Smithtown, please don't give up

Sadly, on May 18, the Smithtown school district elected three new members to its board of education who had campaigned on a platform criticizing the district’s equity efforts. Some in the community say the district is prejudicial against white children.

I attended Smithtown schools, where my classes were predominantly middle- to upper-middle-class white kids taught by white teachers. Every single person I knew was white.

In high school, we learned about civil rights and segregation but never discussed the lasting impact those issues would have on generations of people of color. Like so many people, I said things like "I don't see color" or "I treat everyone the same regardless of the color of their skin." I now know how ignorant those comments were.

The first time I found myself the only white person in a room full of Black people was my first day teaching. I realized how little I knew about the plight of others who didn't grow up in a comfortable middle-class, white world as I did. How could I possibly teach kids about the significance of someone like Martin Luther King when I had never so much as had a Black friend in my life? I felt like a fraud.

The fact is, many of the students in the Baltimore school where I teach first grade often are waging battles at home that I could never truly understand. Their start in life isn't similar to mine in any way. My parents positioned me for success and met all my emotional and material needs. Many of my students need more help from their teachers, their school and society than I did.

With the hard work I've done on my school's equity team, I've come to understand the unconscious biases I didn't even know I had. The conversations we have in our equity meetings are hard. They make me mad. They make me cry. When my Black colleagues share the discussions they have with their children about racism and discrimination, I know that they are unlike any exchanges my parents ever needed to have with me.

I now realize that I must "see color." Whether we like it or not, one's skin color influences their perspective on most things. To say it doesn't is just ignorant. "Seeing color" helps me appreciate that my view of the world and how I'm treated in it is very different from my Black colleagues and the students I teach. Looking through that broader lens, I no longer feel like a fraud teaching in a community of color.

To Smithtown, I say this: Continue with your equity team and the vital work you're doing. It's entirely possible to help kids have compassion for those who are unlike them without making them feel guilty about their blessings.

To those fighting these initiatives, I implore you to reconsider. Your unwillingness to accept the realities of a world different from your own is doing your children much more harm than any conversation about white privilege, racism and unconscious bias ever will. I can say firsthand that doing so will better prepare your children for a life outside of the comfortable, white, affluent bubble that is Smithtown.

Taylor Ackerman, a 2013 graduate of Smithtown East High School, is a teacher at Scotts Branch Elementary School in Baltimore.