Educators and parents had one job yesterday:
Reassure
kids and help them feel safe in the wake of the most ugly, damaging and
high-stakes election in American history. For the foreseeable future, in fact,
they’ll need to double down on creating a school climate that’s free of fear
and feels safe.
But safety isn’t enough, and it’s not the only thing our children—and
our country—need right now. Kids will sniff out false reassurance, and they
will learn that the adults who are doling it out can’t be trusted. They
desperately need their teachers and parents to tell them the truth: Everything
is not OK. We have work to do, and we can do it.
Here are a few of those truths kids need to hear.
Emotions are strong.
If you’re feeling hurt, disappointed, fearful or sad about this election, don’t
hide it. Hillary Clinton acknowledged the hurt of losing in her concession
speech. Don’t put on a happy face; the kids will see right through it. But be
hopeful for the future. If you or some of your students are feeling jubilant,
don’t gloat. Remind kids that the president must serve all Americans, not just
those who voted for him.
The country is
divided—and not just on politics. This election has thrown the spotlight on
how we see each other: urban vs. rural; coasts vs. the heartland; “common
folks” vs. elites; “real Americans” vs. immigrants and Muslims; people who
believe they were better off the way things “used to be” vs. those who know
they do not want to go back to a time when LGBT people hid in closets, racial
discrimination was the law and women’s place was in the home. No matter where
your students stand, they need knowledge. Those students who feel dispossessed—and
that includes many white folks in the Rust Belt—need to see their realities
affirmed and need to know that others struggle too. Your immigrant or Muslim students
wonder if the country hates them? Be honest: Yes, a lot of people do hate and
fear them, for no other reason than their ethnicity or religion. We have a long
history of fearing the “other.” Your African-American kids feel their race
counts against them? It does; their opportunities in life are different because
they were born black in the United States. You don’t judge them by the color of
their skin, but when the world doled out advantages, they got shorted.
No one really knows
what this election means. Pundits and scholars will spend months analyzing why
half the country voted for a man with no experience in government, who ran on a
platform of fear and nostalgia and who is widely seen as a demagogue. We’ll
hear about misogyny, xenophobia, a revolt against the political establishment,
the effects of globalization and rapid social change, the culture of celebrity,
economic stress, and white anxiety in the face of a browning nation. Resist the
urge to explain it to your students; you can’t. Not yet. That’s going to be a
job for historians. Tell them you don’t have all the answers, but here are some
explanations being offered. Be willing to discuss and explore the
possibilities, even if they are ugly or uncomfortable. No one wants to tell a
roomful of little girls that maybe the country wasn’t ready for a woman
president, but chances are they’ve already figured out that they are treated
differently than the boys.
Voting matters, but it
doesn’t happen on its own. It takes work to make sure that everyone who is
eligible to vote is registered, has knowledge about the process and gets out to
vote. Some of us were lucky to have a long list of advantages that make voting
matter-of-fact. My parents voted, for instance, so I learned about it early and
developed the habit. That’s not true for people whose parents were excluded
because of felon disenfranchisement, voter-suppression laws or their status as
non-citizens. I have a job that allows me to take as long as I need to vote.
That’s not true for hourly workers. I have a car and it’s easy to get to the
polling station. Not everyone can say that. Today, we don’t know exactly how
voter turnout in 2016 stacked up historically, but it’s clear that lots of
people didn’t participate. Talk about that and about the obstacles they face,
including apathy, with your students.
Voting matters, but
it’s not the only thing that does. Citizens and non-citizens alike have a
role in shaping the future of this nation, and they do it in many ways. They
serve in the military and on juries. They volunteer in their communities,
attend school board meetings and work with others to get things done. In the
face of injustice, they organize to bring about change. In the past, for
example, women organized and fought for 72 years to get the right to vote. African
Americans put their lives in danger to end legal segregation and secure their
right to vote. Chicano and Filipino farm workers organized to get paid a living
wage and be treated with respect. Today, members of the Standing Rock Sioux
nation and their allies are fighting an oil pipeline in North Dakota that
threatens their water and land. Black, white and brown Americans are joining
together to confront racism under the banner of the Movement for Black Lives. Citizenship
is something you do every day, by raising your voice for what you believe in,
and sometimes—as those who signed the Declaration of Independence vowed—putting
your “life and sacred honor” on the line.
The majority isn’t
always right. Majorities famously have little regard for minority rights. The
framers of our Constitution feared nothing as much as mob rule and put checks
and balances into place to prevent an ill-informed majority or a special
interest (they called them factions) from having too much power. In the past,
voters have chosen to uphold Jim Crow, to limit marriage for LGBT people and to
support one religion over another. Two core American values, the idea of
majority rule and the idea of individual rights, often come into conflict. Protecting
minority rights is core to who we are as a people.
The majority doesn’t
always decide, anyway. At this point, it appears that the winner of the
Electoral College didn’t win the popular vote, let alone a majority of the
eligible voters—preliminary numbers suggest that 44 percent of those eligible
to vote didn’t. The more difficult subject, though, is the Electoral College, a
legacy from the Constitutional Convention that was created, along with the
infamous three-fifths clause, to privilege slaveholding states. Even though we
no longer have slavery, the setup continues to give a decided advantage to less
populated rural states. How? The formula for the number of electoral votes a
state gets is simple: It’s the number of representatives the state has in the
House plus the two Senators each state has. The result is that North Dakota
gets one electoral vote for every 224,000 people while California gets about
one for every 677,000 people. In the end, both the U.S. Senate and the
Electoral College give an advantage—and a louder voice—to lower-population
states.
Kids really are our
future. No lie. It can sound like a cliché, something adults say that has
little real meaning. But it is true. John Dewey argued that humane education of
our children, one that ensured equal access and opportunity, was the only way
to preserve and advance society. The children in the nation’s public schools
are the leading edge of the demographic future: They are poorer, as a group,
than the average American. Increasingly more are black and brown. We generally
don’t do a great job educating children in poverty and children of color. Can
we afford to keep that up?
Costello is the director of Teaching
Tolerance.
