By Michael Brosnan
— for Wendell Berry
In this column, I’ve toggled between creative writing and reflecting on the field of education. That’s because both have been central to my writing life — my sense of what matters in this world.
Today, I’m jumping back to education. Over the years, I’ve written numerous pieces on education, including a book on a remarkable urban school that has succeeded where others have fallen short in our efforts to educate children well across the economic spectrum. The book, Against the Current, highlights clear ways a school — in this case, an independent public school — can reverse the drop-out trends and help low-income students find success in school and in life. The book also served as a model for an award-winning documentary film, Accelerating America, on the same subject.
That mid-1990s project opened my eyes more fully to questions of economic and racial injustices in the nation — how they are linked and how they play out in our schools and culture at large. Indeed, I came to understand how so many of our systems — some by intent, some by happenstance — have served to sustain these inequities.
My essential understanding — then and now — is that, collectively, we’ve set up our schools to favor the rich and stifle economic and social gains for people of color and the poor in general. The statistical evidence has held steady for decades. Dozens of well-researched books — including the groundbreaking works of Jonathan Kozol and the more recent works from Lisa Delpit, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Heather McGhee, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Diane Ravitch, and others — present the essential problem of embedded racism and classism in ways that are clear and irrefutable. The reason I write about these matters is that (1) I believe many of us don’t see the problem accurately and that, if we could, (2) we’d work to correct it together. I do not believe the racism and classism we embody are the will of the American people. I also know we can do so much better. By paying better attention to race and class in schools and society, we can make America a more thriving, productive, safe, and happy, world-leading democracy — one that might actually live up to the ideals our founders aspired to. We can improve life for all citizens and contribute to a healthy global community.
In short, I see quality education as central to our nation and human civilization. And central to improving the quality of education is a clear awareness of the ongoing damaging impact of racial and economic injustices.
In the 1990s through the early 2000s, I was highly optimistic about the future of education. I witnessed remarkable improvement in how we educate children across the entire K-16 spectrum. We learned a great deal about ways to support and promote intellectual engagement. We learned why and how to prioritize social-emotional learning, the mind-body connection. We came to understand the subtle and important differences in what works for boys and what works for girls in schools, separate and together. We learned what the best early childhood learning programs do and how to rethink those complicated middle-school years in order to better shepherd preteens and early teens through that tough human transition. While brain science helped us understand the role of student resiliency and grit, we also learned to create supportive communities and encourage empathy and collaboration. The magazine I edited for over 20 years looked at the whole gamut — from school leadership to hiring and retaining quality teachers, to developing best-in-field teaching methods, to effective use of homework, to creating better daily scheduling, to outdoor and environmental learning, to the wise integration of technology, to healthy sports and wellness programs. Even questions about better lunches and school architecture earned space.
A major thread through those years was about the growing understanding and importance of considering the background and needs of all students — how we meet students where they are and get them to where they need to be. And central to it all was a deep understanding of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming in schools. Programs that examine education through a lens of race and economics are essential in helping schools reach the sort of outcomes they want for every student.
The future seemed bright.
So I admit that when the conservative-led DEI backlash began, I assumed it would be short-lived. I assumed that logic, reason, fact, morality, and truth would quickly kick in — and that whatever shortcomings or growing pains DEI programs might have, the overall value would settle in.
Since that has not happened — not yet — I wanted to respond with an encouragement.
When we read in the press about DEI issues in education these days — as it exists in both the precollegiate world and higher education — the articles tend to get caught in finger pointing and accusations. Conservative groups and individuals on the right think people on the left are damaging America and American culture by, I don’t know, showing too much concern about systemic and cultural injustices and too much empathy for those who have less than they have. The conservative claim is that DEI programs are essentially racist and that out-of-control “wokeness” injures white people simply by asking white people to consider the longstanding injustices embedded in our systems. The Supreme Court offered troubling support for these views by rejecting affirmative action programs in colleges and universities designed for fair admissions and academic excellence. The court decision was followed by nearly 20 states passing laws banning DEI initiatives. The Trump administration, always anxious to bully some segment of a population it’s supposed to serve and protect, decided it should attack institutions of high education that embrace fair admissions policies — particularly Harvard University — by both suing them and withdrawing research funding vital to various fields of study and to the nation.
Last week, Trump administration continued its attack and mischaracterization of schools that care about racial and economic justice — threatening to remove the tax-exempt status from private, nonprofit schools and colleges that offer targeted scholarships and support to Black or other minority students.
In these anti-democratic actions, the Trump administration and its backers seem to think they are somehow improving the nation and the world. But they are not.
What few mainstream news articles remember to include is why the push for DEI arrived in the 1990s in the first place. Or why there are essential reasons these programs still matter. The noise is too much about some imagined battle for a winner-takes-all political dominance.
The Trump administration would like nothing more than to rewrite American history in a way that literally whitewashes the brutality in the nation’s founding. I get the instinct: We all want to belong to a good story, an exemplary history. It’s nice to think of oneself as a good guy. But the truth of our founding, of course, involves the violent displacement of Native Americans and a long, brutal, immoral reliance on slavery. Our history continues to play out this story of racial and socioeconomic dominance. Efforts at righting these clear wrongs have been made over the years — through formal civil rights legislation and broader cultural and religious efforts — but the reality is that we haven’t come close to living up to our founding documents or our purported ideals. In our current times, racial and socioeconomic inequities remain unconscionably large and have held steady for decades. Efforts to open honest conversation in the name of an honest democracy have been thwarted by many predominantly white, powerful, conservative Americans and their “think tanks,” all of whom somehow believe a fair, just democracy is not a national goal.
So we remain stuck in a place where, at almost every turn, it’s far more difficult in America to Black or Latino than to be white. One could fill pages with the statistics behind the myriad inequities and injustices. I don’t think it’s necessary here; the statistics are widely available. However, I did want to mention two that underlie most of the others: the racial wealth gap and the general wealth divide.
According to the 2024 U.S. Census, the typical wealth of a white households is 10 times greater than that of a Black householder. The numbers have fluctuated slightly over time, but the gap has always been large, and the national efforts to avoid discussions about systemic racism continue to keep the gap high. So, today, on average, for every $10 a Black family has, a white family has $100.
Money isn’t everything, of course. But in America, it affects most everything we do and what we have access to. What I wish we’d also keep front and center are the injustices that parallel this systemically shaped and controlled lack of wealth for Blacks and Latinos. Compared with whites, they face the far greater discrimination when it comes to access to jobs, education, housing, health care, quality food, healthy environments, and more. Blacks and Latinos face unemployment rates double those for whites. They face far greater abuse in our criminal justice system. They are incarcerated at a far higher rate than whites and are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than white people and are more likely to end up on death row.
They also attend poorer, lower-resourced schools, and thus have less access to higher education and all that higher ed offers.
None of this has happened by chance. In his book Poverty, by America, Matthew Desmond makes clear the essential issue facing us: “Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to.”
Desmond encourages us to be “poverty abolitionists” — people committed to ending financial, political, and social obstacles to economic health for all Americans. He encourages raising the minimum wage to a living wage, regulating bank fees, expanding housing access, and offering universal health care. He’d like us to end welfare programs for the wealthy based on tax breaks. But he’s also aware that we need to be a more racially integrated nation in this process, which includes access to quality education for all children.
“When families across the class spectrum send their children to the same schools, picnic in the same parks, and walk the same streets, those families are equally invested in those schools, those parks, those streets,” Desmond writes.
As we move into the midterm elections, I hope we can keep this thought front and center. The future of America depends on how we can break from the collective mindset that inequities are personal issues not public ones. The steps forward have been complicated by the Supreme Court and new state laws, but it’s still possible for us to create policies and programs for schools and society that will help break the grip of racial and economic injustice.
What Wendell Berry Says
Another voice that has helped me process these questions of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in America is that of Wendell Berry — poet, novelist, essayist, farmer, and extraordinary human being. Berry died recently at age 92.
In The Hidden Wound — Berry’s book-length reflection on race in America, first published in 1970 — Berry’s aim is to encourage the kind of moral outcomes we all seek and yet seem to struggle to achieve. He was one of the first white writers to deeply examine the effects of modern-day racism on white people. At the time of The Hidden Wound’s publication, many whites thought of racism and racial inequities as a problem affecting people of color only. Whites working for racial justice saw their efforts as a matter of our predominantly white nation offering more opportunities for people of color. The history of racism was clear, but there was little effort given to examining the historical and ongoing negative effects of our racially divisions on white people themselves.
So Berry makes the central point crystal clear at the start of his book:
“If I had thought it was only the black people who have suffered from the years of slavery and racism, then I could have dealt fully with the matter long ago; I could have filled myself with pity for them, and would no doubt have enjoyed it a great deal and thought highly of myself. But I am sure it is not so simple as that. If white people have suffered less obviously from racism than black people, they have nevertheless suffered greatly; the cost is perhaps greater than we yet know.”
The years to follow would prove Berry correct. Racism has hurt us all socially and economically — and continues to do so today. The effects vary by race, gender, and individual experience, but the damage is felt all around. Centuries of slavery, the era of Jim Crow, and ongoing racism and racial inequity may have made life relatively easier for white people than for people of color, but they have nevertheless hurt everyone in this culture. The injury runs deep — deeper than we are often able to admit.
Contemporary research has proven this point over and over — and, indeed, Berry’s essay has been foundational in subsequent studies of whiteness and white identity in American society and underscores the argument that all of us have an obligation and interest to engage in antiracist work.
But rereading The Hidden Wound recently, I had a sense that few of us, myself included, have dug deep enough into Berry’s argument to understand exactly how wide and deep the wound is. It’s not just the immorality embodied in a system that favors some over others. It’s not just that it’s wrong to participate in the suffering of others. It’s not just that the inequities by race keep us from fulfilling our collective democratic principles. It’s not just that racist laws, practices, and perspectives divide us and have kept us from learning from each other. It’s not just that the white power structures have denied opportunities to Black people and other people of color that might otherwise have led to greater discoveries and contributions to society. For Berry, it is all these things. But it’s also that racism has led us to create a badly misshapen society that, at best, holds us back, and, at worst, drives us toward ruin. It has enabled a hyper-focus on economics to dominate our democratic society in unhealthy ways. It has supported and encouraged the maintenance of a power elite that has created and sustained an underclass and has used the poor for its personal gain in ways that have made ours the most economically inequitable nation in human history. It has corrupted the key spiritual concepts of Christianity and moral living. It has undermined our ability to build and maintain thriving community life. It keeps too many of us anxious and uncertain about our place in society — and deeply worried about the future. And it has been a key factor in our separation from the natural environment — enabling us against our better judgment to wreak unprecedented havoc on the natural world in the name of small, short-term economic gains, and to resist taking action that would prevent further damage for future generations.
If you are staring at any of the above points with questions or doubts, I encourage you to read The Hidden Wound. Berry’s points are well presented and defended. That many white people can’t or don’t yet see these wide-ranging effects clearly, Berry argues, is due to the fact that, in order to maintain unjust structures, we are encouraged not to examine them. “However conscious it may have been,” he writes, “there is no doubt in my mind that all this moral and verbal obfuscation is intentional.”
Change is inevitable, of course, but the kind of change we need only comes about with greater clarity of vision and purpose. In much of Berry’s writing — in The Hidden Wound and in many of the other 50-plus books — the central argument is a moral one based on principles that underpin our democratic founding but that have never managed to take center stage. The book encourages nothing less than the reimagining of our democracy — with greater attention paid to the intersection of economics, environmental ethics, and human communities.
I see elements of Berry’s argument in the efforts of educators who are working for more economically and racially equitable educational systems and programs on behalf of all students. But I think it’s worth looking more deeply at what exactly we’re hoping to achieve in the process. The push for excellence and justice in schools is connected to our essential democratic goals.
By supporting thoughtful DEI programming in schools and elsewhere, our nation will be stronger, more unified, more productive. And I believe our sense of ourselves and our happiness will be greatly improved. We will live with less fear and anxiety and look forward to a better future.
It’s About All of Us
Sociobiologist and Pulitzer Prize–winning writer E.O. Wilson wrote, “We have created a Star Wars civilization with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.”
It’s those Stone Age hearts I think about most. The way we too often lean toward tribalism, fear change, demonize others. Wilson more or less invented the field of sociobiology — focusing on the rare species that function in social groups, everything from ants to humans. We’re exceedingly rare in this way. Of all the known species in the world, only around 2 percent fit the definition of social animals. For as long as we’re on this planet, we will continue the communal life. The only intelligent way forward is to figure out how to do it well for a growing population.
I have worked in the field of education long enough to understand that our schools are essential to the future of both humanity and the planet. And I believe that the efforts to make these institutions better year by year is essential to that future. Ensuring a focus that enables our schools to be diverse, equitable, inclusive and just matters a great deal.
So let’s work on softening those Stone Age hearts a little — and get back to work on the question of real human excellence.