Chapter 2: Because That is Our Only Choice: Art as Anti-Racist Teaching

This chapter builds the argument for why creating art in schools is more important than ever and naturally lends itself to notions of equity-minded anti-racist teaching.

When I was teaching high school ELA during the 2020–21 school year, “getting back to normal” was the preferred rhetoric du jour from administrators, district leaders, and talking heads on the news. While of course we all longed to once again enter public spaces without masks, social distancing restrictions, or copious amounts of hand sanitizer, there was also a sense that getting back to normal wasn’t going to cut it. While the COVID-19 pandemic may not have caused the pandemics of racial, gender, and income inequality, it surely amplified and widened these disparities, exposing the precariousness—and even violence—of our social systems. When we collectively watched the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and then the reckoning of Breonna Taylor’s murder not long after, we knew that getting back to normal wasn’t an option. Likewise, we saw how dangerous the protection of the old normal could become on January 6, 2021 when domestic terrorists, fueled by misinformation and white supremacist ideology, attacked the US Capital to disrupt a democratic election, and again when legislatures in several states passed laws barring trans youth from receiving genderaffirming treatments. If all of that constitutes the normal we are trying to get back to, I repeat emphatically the words of Gloria Ladson-Billings: “We are not going back!” (as cited in Morrell, 2021), over and over again.