If it ain’t woke, fix it: KIPP move was right
Monica Rhor says its motto ‘Work hard. Be nice.’ sent the wrong message to the charter schools’ students of color.
When the KIPP charter school network announced that it was dropping its slogan — “Work hard. Be nice.” — critics howled, calling it an example of wokeness gone wild.
I cheered.
On its face, that now-discarded mantra seems to evoke an ethos of diligence and kindness. In reality, it glosses over the inequalities and injustices faced by Black and Latino students — who make up 95 percent of the enrollment at the 240-plus KIPP schools — and instead preaches compliance without complaint.
Work hard, even though the deck is stacked against you. Work hard and maybe someday you’ll get ahead. Work hard and your bosses will eventually see your worth.
Be nice, as in be docile. Don’t make waves. Don’t make trouble.
White kids typically aren’t told to know their place. So why do we expect that of kids of color?
People of color don’t need a school slogan to be taught the value of hard work. That message is drilled into our heads from birth. We are not only expected to work hard, but to work harder than our white counterparts.
We learn it in the old saying handed down by Black parents: You have to be twice as good to get half as far.
I learned it from immigrant parents who put aside pride and, many times, advanced degrees from other countries, to toil at whatever job they could find here.
My parents worked two and three jobs — graveyard shifts piled on top of morning shifts on top of side gigs — without a grumble. I lived the refrain on summer breaks from college, when my sisters and I worked in a cosmetic factory to earn money for school, our hands rubbed raw and bleeding from packing hundreds of high-priced makeup kits that came hurtling at us down the assembly line. Don’t fuss, we were told, just work harder.
I carried the creed into the newsrooms of my early journalism career where I hustled so much that a veteran white reporter told me to slow down because I was making my coworkers look bad.
But hard work alone, I soon learned, isn’t enough to break down the barriers of systemic racism and plain old ignorance. Hard work alone didn’t stop fellow reporters from making snide remarks about me because I am Latina — calling me an affirmative action hire and questioning my qualifications, even as I amassed a collection of awards.
Hard work — and a degree from Harvard — wasn’t enough to prevent a Black birdwatcher from being falsely accused of threatening a white woman in New York’s Central Park. The racism he confronted in the Ramble is what other people of color confront in boardrooms. Hard work doesn’t close the salary gap that leaves women of color at the bottom of the pay scale in most newsrooms — and in most workplaces.
It doesn’t erase the bias of recruiters who often, as a Harvard study found, toss out résumés of African American or Asian job applicants in favor of white candidates. It doesn’t change the dynamics of a college admissions system that still favors children of alumni or a labor pool where Black workers are expected to perform better than white workers and are more likely to be fired for errors.
That’s why KIPP leaders were right to jettison the slogan and to examine more deeply the signal it was unintentionally sending.
“Asking us to ‘be nice’ puts the onus on kids to be quiet, be compliant, be controlled,” said one former student, according to a statement on the KIPP website. “It doesn’t actively challenge us to disrupt the systems that are trying to control us.”
As I grew older, I rewired my programming. I understood that pushing the myth of meritocracy doesn’t take into account the fact that white folks often start off on third base, while we have to dodge around obstacles just to get to first.
As a parent, I’ve amended the script I heard from my parents.
I still encourage my daughters to dream big and aim high. I want them to go out and hit home runs. But as young Black women, they must also be educated on the hurdles created by the legacy of slavery and institutional racism. I still tell them to treat others with kindness. But that doesn’t mean accepting second-class treatment or staying silent in the face of bigotry.
Simply telling kids of color to “work hard” and “be nice” won’t magically make those disappear. The implication of such phrases — whether in school slogans or by politicians preaching a “pullyourself-up-by-the-bootstraps” credo — is that students of color who fail just didn’t work hard enough. The truth is that their path to success is often blocked by barricades and inequities.
Overcoming a system fortified by racism requires the will to push back, the strength to speak truth to power, the belief that your voice should be heard, not hushed.
Like other young people of color, my daughters can learn from role models who were unafraid of raising their voices and raising hell — people such as Ida B. Wells, the African American journalist and former slave who, in the 1890s, exposed lynchings in the Deep South. Such as Dolores Huerta, the labor activist who led the farmworkers’ rights movement and, at 90, is advocating for voting rights.
Such as Rep. John Lewis.
As the civil rights icon was laid to rest last week with the pomp and dignity deserving of a statesman, I reminded my daughters of the righteous anger that propelled him as a young man to defy unjust laws and face off against white police officers armed with billy clubs and attack dogs.
“We are tired. We are tired of being beat by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again, and then you holler ‘Be patient.’ How long can we be patient?” Lewis told the throngs assembled for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. “We want our freedom and we want it now.”
Those are not the words of a man just content to be nice — though by all accounts, he was consummately nice and kind. Those are the words of a freedom fighter who was arrested 45 times in his lifelong fight for civil rights and who refused to accept things as they were. Even to the end of his life.
“Each of us has a moral obligation to stand up, speak up and speak out,” Lewis wrote in an op-ed published on the day of his funeral. “When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something.”
Stand up. Speak up. Speak out.
As KIPP schools search for a replacement slogan, that’s a damn good place to start.