sixth grade, and maybe even earlier, but I happen to notice this in the curriculum, there is an exploration of identity where, you know, and I would actually really like to hear your thoughts on this. You know, the individual identity is sort of acknowledged, right, your interests, you know, preferences, dreams, aspirations, personality, character, all of those things are really important, and you are also have a social identity.

And your social identity is how other people see you, and you’re born into this world where certain social identities are valued more than others, and so they kind of lead you outside the house of your self-understanding into this world of social, you know, social impinging. And gradually, you sort of become separate.

I think that the effect of this is you should prioritize how other people see you when you have a self-concept before you even really know who you are or you’ve developed yourself, you’re supposed to sort of—I think the kids are supposed to sort of hold it in abeyance and then prioritize, you know, how other people view you, and I don’t think that’s healthy.

What did you see as the consequences of that in the school?

I mean, obviously, this is starting to bother you as this year—you buy into it to begin with, and you’re enthusiastic about it to begin with, and you attribute that to, well, the mechanics of the initial education, let’s say.

It’s a group phenomena. It capitalizes on empathy, and it sounds benevolent, certainly. In fact, it's the very essence of benevolence in some sense, so it’s going to be seductive regardless of whether or not it’s correct, but you become uncomfortable with it.

Well, the first thing you’re uncomfortable with is that you were implicitly asked to produce a falsehood in relationship to your own identity, which was—yeah, when you were asked the question about what you liked about being white.

And you said that what you said wasn’t right, exactly, or wasn’t correct, wasn’t true. It was something that you whipped up on the spot because of the nature of the demand of the situation, and you remember that. So, obviously, that’s significant.

I think I was just meeting and what I thought was an absurdity, with an absurdity. You know, like I felt the question was a little bit absurd, you know. It’s sort of like the premise, right? The premise is—in what do you call it? Like how long have you been beating your wife? Kind of question.

You know, so the premise of whiteness is you’re supposed—you have to accept the premise in order to answer the question.

I really have never been comfortable with the premise, period, because I don’t think that it—you know, right? It takes a lot of presence. It takes a lot of presence of mind when you’re asked a question to question the question, especially when you’re the student and it’s the teacher that’s so to speak, it’s the authority figure that’s posing the question because you immediately have to rebel, and you have to do it in an extremely sophisticated way.

Yeah, and, you know, this could get back to the school, and I might not have passed the class, and, you know, I’m white, so that would have been problematic, and why—and that might have had job repercussions or, you know, promotions, or whatever. You know, you just you realize that to question the question is mandatory.

Yeah, and to question the question in these circumstances is, you know, the risk of that is so much greater than the triumph of dismantling the question that you’re just not—you’re never gonna—and you may see—you may even fail at dismantling the way. Like your little rebellion may lead nowhere, and you may be wrong, you know, which is the hesitation that anyone would have with an objection, just that you might be wrong.

And so, of course, you’re just going to fall on that side of the equation. I mean, that’s what I did. Some people don’t, but that—

No, most people do.

Yeah, and no wonder, right? It’s hard not—like you outlined a bunch of reasons why it’s difficult to, you know, come up with exactly the right response at that second. It’s not like it’s a question you’re prepared for, right?

Right, right. And, you know, I think—I think the students do it all the time, you know, because there’s tremendous social cost to challenging any of the assumptions of our anti-racist programming or the manner in which it’s delivered.

What are the costs for the students?

Social appropriation. You could have, you know, teachers write recommendations for them if they get a reputation that there’s a fear that it could affect their applications. Students have come to me with, you know, concerns and examples of papers that they wrote, say, you know, on taking a position that went against the orthodoxy, and they’ve, you know, suffered a great hit from it.

And I've asked them, like, "Are you sure it just wasn't a good paper? Are you sure?" And they’re like, "No, I actually cited this, this, and this, and I stood, you know." And so I think they’re real. I think that they’re real, and there have actually been, you know, stories that they’ve brought to me that are, you know, someone defends capitalism or something, and then they have a big talking to after class or something like that, which is just—

Well, yes, I mean how could you possibly defend capitalism while you’re going to a $55,000-a-year private school, right?

Right, I mean, what's the probability that your parents are capitalists? A hundred percent, very high.

Very high. So basically, you’re being set to task because you have the goal to defend the very attribute of your parents that enabled you to go to the school in the first place, and that, of course, enabled the school, right?

And it’s such an ironic thing that both the administration and most faculty have such contempt for the very thing that makes them have a job. You know, like they believe that in order to achieve—why do you think they have contempt for that, given that it’s the very thing that allows them to have a job?

I mean, this is associated with the question we discussed earlier, right, about you being resentful back when you were an undergraduate. It seems to me—and I—well, let me let you answer; I won't push you.

Yeah, no, I think that's a good connection to make. I mean, we all—you know, if you have baked in a resentment of authority and see all order as tyrannical, well then, you know, even the hand that feeds you is going to be a tyrant. And so it’s also so convenient, you know. I’ve watched among my professorial peers—I’ve worked with business schools, for example, quite frequently and I have my own companies and did while I was a professor, and I’m not an anti-capitalist, and many of my colleagues would sneer at my involvement with the business school.

And I thought, okay, so what’s going on here? It’s like I know lots of businessmen, and like, look, there are plenty of businessmen who have contempt for academics, so it’s not like it’s a one-way street.

And my sense always was with something like, well, look, I have an IQ of 145 and I’m not getting paid $700 an hour like my corporate counterpart on Bay Street or Wall Street, and I work just as hard, which is true, by the way, because top-rated professors work, you know, 60, 70, 80-hour weeks to keep on top of their research just like the high-end lawyers do in corporate law offices, but they’re not rewarded financially to nearly the same degree.

And so, to me, it was always just a matter of straight-out envy. It’s like, well, if this society was structured properly, professors would make a hell of a lot more than corporate lawyers.

It’s like, well, yeah, except you have tenure and complete creative freedom, and you know that’s actually worth something. So how dare you complain when you’re a tenured professor because you have the best job in the world?

So anyways, back to the faculty at the high school.

You know, I think—well, you know, this is not the case for all of them, and I really don’t want to generalize too much, but it does seem that in certain of the humanities subjects, it tends to be more, you know, radical questioning of, you know, the foundations of, you know, what creates inequity in the—over at these schools, which are, you know, it's almost like the more opportunity these schools offer, the more they're part of a problem, I think, is the view in the sense that, you know, if you're offering me some opportunity—right?

If you're offering tuning into these elite kids, well then, what about all the other kids? Which is a good question, but then, you know, instead of figuring out the best ways to help the people that need it, the focus is on sort of, you know, questioning and interrogating the site of the top end of the inequality.

Well, it's an interesting moral conundrum, right? If you're working at an elite private school and your conscience is bothered by inequality—and I mean, virtually everybody's conscience is bothered by inequality. There are very few people that walk down the street and celebrate tripping over a homeless person.

You know, the typical person would rather set the world up so that people didn't fall out of the system in such a painful manner, so you have that plaguing your conscience. But it seems like—so maybe that does provide a way out is you can continue doing what you're doing, but you can also critique the system as a whole and regain some ethical equilibrium in that manner.

Yeah, I think that's a bit—that's a lot of it, yeah, for sure.

All right, so you're initially an advocate of this, you’re excited about it, but what happens?

Yeah, what—so when did that start? How many years ago about?

I kind of kicked in 2015, I believe.

Okay, so it’s about six years we’re talking about, yeah. And so, you know, the word came down—there was a diversity—as I understand it, this is, you know, pieced together—but there was a diversity task force on the board. There was a retreat, a board retreat that was led by something called the Karl Institute. The Karl Institute is one of these outfits that stands for critical analysis of race and learning and education.

And, you know, they sort of pitched their tent with anti-racism as a philosophy, and they started to, you know, talk to the faculty a little bit. You know, what later became the Office of Community Engagement, which is the sort of bureaucratic arm that, you know, is essentially a sort of ethical priesthood of how to behave properly in, you know, the school environment and, you know, how to be a good anti-racist.

But they would ask—they had meetings, but they would ask us things like, "Well, what does anti-racism mean to you?" And that’s a perfectly innocuous question. And, you know, to me, I was like, "It means not being racist. It means not differentiating, you know, individuals based on the color of their skin and treating people with respect and dignity no matter, you know, what their skin color is."

And they say, "Well, that’s interesting. You know, well, you know, that’s very interesting. Okay." And then they just heard people out, and some people had more, you know, I guess I would say advanced ideas about, you know, being aware of systemic oppression and understanding different perspectives based on how you might assume a child had been, you know, had developed given their circumstances, and those were rewarded, you know, much more.

And those are not bad ideas. You know, we haven’t got to the bad stuff yet.

But it started to become apparent to me. I sort of had the realization that this was really going the wrong direction when we had a professional development meeting and they passed out the—you, I’m sure you’ve seen it—the Pyramid of Racism, also known as the Pyramid of White Supremacy.

And it had this schema; it was a schema arranged in the form of a pyramid with genocide at the top of the pyramid and then various layers that had categorical names like overt racism, covert racism, minimization, indifference, and then various—there must have been about 50 or 60 things sprinkled on the pyramid at various levels.

And some of the things on the pyramid, I actually thought were, you know, in many cases, virtues. So things like being apolitical or things like, you know, there are two sides to every story.

Things that were contradictory like not believing POC but also thinking, "Well, my black friend said dot dot dot." So the idea that these two things were next to each other seemed interesting to me.

Also things that were just, you know, political party plat—you know, platforms. Minimization, yeah. "We belong to the human race!"

Right, right. That was post-racial society.

Why can’t we all just get along?

Prioritizing intentions over impact—that's a nice one.

Yes, yes, we could talk about that for about three weeks.

Yeah, not believing the experiences of people of color—two sides to every story, right?

Yeah, well, it’s very interesting when you look very carefully at the words that are lumped in with the other words, let’s say, right, by association.

Okay, so you had this Pyramid of White Supremacy, and I was asked, you know, what do you—how do you respond to this? What do you think about this? And I just—I said, "I think this is an extremely destructive and horrible schema to put in front of a child, and I will never do it."

And so this was when you were teaching math.

Well, you know, I should explain it. At our school, all the teachers have other duties that are really important. Like you have an advisory, and the advisor shepherds, you know, maybe eight to ten kids through the four years. So they come to you with problems, and you can help them out. You can help them out academically.

So this would have been something that I would need to share with the advisory.

And I think they actually—so you registered your objection.

I did. This is the first time I kind of registered my objection because I felt—why did you do that?

I mean, look what you just told me. Remember what you just told me? You said that at one point in your life, you were like dangerously lost, and you found your way out through mentoring. That put you into the education field, then you got a good job that you liked with people you cared for, that was meaningful to you, and it structured your life.

And then you bought into this anti-racist movement, let’s say, and, but now you decide you’re not going to do it. So like, why? You have a lot at stake at this point. A lot!

So why—what’s bugging you about this so much?

Yeah, I think it—I think some things had happened before this where I had spoken to the head of school prior to this and warned him.

Because I immediately thought of—I was just thinking about anti-racism: "Anti-racism; why does that should be a good thing?"

Why does that bother me?

And what bothered me was that I knew that racism was a concept that had undergone an enormous creep, that people had very different ideas about what was and wasn’t racist. Some of the American flag was racist. Things that were, you know, perhaps innocuous to some would have been considered racist to others, and then how would you adjudicate what you were actually against?

And I saw this as a real threat because it would lead to real problems in determining what it was that you should be anti, and if you frame—if you frame in your mission something which is anti-something vague, you’re really setting yourself up for a witch hunt.

And I just sort of—especially—look, especially when we look at this Pyramid of White Supremacy, right, and at the top we have genocide.

So it’s like the ultimate evil.

Okay, so that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the ultimate evil, okay? So then you might say, well, maybe your definitions matter when you’re talking about the ultimate evil, and so maybe being vague about exactly what that evil is—especially if it’s convenient for you to be vague—perhaps that’s a little bit ill-advised. Perhaps particularly when you’re teaching children.

Yeah, yeah.

And, you know, I said, "Well, is this the comprehensive list of things that belong on the pyramid? Are there other things that we don’t know that are on the pyramid?"

And they said, "Well, you know, there could be."

I said, "Well, that’s nice. So now we have other stuff that’s just in the margins that could be thrown onto this pyramid. Who knows what they'll be?"

Maybe and who knows who will decide exactly.

Exactly.

Like this is—okay, so this list is not exhaustive, and that actually scared me more.

Why?

Well, because it meant that no one could anticipate where the lines were. I mean, kids need boundaries, and so how are the kids supposed to know what is and isn't if they just have this grab bag of all these possible things that could be, you know, associated with the ultimate evil?

You know, that is just setting up this whole tripwire situation where they’re just—how are they supposed to know how to trust what is and isn’t falling into the schema that comes out of their mouth or could they have a thought that they want to articulate?

How—you’re just setting them up for anxiety and tension, and you know who it means that you’re really—you know, and I began to see this in actual discussions. People have about it. Kids were restricting themselves to a very narrow set of things to say that they felt were okay to say, you know, and it was all the jargon. You know, it was saying, "Well, you know, we need to acknowledge our privilege." Yes, we are privileged! You know, that privilege makes us unable to understand!

Okay, so what you saw as people’s attempts to deal with the ambiguity was that they just stopped saying anything that wasn’t approved.

Yeah! Because that is the way out of it, right? If what’s negative is ill-defined but what’s positive is listed, then you just stick with the list. You stick with the list.

And then what’s the problem with that, exactly? So the kids stick with the list.

Why—is that bothering you?

Well, it’s because it means that, you know, events—the multiplicity of possible reasons for things that change that are different depending on the actual incident get reduced to this script of explanations, and only those explanations, you know, fit the paradigm, and only those explanations will be considered.

And that means that you’re not making sense of the world for yourself; you’re following a script. I don’t think that's—you can’t do that.

Okay, so now you’re watching this. It’s having an impact on you; it’s having an impact on the students. What’s the impact on the students?

Personally, too, I felt—okay, some of it was personal, but also I was seeing it in the students, and particularly in the most recent years, it’s sort of like when you go to a meeting and, you know, everybody is—the people there are people that are silent and there are people that are talking, and the people that are talking are saying all the right things, and the people that are silent are listless and are disengaged and just waiting for it to end.

And then that listlessness and disengagement is being framed as resistance by the people who are running the meeting. They’re the people that are in charge of delivering the anti-racist programming.

And then there’s meetings about how to get—because that’s indifference.

Yeah, and so they actually call it the Pyramid of White Supremacy. At the—in a pyramid, every brick depends on the ones below it for support. If the bricks at the bottom are removed, the whole structure comes tumbling down, which means that if you face down indifference, you eradicate genocide.

Right, exactly.

And so it’s a way to use a structural metaphor to transfer all of the, like, all of the weight of genocide onto all the little things.

I’m not saying it very well, but I think you know what I mean.

So White—so we got an email. I remember getting an email from the Office of Community Engagement that said, "We’re looking for ways to target white, white disengagement."

And white was in brackets, right?

It’s almost as little—we’re embarrassed to say it, but it’s—it’s white. It’s white disengagement, right?

And that’s sort of like, "We’re going to say it, but we don't really want to say it," and that just made me a little bit even more upset because it meant that if you’re not—you're not even going to be honest about what you’re calling it. You’re gonna try to have it both ways.

So—and what’s happening among your colleagues at this point? You’re becoming dissatisfied?

Yeah, what’s the nature of your private conversations? Are you starting to be isolated?

No, I mean I still get along well with my colleagues. And, you know, there are some that I have conversations with, and they’ll, you know, they’ll say, "Well, I won’t go as far as you, but I definitely think there’s something not so great about this."

You know, I think it's—the other colleagues were concerned about the same things. I was free expression and the ability to entertain—to have different ideas and to talk about the framework and, you know, and maybe challenge it—the whole thing.

So, yeah, I was—I wasn’t alone in my doubts for sure.

Did you ever wonder if it was you going off the rails?

Sure, sure! I mean, I still felt—I still felt like it was perhaps me, you know, in the way that, you know, because I have had privilege in my life, I’ve had substantial privilege in my life.

I would call it, you know, opportunity, and I’m grateful for it. One of the things that I learned about studying the aftermath of the Russian Revolution was that privilege creeps, too, because it’s very, very hard to find someone who isn’t privileged in some manner.

Like the only person who isn’t privileged in some manner is the person in the world who’s suffering more than anyone else. There’s only one of him or her; everyone else is privileged. So you can expand the net of guilt indefinitely by focusing on privilege.

Yeah, yeah! And I didn’t like the way that it was being used to discount people’s ideas. You know, if you have an educational institution, ideas are the whole are everything, you know, and the—I—there should be—you should be talking about ideas based on what make ideas sound or unsound, not the person who’s saying them.

So I was seeing situations where, you know, white students would make a claim and then that claim was discounted by someone else because of their privilege.

You’re making of course the white supremacist assumption that there are such things as ideas and that they can be ranked in terms of quality and that the purpose of discursive speech is precisely to do such things and et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, and so the whole solipsistic nature of it—I was like this is—you can’t even have a conversation. This is not a way to have a functioning—you’re not preparing people to function in a truly Virginia world of ideas.

It’s not.

Well, it’s worse in some sense that the claim, the fundamental claim is that there’s no such thing as a conversation. There’s just different discourses of power.

There’s no conversation—assumes ideas and the free flow of ideas and the irrational individual actor and the capacity for logos and the individual as the central unit and so on and so forth.

People who hold the critical race position, let’s say, don’t—and again, it’s not that they avoid confrontational conversations; they don’t believe that there’s such a thing as a conversation. It’s not part of the system, so it’s a fundamental dispute.

Yeah, no, that’s true.

And then the little things, like I remember talking to a colleague about a new hire, and she said—I said, "Well, what’s he like, this new guy?"

And she said, "Well, he’s like you; he’s like me."

Well, what do you mean by that?

And she was like, "Oh, he’s white."

I was like, "Okay, all right!" You know, this is not a person that’s a total stranger either, and I kind of walked away and like really?

So, okay. And, you know, I also heard the objection to my objection, which is, you know, “See how it feels, white man! See how it feels to be treated as your race!”

That is, it’s a—you know, she might have been trying to teach me a lesson in some sense, like, "Now you know how it feels," but that’s not, you know, okay, that’s—that’s a point that you’re making, but that’s not—that’s not a healthy thing, and that’s not good because it doesn’t actually reduce some type of misery in the world.

Yeah, I mean, yeah.

All right, so you’re starting to get—the feel disquiet, and you actually make this known.

Yes, I make it known in 2019; I make it known in 2020. I talk to the assistant head; I talk to the head of school.

You’re married.

I’m recently married. I’ve been married over a year—just over a year.

Do you have any children?

No children!

No children! But you are married; okay, so I’m just wondering what you have resting on your job.

Exactly!

Yeah, and I—I didn’t, you know, I’m—I have to say that, you know, not having kids is huge—I would say is a huge part of why I feel like I’ve been able to stick my neck out.

And, you know, I'm not—I don't judge anyone for balancing their duty to the truth and their duty to their family in whatever way that works for them because both of them are important.

Or to put things at risk, you know, that’s—that’s a personal choice and that’s—I can’t speak to any of that, but I think it definitely—not having mouths to feed and, you know, having some savings from my previous job, and things—being smart with my money and not spending it unwisely as I had done a decade and a half ago.

But, I think that that helped me to do what I’m doing.

All right, so how are you being treated by the administrative officials to whom you’re registering your objection? Are you doing that in writing? Are you doing that in person?

You know, mostly in person, and, you know, I’m not writing anything official; I’m in the grumbling in my beard phase, I guess. I’m in the griping phase where I would go and I would say, "You know, this is wrong. Like, why can’t we teach a broad range of viewpoints? Why do we always have to teach this ritualistic thing that’s just a litany of, you know, basically far-left ideas?"

And, you know, some of the administration were very sympathetic, like even overly so. Like, I remember talking to the assistant head; he pulled down a copy of Jonathan Haidt off the bookshelf and was like, "I’d love to teach this in my class. I really want to make this happen. I want to teach, you know, more than I was sort of—maybe just modeling it or humoring me or something but he had the book! He had the book!

That’s right! And he knew the book, and he knew where it was on his shelf!

I know, so like, but, you know, then in public, you know, or in public—in front of the community, you're not saying nothing about it, right? So I think there’s a tremendous amount of preference falsification still going on there, you know.

Well you outlined why—I mean, yeah, you lost your job.

Yeah, so, you know, these are high stakes games and, right, you make a mistake and you veer outside the realm of acceptable behavior, let’s say, and what happens?

Well, you get disproportionately punished for it, and there’s a moral element to it too, which is, well, there’s no bloody way someone like you should be teaching. So not only did we fire you, but we’re right to do so!

Yeah, so—and you know, that’s a very hard thing to withstand, which is something I also want to talk to you about.

I mean, you know, confident though you may be, or anyone may be, when your institution sheds you and surrounds that with accusations about the nature of your character, if you’re not a complete psychopath, it tends to strike you to your heart because there’s always the possibility that you’re wrong, right?

Right!

But I really knew I wasn’t because, you know, coming out, there was this meeting, and I referred to it in the article or my essay, "The Self-Care Through an Anti-Bias Lens" meeting, which is what kicked off the whole past two months for me.

It was a meeting where students were ostensibly going to learn how to take care of themselves during the pandemic, how to manage their emotions, how to take deep breaths and cope with things. And in that meeting, you know, after some—some mind-relaxing exercises like meditation and stuff, they put up the white supremacy, you know, aspects of white supremacy culture slide.

And that’s different than the pyramid?

Or this is different than the pyramid?

And this is, you know, it’s actually—you know, they’re—there’s different forms of it, but essentially, you know, it's fairly common in this—this thing as you know, and yes, so here’s some professional and transactional relationships versus relationships based on trust, care, and shared commitments.

Protecting power versus sharing power. Culture of overworking versus culture of self-care and community care. Competition and struggle for limited resources versus collaboration and working to share resources?

That's all white dominant culture!

So—yes, yes! And so some of the things that were on this particular slide were objectivity, individualism, either-or thinking, right?

Right.

And I know that one; there was—you know, the thing that wrangled me the most was right to comfort because you know, how are you giving a self-care workshop where the 200 kids that are in there in this racially segregated workshop are challenged that they might not—you know, that having—a right to comfort is associated with, you know, genocidal evil.

Kenneth Jones and Tema Okan: "Dismantling Racism Workbook," 2001. God only knows what that is, but it's everywhere!

The characteristics of white supremacy culture! Perfectionism, which is an element of conscientiousness, which is a fundamental trait. Sense of urgency, defensiveness, quantity over quality, worship of the written word, paternalism, either-or thinking.

Notice this is all written in words, by the way. Power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism—which seems to run somewhat counter to the fear of open conflict—progress is bigger and more objectivity.

Right to comfort?

Yeah, it’s quite the grab bag of conceptually unrelated items. It’s incoherent at every possible level of analysis as well as being—it's impossible to parody.

Yeah, yeah.

And I saw it and I, you know, I had been thinking for a couple months prior to this because there had been some meetings that really upset me, and I was thinking, well, and my head of school had actually said that if I was in an appropriate forum, I should feel free to ask questions.

By this point in the meeting, I think maybe 30 minutes in before this popped up, other faculty had been saying things in the chat area of the Zoom meeting.

So, you know, is that anonymous?

Is that anonymous in the Zoom?

No, it’s—they were so they were under their own names, under their own names, yeah.

And so I thought, well, why—when the facilitator mentioned that if you looked at this slide, I think she said, you know, “You might have some white feelings.”

And I said, "I just kind of blurted out." I didn’t blurt it out angrily; I didn’t flirt it out angrily, I don’t think I was too upset. Of course, you know, I don’t know how it was perceived, of course, but I said, "Well, what do you mean by white feelings? What is a white feeling?"

And I—you know, what came back was—I think she said something—that defensiveness was a white feeling. I said, "Well, these feelings can belong to people of any race." And, you know, I think that it's—I don’t understand why it’s being attributed to a particular—the white people.

And, you know, I had that kind of opened the gates a little bit and kind of broke the ice, I think, because in the chat other kids started to ask questions. There was a debate about whether I should be allowed to ask the question, and there was—

Which question?

The question about the white feeling question.

I see.

There were also some—there was a lot of capitalism bashing in the chat, and I said, "You know, I believe capitalism is anti-racist since it’s done more to lift people of all races out of poverty than any alternative."

And, you know, I wasn’t monopolizing the chat; I was dropping in little things, and there was a lot of activity in the chat.

And then the facilitator actually went with me, and she explained stuff, you know, her perspective on it, and I thanked her, and, you know, she moved on some more.

And I think I asked another question, but I really—as she said later in a meeting about the meeting in front of the whole faculty, she felt that I—you know, I was asking out of curiosity. I wasn’t, you know, on a rant or saying it, you know, to be antagonistic.

I think some of my faculty members felt that I was, but the facilitator herself didn’t feel that way, and she was the one I was talking to.

So I think that definitely counts.

That's quite remarkable, I would say, because it's very difficult in a group like that when you know the implicit ethos to be able to say something that's questioning without having anger build up as a motivation, right?

Because you need something to break through your resistance, yeah.

So, yeah, to be able to say it without upsetting the—the, uh, yeah.

I mean, I was passionate, but I wasn’t—I don’t think I was, like, enraged or anything like that. It’s, you know, I was trying to modulate what I was really upset was that was the either-or thing because I was like, "Well, if either-or thinking is a characteristic of white supremacy, well then, Ibram Kendi’s got to be the whitest person in public life because his entire philosophy is so Manichaean."

I mean, anyway, so—but I didn’t say that of course because I would have been inflammatory, but what I really wanted to do—I’ve been thinking about an opportunity because I wanted to model for the students that you could ask questions—that someone who was a teacher or someone who was an authority figure could ask a question, and it was okay.

And did—and how did the students react to it?

Was it phenomenal? I mean, I was really gratified that they confirmed that my—it confirmed that I was doing the right thing because things came out in the chat. They started to ask a broader range of questions. I received the transcript later, and, you know, it was like night and day. Kids were asking questions like, "Well, I don’t feel like I’m ignorant just because I’m white," or, "You know, I don’t like to be reduced to my race."

And then faculty joined in, so several faculty members also started to ask questions.