Coastal Pines School
A Case Study
How We Show Up (And the case for something different)
White people, in my experience, show up to conversations about antiracism with a lot of feelings. Some of us feel urgency. We want the activity, conversation, talk, or whatever it is, to be productive. We want to get something out of it, a concrete takeaway to show what we accomplished. We tell ourselves, If I know enough, I will be ok. If I know the right things, the right words, I will be seen as one of the “good ones.” Some of us show up feeling misunderstood because we already know this stuff. I’m here but I could lead this workshop if you let me. Others don’t want to show up at all and enter the room bristling with anger. This is a bad idea, their whole bodies seem to say. It’s not surprising that we show up in these ways and while they are different, they stem from the same source; sinking into the ways that whiteness operates in ourselves and our communities feels deeply uncomfortable.
Kelsey Blackwell and many other scholars of color tell us that the feelings that come with racial identity exploration are the work. Blackwell’s essay, “Race and the Body: Why Somatic Practices are Essential for Racial Justice,” argues that this feeling work cannot be transactional. It cannot be timebound. This case study shares the story of one school trying to stay in the “feeling work” as an ongoing, collective process. This school has the same fast-paced schedule and stresses that all schools face. And yet, they have chosen to resist a “one-and-done approach.” They have chosen to stay in conversation with their white faculty and staff with no end date on the calendar.
Jumping In (Taking in the landscape and establishing shared language)
The first time I visited Coastal Pines School was in December 2022. Before my visit, I met with Britt and Abby, two of the school’s leaders engaged in equity goals. They shared the history of recent professional development for white-identifying faculty and staff, which had been limited in recent years because of the pandemic. They shared their hopes and dreams for my visit and perhaps most importantly, they asked thoughtful questions about what we might do after. They also made me aware of their thoughtful plan for all faculty and staff of color, many of whom would be attending a national conference on the day of my first visit.
Arriving at Coastal Pines School on that chilly December morning in 2022 was exciting and of course, I was nervous. For the reasons I described, gathering fifty white-identifying people to engage in conversations about whiteness is complex. I began by sharing my own story; how I had come to this place in my life standing in this room, in this company. I talked about the many years I was not thinking at all about what it meant to be a white person, much less a white educator. I shared how long I taught students of color while pretending that race was not in my classroom; how I functioned as if race was not shaping the curriculum, my interpersonal dynamics with students and colleagues, or my teaching methods and habits. I talked about how awakening to what it means to be white has been and always will feel like peeling an onion. The layers just keep coming.
I start with my story because I know that as a facilitator, positioning myself as an expert gets us nowhere. Not only is it disingenuous, we are all learning always, but it immediately creates a hierarchy and sets the tone for a competitive and goal-driven conversation. I’m not interested in those kinds of conversations anymore. What I mostly felt in the room that day was tentative and in some cases, excited, curiosity. We spent three intimate hours together digging into questions about what it meant to be white in 2022, what it meant to be white at Coastal Pines School, and what it felt like to sit together with these questions, all questions best pursued without asking people of color to be in the room bearing witness.
Going Deeper Through Dialogue (A cohort takes a deep dive into what we’d started)
In the early spring of 2023, fourteen white-identifying staff members from Coastal Pines School joined me each Tuesday on a Zoom call to continue and deepen what we’d begun in the winter. Over six weeks, I rooted the dialogue group in what Vanessa de Machado from the University of British Columbia calls “depth conversations.” Depth conversations are solution-resistant. They are about sinking into the complexities of what we don’t understand and letting go of our egotistical desires to know or drive where we’re going. I chose this as a grounding force because white people tend to approach antiracism as a verb, as something that requires “doing.” It’s understandable that we feel urgency in our desire to do something in the name of antiracism. And yet, our urgent pursuit of solutions is often counterproductive.
Urgency keeps the focus “out there,” away from us. Urgency and “doing” can act as shields from the deeper, feeling work that Blackwell implores us to engage in. At times it was hard for the group to resist urgency and to stay in depth conversations. Some participants felt frustrated by our lack of discreet goals. It was hard for me, too. I’m just as primed as any other white person to seek solutions. As a facilitator, the urge to give a sense of accomplishment to participants is a constant temptation. Yet our dedication to depth conversations allowed us to explore how our desire to “do” and to “fix” are often defense mechanisms we use to protect us from the feeling work. The hope for me was that after six weeks, we’d have built our capacity to sit in the mess just a bit longer, that we’d be able to regulate our bodies and listen to our internal wisdom and the wisdom of others just a little bit better. I reminded myself and the group often that this is lifelong work, not six-week work.
Expanding the Dialogue (Community members create more opportunities to sink in)
In the fall of 2023, four of the participants from the dialogue group began leading monthly antiracist affinity spaces for other white educators at the school. Excitingly, and at a time when participation in white antiracist groups was dropping precipitously elsewhere, many of the white faculty and staff signed up for these colleague-facilitated cohort spaces. I met with the four faculty facilitators twice during the fall to share resources and to support their leadership of the groups. This time also allowed them to connect and share ideas, successes, and challenges. We then worked together to plan my return to school in December. Each of the four cohort facilitators, plus a few more volunteers from the Spring Dialogue Group, planned one-hour workshops with a variety of topics to take place after my work with the larger group. This collaboration was exciting because one of our partnership's central goals was to build leadership capacity within the white faculty and staff.
A Year Later (All together again and we are not the same)
When I returned to Coastal Pines School in December 2023, I was greeted with welcoming smiles. In the morning, as we engaged in vulnerable storytelling and discussion, the mood in the room was one of openness. I sensed something else, too. Urgency was no longer a dominating force. Instead, people listened, people breathed, and people allowed themselves to feel. There were tears, but they were not tears of defensiveness. There was confusion, but this confusion did not lead to blame or frustration. There was resistance but this resistance dissipated when it was met with curiosity and compassion. During the small group story sharing, I heard someone attempt to justify something that many students of color find harmful. I was about to wander over when another group member said, “You might never understand fully why it’s harmful and I might not either, but we have seen the impact on the faces of our students of color and so I think we have to try hard to never do that again.” After this teacher spoke, the group grew quiet and nodded their heads. The ego, the defensiveness, and the desire to give what Ali Michael calls PLEs (Perfectly Logical Explanations) had dissipated in the face of collective vulnerability and truth-telling.
My journey with these educators reaffirmed for me that when we come together through multiple touchpoints, not for easy solutions or some kind of objective coherence, but to explore the complexities of what it means to be white educators, we change. When I returned this past December, it felt different because the community that gathered that morning was different. There was a collective understanding that the feeling work, the sinking into the discomfort, is required for any real change to take place. Of course, we are still at the outer edge of the onion and it will take continued fortitude and patience to continue peeling—we know too well that white people always have the option to exit the side door. But it is my hope and belief that we have solid roots in the ground. I’m excited to see how Coastal Pines School tends to these roots and I will continue to support them with humility, curiosity, and compassion.
