McKenzie Kennedy, who prefers the pronouns she and her according to her email signature, serves as the Secondary Social Studies Curriculum Coordinator in the Des Moines Public Schools.
She sent an email to well over 100 contacts letting them know if their school is currently planning for a Black Lives Matter (BLM) Week of Action, or if they’re interested in doing one, to see the resources that came from Rethinking Schools.
“I look forward to hearing about the plans buildings put together and seeing them during that week,” Kennedy wrote.
The email also had a couple of “resources” teachers were encouraged to examine.
One is called “Teaching For Black Lives.”
“Black students’ minds and bodies are under attack. We’re fighting back,” it states.
The book grows “directly out of the movement for Black lives.”
“We recognize that anti-black racism constructs black people, and blackness generally, as not counting as human life,” the website states.
Here are the book’s table of contents:
Section 1: Making Black Lives Matter in Our Schools
Black Students’ Lives Matter
Building the school-to-justice pipeline
By the editors of Rethinking Schools
How One Elementary School Sparked a Citywide Movement to Make Black Students’ Lives Matter
By Wayne Au and Jesse Hagopian
Student Athletes Kneel to Level the Playing Field
By Jesse Hagopian
Happening Yesterday, Happened Tomorrow
Teaching the ongoing murders of Black men
By Renée Watson
Space for Young Black Women
An interview with Candice Valenzuela
By Jody Sokolower
Trayvon Martin and My Students
Writing toward justice
By Linda Christensen
Two Sets of Notes
By MK Asante
Taking the Fight Against White Supremacy into Schools
By Adam Sanchez
A Vision for Black Lives
Policy demands for Black power, freedom, and justice
By the Movement for Black Lives coalition
Section 2: Enslavement, Civil Rights, and Black Liberation
The Color Line
How white elites sought to divide and conquer in the American colonies
By Bill Bigelow
Presidents and Slaves Helping students find the truth
By Bob Peterson
When Black Lives Mattered: Why Teach Reconstruction
By Adam Sanchez
Reconstructing the South
By Bill Bigelow
Medical Apartheid Teaching the Tuskegee Syphilis Study
By Gretchen Kraig-Turner
Beyond Just a Cells Unit
What my science students learned from the story of Henrietta Lacks
By Gretchen Kraig-Turner
Teaching SNCC
The organization at the heart of the civil rights revolution
By Adam Sanchez
Claiming and Teaching the 1963 March on Washington
By Bill Fletcher Jr.
Reflections of a “Deseg Baby”
By Linda Mizell
What We Don’t Learn About the Black Panther Party — but Should
By Adam Sanchez and Jesse Hagopian
COINTELPRO Teaching the FBI’s war on the Black freedom movement
By Ursula Wolfe-Rocca
Section 3: Gentrification, Displacement, and Anti-Blackness
Burned Out of Homes and History
Unearthing the silenced voices of the Tulsa Race Riot
By Linda Christensen
“The Most Gentrified City of the Century”
By Becky HenkleBerry and Jeff Waters
What Do You Mean When You Say Urban?
Speaking honestly about race and students
By Dyan Watson
Vacancies to Fill
Considering desire in the past and future of Chicago’s vacant schools
By Eve L. Ewing
Plotting Inequalities, Building Resistance
By Bridget Brew, Crystal Proctor, and Adam Renner
Bearing Witness Through Poetry
By Renée Watson
Shock-Doctrine Schooling in Haiti Neoliberalism off the Richter scale
By Jesse Hagopian
Lead Poisoning
Bringing social justice to chemistry
By Karen Zaccor
Section 4: Discipline, the Schools-to-Prison Pipeline, and Mass Incarceration
Jailing Our Minds
By Abbie Cohen
Schools and the New Jim Crow
An interview with Michelle Alexander
By Jody Sokolower
Racial Justice Is Not a Choice
White supremacy, high-stakes testing, and the punishment of Black and Brown students
By Wayne Au
How K-12 Schools Push Out Black Girls
An interview with Monique W. Morris
By Kate Stoltzfus
Haniyah’s Story
By Haniyah Muhammad
Teaching Haniyah
By Jody Sokolower
Teaching the Prison-Industrial Complex
By Aparna Lakshmi
Restorative Justice What it is and is not
By the editors of Rethinking Schools
Baby Steps Toward Restorative Justice
By Linea King
Section 5: Teaching Blackness, Loving Blackness, and Exploring Identity
A Talk to Teachers
By James Baldwin
Black Like Me
By Renée Watson
Dear White Teacher
By Chrysanthius Lathan
Black Boys in White Spaces One mom’s reflection
By Dyan Watson
Raised by Women
Celebrating our homes
By Linda Christensen
Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class
By Clint Smith
#MeToo and The Color Purple
By Linda Christensen
Queering Black History and Getting Free
By Dominique Hazzard
Rethinking Islamophobia Combating bigotry by raising the voices of Black Muslims
By Alison Kysia
Rethinking Identity Afro-Mexican history
By Michelle Nicola
Brown Kids Can’t Be in Our Club
Teaching 6-year-olds about skin color, race, culture, and respect
By Rita Tenorio
A Message from a Black Mom to Her Son
By Dyan Watson
Black Is Beautiful
By Kara Hinderlie
Another book, “Teaching a People’s History of Abolition and the Civil War,” encourages students to “take a critical look” at the “popular narrative that centers Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator and ignores the resistance of abolitionists and enslaved people.”
In the “introduction” posted online, Adam Sanchez writes:
“What role have white people played in maintaining and fighting black oppression?”
It continues…
“Today, hate crimes against black people and other people of color continue. Police regularly murder black citizens with impunity.”
