ROOM FOR GROWTH

The sun beat down upon the wooden deck. A group of CHS teachers chatted about their summers as they helped themselves to a variety of snacks and settled underneath the umbrellas blocking the hot summer sun.

The book group was originally formed before the pandemic by multiple CHS teachers concerned about equity. At the first meeting they read “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo, a book that gives insight into the minds of how white people see race.

“[The book, ‘White Fragility’] brought me clarity into what my experience had been like and why,” said Maneesha Mankad, a CHS math teacher. 

“When I first came to Ann Arbor, people would say to me, 'We don't see color. We're colorblind,' and I thought that to be very interesting, because if you're looking at me, the first thing you see is color,” Mankad said. “I was fascinated by the idea that people felt like they didn't see color.”

This fascination grew into perplexity as Mankad continued to live in Ann Arbor.

“Someone commented to my daughter about her brown skin and how they didn't play with brown skin people in their family,” Mankad said. “I took it to her teacher and I said, 'I don't understand how to address this' because [my daughter] was feeling left out.”

The teacher was astonished because to her, children couldn’t see color. 

“Once again, I was perplexed because I was like, 'Okay, the first thing you see about me [and] my daughter is [color],” Mankad said. “But I understood that what the person was trying to say to me was essentially the fact that color doesn't influence their actions, or their thoughts or their behaviors, and they don't discriminate based on color. So what that meant to me was that the intention is to not see color so that the discrimination doesn't happen.”

Mankad was reminded of this when she attended the book group discussions, and she thought about whether or not claiming that you are “colorblind” was an adequate method to handle discrimination.

“It's important to identify the differences, because that tells you that you are actually seeing the person,” Mankad said. “Saying that they don't see that particular trait or difference, that just makes you then wonder, are they seeing you at all?”

Reading and discussing “White Fragility” led Mankad to think about how discrimination forms and occurs in everyday society.

“I started to get a better perspective of how because of different experiences, perspectives or different lenses that people come from, they don't have a sense of the experience I had because they can't possibly have that,” Mankad said. “I think that book highlighted the fact that discrimination is not necessarily someone trying to be mean to other people because they're different. Discrimination could be completely unintentional with the best of intentions, and it could still be happening.”

Mankad believes that because miscommunication will always happen, people from all backgrounds should open their minds to the possibility of making mistakes.

“It's important to open your mind to other ideas or possibilities of how you could be thinking and what biases you might internally already be having, and examining that through a different lens so that you can understand when certain things happen despite your best intentions,” Mankad said. “I think my main takeaway was to understand where other people came from, and to be more thoughtful about how another person could be perceiving the same situation and trying to find a way to bridge.”

This past summer, the group also read “My Grandmother’s Hands” by Resmaa Menakem, a black therapist. The book explores three communities: black, white and police, and how each community deals with trauma of some sort and how they can come to understand each other more.

“I think there's always more that we can learn and examine, both to motivate myself to read and [to] grow as a person,” said Joslyn Hunsher-Young, a CHS social studies teacher.

“My Grandmother’s Hands” investigates the trauma that police have to deal with for their jobs, and how it impacts how they handle situations. He specifically explores the culture of the police community and the mantra of shoot before you get shot. In one example, a situation arose between a police officer, who had just come from a tense event, and a white civilian. 

“We're all dealing with trauma in our cultures and in our lives, so we as individuals, and as communities need to be able to identify that and deal with that, even though it's going to be painful,” Hunscher-Young said. “ If we don't recognize that in ourselves and then eventually begin to also recognize and see that and other people then like we're stuck and we're not going to improve.”