Organic DEI: Empathy Beyond Ideological Hardness

Including others, embracing diversity, and seeking balance in a free-flowing way

This is an essay I wrote for a book (still in the works) with several other writers and academics who are advocating for a more humanized, less ideological, and—in my own language—less abusive and cruel approaches to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).

One of the main organizers of this writing project is Jennifer Richmond, who is the founder of the Institute for Liberal Values (ILV). The mission of ILV includes the advancement of the non-partisan values of open inquiry and freedom of speech, thought, conscience, and expression.

Part of what inspires me about ILV is that this organization has aligned itself with and shares a partnership with the nonprofit Free Black Thought organization, which is headed by Dr. Erec S. Smith, an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and a Fellow at the Cato Institute. When I say co-founded, I am pointing to the multicultural, authentically diverse members of a coalition of people who have contributed to the founding and curation of Free Black Thought and who wish to see not only the advancement of the recognition of diversity of thought among Black and brown communities, but among members of all races, genders, ethnicities, and other socio-cultural identity markers.

Another project associated with both the Institute of Liberal Values and Free Black Thought is Mutual Persuasion, which was founded by Smith who currently serves as the Executive Director. This project aims to advance the values of fair, evidence-based argument and good faith engagement with those we find ourselves in disagreement with over social, cultural, and political issues as well as those we may temporarily regard as potential adversaries.

Two advisors of note are Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at New York University (NYU) and co-author of the “The Coddling of the American Mind” (which was written in collaboration with Greg Lukianoff, the founder and President of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression); and Daryl Davis, a Black man, a peace advocate, and a jazz musician, who spent 30 years traveling throughout the United States engaging members of the Klu Klux Klan and other racial supremacist groups, and eventually persuading members to renounce their organizations and racialized ideologies.

In 2023, I was invited to be a member of Mutual Persuasion, partly due to my ongoing advocacy for more sensible and just approaches to inclusion (or what many are now calling DEI) that I believe can help create more mission cohesion and interpersonal harmony between and among members of diverse demographic backgrounds.

Finally, I want to briefly mention an international online conference organized by Jennifer Richmond, Laura Beaver-Walken, and others from Helen Pluckrose’s Counterweight organization in October of 2022 that aimed to bring together a variety of voices that championed less polarizing approaches to DEI—The Counterweight Conference for unifying approaches to diversity, equity, and inclusion. I wrote about this conference in the fall of 2022 and hyperlinked to many of the well-known scholars and respected and highly diverse voices from all walks of life who lended their reasonable perspectives to positive and generative approaches to creating an inclusive society, including inclusive workplaces and educational environments.

I was fortunate to be invited to be a participant in this conference and gave a presentation during an interview with Laura Walker-Beaven that explored my approach to DEI as well as my learning process as a young educator in attending the educational rights and needs of a widely diverse student population in the Boston Public Schools district.

In light of the overall mission towards depolarization that many of these organizations and movements are working towards, I reached out to Jennifer Richmond just this morning (March 28, 2024) to ask her permission to allow me to publish this essay on my Substack page while the production of the upcoming book is still in process. As is common in these circumstances, I will eventually take down this post when the book is finalized and ready for publication (just as linguist John McWhorter did when he decided to consolidate his posts from his Substack page Lexicon Valley into the 2022 book “Woke Racism”).

The reason for my request is that I believe I have something valuable to say about ways to approach DEI that can foster positive outcomes for organizations and that can hopefully move the needle a little bit more towards a direction that is less polarizing.

Simply put, we don’t need to shame, hate, scold, or to lob accusations against people who come from groups that are disfavored by our ideology to bolster an atmosphere of inclusiveness and compassion that many DEI programs are advocating. We can adopt an invitational approach that invites all participants in DEI-related programs, workshops, and events to sincerely contemplate what it might feel like to be “the other” and to also contemplate the reality that any demographic group we might call “the other” contains a highly diverse number of personality types, socioeconomic backgrounds, gender identities and sexual orientations, beliefs about life itself, and social and political perspectives.

In other words, we are all human.

Below is the essay (which, if eventually published in the upcoming book about unifying approaches to DEI), I will remove from this Substack page).

Organic DEI: Empathy Beyond Ideological Hardness

There is something to be said about the power of identity in the shaping of outcomes in education. In this essay, I’d like to propose an organic approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), which very much involves the inclusion of students’ identities, but in a way that is less dogmatic, ideological, and abusive than many of the current offerings.   

Let me begin with a story about “Diane.”

“Mr Lawrence, I’m SPED ‘cause I can’t read or write”

“Mr. Lawrence,” spoke the dark-skinned Black girl of 13, immediately upon entering my 7th grade classroom for the first time.

“I’m SPED ’cuz I can’t read or write.” 

SPED is shorthand for Special Education, and I had gotten used to hearing students classify themselves with the shorthand label. As I looked out from behind the chart paper I was marking up in preparation for that day’s mini-lesson on prepositional phrases, I noticed that “Diane” had her hair in braids, almost like Princess Leia from the first Star Wars movie. I also observed that she was chewing gum in a chomping style and was swaying nervously back and forth with a simultaneously strong sense of eagerness, as if to make sure I understood her properly, and that I would do as expected and confirm the diagnosis she had been taught to reinforce for herself. With dark, intentionally distressed faded blue jeans and an ’80s-style bright-colored halter top, her fashion sense and the firmness of her gaze told me, too, that this was a young person to reckon with.

On this late September morning, at an alternative school that had been set up to teach middle schoolers who had been expelled from their other schools, I was confronted with the now-familiar ritual of a random intake of yet another so-called “bad kid” who had already formed an identity for herself.

I stood up from my kneeling position, walked out in front of the chart paper and responded, “Well, let’s spend some time together learning about what your approach to reading is like, so I can help you improve. Can we set aside your belief that you can’t read just for a few weeks so we can find some time to read together?”

During the years I had worked in a large urban public school system, I had become quite familiar with the self-concepts that many students in Special Education classes had formed for themselves, and Diane was no different. In fact, like other students I had known before and since, the word “SPED” didn’t appear to have a negative connotation for Diane at all. Being “SPED” was just a default factory setting for her, straight out of the box, bubble wrap and all.

But, it turns out, she didn’t really have a learning disability. She just missed many classes in her early schooling due to a life of chaos, never had the opportunity to learn phonics, and had to learn how to “survive” by relying on word recognition during read-alouds, hoping that nobody would notice that she would often read words that weren’t there on the page. So, I decided to tutor her away from that face-saving strategy and towards more empowering strategies that would provide her with a strong foundation for her future endeavors in both life and work.

Over the next several months, Diane and I read together twice a week. For the first month, I systematically trained her in decoding (sounding out letters, consonant blends, and vowel sounds), encoding (finger spelling words in the air), recognition of common endings and beginnings (e.g., “tion” for places, things and feelings, “tian” for people), and syllabication (breaking big words into syllables), after first introducing phonemic awareness exercises, building a firm grasp of the mechanics of what makes a vowel (how your jaw moves) and what makes a consonant (lips, teeth, and tongue). Two of the primary influences that informed my reading recovery strategies was Dr. Alfred W. Tatum’s book Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males and the wide variety of phonics programs that I had picked up during my years as a substitute teacher and paraprofessional.

A year later, I had Diane again in 8th grade English/Language Arts. She was at grade level by then, and, as I suspected, she was smart as hell, and a gifted thinker now that she knew what it was like to get to the bottom of a paragraph, the bottom of a page, and the end of a chapter fast enough to sustain interest and build comprehension around the meaning of the text. And over a two-year period, Diane, her mother, “Jane,” and I grew close, almost like family. That kind of thing happens in small alternative schools where relationship-building and intense academic interventions play such a crucial role during the crucial years of adolescence.

This is a good moment to pause. 

I wanted to share this anecdote about Diane not to present myself as the “white knight savior” character in one of those treacly, sentimental teacher movies where the heroes come to “the ghetto” and change the lives of students of color who, in turn, teach the hero teachers how to breakdance after the hero teachers have graciously—and infantilizingly—bestowed upon those students the angelic generosity of their time and expertise in the service of “social justice!”

Okay, maybe a little of that went down (I was actually in a breakdancing crew called the Electro Shockers when I was 13 and lived in the ‘hood’, and I still have some moves!, so, yeah, I danced with students during some English Language Arts classes). I also have to confess that a couple of my students did teach me the Motorcycle Dance that was popularized in the mid 2000s by the hip hop singer Yung Joc in the music video for his song, “It’s Going Down.”

So, sure, I was in a cheesy teacher movie at some points.

But, as the youngins’ say nowadays… whatevs.

Humor aside, I want to be frank about the simple fact that Diane was fortunate that by the time she first entered my classroom, I had already begun to understand, through much trial and error, the following three pieces of teaching wisdom:

1. Assume that students from different backgrounds are just as capable, talented, and intelligent as those from my own backgrounds (diversity).

2. Invest additional time and resources into individuals and communities who have not yet been adequately invested in (equity).

3. Represent a wide variety of student identities, as much as possible, in all classroom units of study, to provide an environment that expands rather than contracts students’ sense of self and agency (inclusion).

In short, through the organic route of trial, error, struggle, small frustrations, and empathy over my first decade of teaching in a large urban public school district (Boston Public Schools), I had painstakingly come to appreciate the general principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) without the now-popular guidelines that have come to define how workplaces are supposed to approach DEI.

That said, I still had much more to learn, well after the reading recovery intervention with Diane I just described. I spent four years studying at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where I learned about multicultural theories and critical theories, and was quite inspired by what I learned. Theories and the practices that come from them can be not only inspiring but helpful. The theories and practices behind diversity, equity, and inclusion (or DEI, as most prefer to refer to it in abbreviated form) and its other versions (such as JEDI, which includes the word justice in the acronym, and the newer and simpler DB, which stands for Diversity and Belonging) have steadily broken into the mainstream beyond the teaching profession since the early 2000s and especially between the years 2013 and 2023. Generally speaking, these phrases describe a variety of approaches to building inclusive workplaces, classrooms, communities, and even whole societies, with the overall aim of creating a sense of belonging and welcome for people of diverse races, ethnicities, gender identities, abilities, body types, cultures, and other identities.

I believe that the best approaches are ones that are pursued in a less totalizing way—in ways that acknowledge some of the insights of the currently popular social justice theoretical frameworks but that act upon those insights with a light touch so that we can make room for further insights and further learning.

From my experiences as a substitute teacher and paraprofessional in grades K–12, my years teaching English/Language Arts in middle and high schools, and in my current position as a Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology, I have traveled a long journey in which I have had to learn how to attend to the unique needs of the diverse populations of young people I was hired to serve.

And that journey continues still.

My Journey Towards Organic DEI

I want to share my understanding around where I believe English-speaking countries have arrived at in regards to the influence and variety of DEI frameworks, and where I think we need to be heading if we wish to build a more just and inclusive world. To put it simply, I think we need to make a careful distinction between organic DEI—being open to the experiences of others and the wide variety of perceptual and conceptual diversity that exists in all people, and building just systems, norms, and policies that take that diversity into account— and ideological DEI, which is almost always founded upon a very specific ideological framework called Critical Social Justice (CSJ).

CSJ encompasses multiple overlapping concepts known variably as intersectionality, critical race and gender theory, and the more pejorative term wokeness which is favored by critics who lean conservative in their worldview and even progressives who feel they have been burned by the most fanatical proponents of this worldview. I won’t be using the terms “woke” or “wokeness.” Instead, when I speak of ideological DEI, I will use the phrase Critical Social Justice or its acronym, CSJ. When I am speaking of the general principles of diversity, inclusion, equity, belonging, justice, or any combination of these, in a way that is non-ideological and affirming of the intrinsic dignity and humanity of all people, I will simply use the various forms of the word inclusion (inclusive, inclusivity, inclusiveness, etc.).

A large number of educators now teach in Minority Serving Institutions (MSI), which means that educators need to come to terms with the realities faced by students who come from populations that are currently in the minority. We have to be honest about the fact that there has been a long history of systemic and structural racial bias against specific communities of color in English-speaking countries—especially against Black people in the United States—and that this has had an impact on educational outcomes and economic opportunities for many communities. 

The terms structural racism, racial injustice, and systemic racial bias are often used interchangeably and refer to the enactment of policies, laws, customs, norms, and programs that have historically pushed Blacks and other people of color to the margins. The practice of redlining, for example, denied home loans to traditionally African American neighborhoods, which made it difficult for this demographic to build the intergenerational wealth that home ownership often provides. Another example of structural racism is the withholding of benefits from many returning African American veterans who fought overseas to defeat fascism during World War II. Unlike their white veteran counterparts who returned to the U.S. in 1945, many African American veterans were not able to secure a home loan for their families, even though this was promised in the GI Bill that was designed to reward war veterans for their service. These and many more historical injustices continue to reverberate today and affect the real life prospects and outcomes of many African Americans.

While it has been pointed out that many redlined white neighborhoods are predominately white, the disproportionate percentage of poor Black people whose redlined neighborhoods created a longstanding lack of access to opportunity to accumulate intergenerational wealth (which is greatly influenced by the lack of property ownership) sets some African American communities far behind other communities. It, therefore, makes sense that this history and its accumulated impact needs to be accounted for in the establishment of policies that seek to address the disparity gaps in outcomes. And when we consider the atrocities that were enacted against people of color to advance knowledge in entire fields of discipline—for example, the atrocities committed by J. Marion Sims, the celebrated father of gynecology, who conducted painful experiments on enslaved Black women without anesthesia—it makes sense that many racial justice advocates are asking for some forms of compensation and rebalancing actions, including the removal of statues and the changing of the names of institutions that continue to honor people who have committed these types of acts.

When I say that it make sense, I am not necessarily agreeing with these prescriptions; rather, I am acknowledging the sincerity and moral logic that these prescriptions are coming from.

Critical Social Justice Theories Cannot Be the Foundation of Organic DEI

It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss reparations for past wrongs and the questions around the need for collective atonement in addressing past wrongs. I mention these things here to establish a context for why I believe we need to continue advocating and defending the non-ideological and empirically-based approaches to redressing injustices and inequalities just as adamantly as we need to oppose ideological approaches to DEI that are based on speculative theories about what goes on in the inner lives of people from different demographic groups.

Put simply, I’m firmly against stereotyping, including stereotyping that is backed up by academic theories (a position I have asserted in many posts on this Substack page).

Fortunately, the dam does appear to be breaking.

In the year 2023 alone, a growing number of institutions, state legislatures, and local governments throughout the United States and other English-speaking countries are dropping DEI frameworks altogether, adopting instead a more merit-based approach that focuses on building equality of opportunity for all people, rather than equality of outcomes that are often enforced by policies of positive discrimination in which groups that are deemed marginalized are provided opportunities ahead of demographic groups that are deemed privileged by followers of identity-based Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories.

But, I think we need to be careful not to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

We can and should critique and even remove DEI programs that rest exclusively on the principles and practices of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories of race, gender, class and other sociocultural identities, as they often lead to inter-group resentments and potential legal entanglements due to the unfairness of such principles and practices. But, while we may need to roll back some of these practices, we should continue to strive for inclusiveness to the best of our ability in our public and private policies, practices, laws, institutions, and societal norms.

As a longtime educator in both the private and public sectors—and as a person who has served in what the Department of Interior’s Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Civil Rights has designated as Minority Serving Institutions (MSI)—I can confidently attest to the need for our educational institutions to attend to the specific needs and rights of students from all backgrounds, including students of color, LGBTQ students, women, men, and all others. 

We can do this by adopting more organic approaches to DEI. To do this effectively, we need to work consciously at avoiding the dogmatic ideological approaches that justify punitive and retributive interpersonal abuse against disfavored demographic groups, the double standards for hiring and job performance that has been adopted by an increasingly large number of institutions and companies, and the commitment insisted upon by some of the most vocal advocates of CSJ to applying interpretive absolutism in the analysis of all interactions between people categorized as belonging to marginalized and privileged identity groups. 

By rigidly clinging to the pre-formed belief that bigotry and bias are the only explanatory factors in the outcomes of these interactions or in the life prospects of different communities, we close ourselves off from more accurate, or at least more complete, interpretations of scenarios and the possibility of finding optimal solutions to the problems we want to solve.

And, as many on all sides of the social and political spectrum will agree, the classroom from Kindergarten to college is the place where all of these questions and issues have the most potential for having a large impact on the direction of our society. There is no question that in the 2020s, the classroom on all levels of the educational arc has become the one of the main battlefields for the fights around cultural, social, economic, political, and even spiritual issues. 

Because of this, we need to find a more unifying path that can protect the rights and dignity of all people. And that path must be organic.

Organic DEI in the Classroom 

One framework that underlies most forms of ideological DEI in workplaces and classrooms is Critical Theory. Critical Theory is essentially about looking for the way power is held onto by people in power through discourses (ways of speaking), policies, laws, and norms. This analysis is sometimes called “structural analysis” and can be applied in the analysis of state power, municipal power, and other places in which power is wielded. 

In the classroom, this approach to analysis involves looking into the texts that are read by students, the teaching methods that are used in the analysis of these readings, and the “hidden curriculum” that lies underneath the curriculum that is taught—that is, the teachers’ and institution’s bias in the selection of the content and how the content is presented. Formally, this approach to analysis and curriculum design is called Critical Pedagogy, which can be said to be the educational “arm” of Critical Theory. Critical Pedagogy was designed and popularized by Paolo Freire, a Brazilian activist who fought for the educational rights of the poor and has enjoyed a widespread growth of acceptance in educational training programs and educational institutions since the 1990s.

When applied lightly in a non-dogmatic way—that is, in an organic way— structural analysis can be helpful in examining classroom materials or an organization’s culture and policies, to see where there might be unfair advantages between different demographic groups. From my own experience teaching in classrooms with highly diverse student populations, I believe there is a “middle path” to organic DEI. Through much trial and error, I’ve come to see this middle path in much the same way as the “compassionate anti-racism” approach advocated by Chloé Valdary, an approach that doesn’t treat people as “political abstractions”—but as unique individuals capable of love and intelligence and deserving of being treated with human dignity. This is similar to an approach to teaching called Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which I collaborated with colleagues to bring into the Benjamin Franklin Cummings Institute of Technology as its formally adopted teaching philosophy. UDL is based on the 1972 American Disabilities Act, which stipulated that public facilities and institutions needed to provide access to those with physical and mental disabilities. It’s helpful to think of UDL as a “wheelchair ramp” for students with different learning styles, learning disabilities, language acquisition challenges, ethnic and cultural differences, and various gender identities. The basic idea is to find ways to reach all students in the best way we can.

This involves the selection of texts that represent the widest variety of students possible. It is for this reason, for example, that I ask my students to read an essay by Roxane Gay called “What Fullness Is” for the College Composition I course I teach. This essay describes the challenge of being not only a woman, but a Black woman, and a fat woman. Of all of Roxane Gay’s identities, it is the identity of a fat woman (her words) and the experience of weight loss surgery and the struggle of self-acceptance that she reveals in this moving piece. Though she speaks about the intersections of these identities, she does so in a way that is non-dogmatic and deeply relatable even to those who have identities that are considered more advantaged than others.

The selection of readings like this one speaks to students’ identities (not everyone is lean or white or male, for example) and offers a window into their own worlds, which research has shown can boost student motivations. To balance out the curriculum of the unit on identity, I also share pieces about poor whites who struggle with drug abuse, as well as the experiences of well-to-do people struggling with issues we might never have considered to exist in the lives of those on the top of the economic pyramid.

Selecting readings that strive to be representative of the experiences of the broadest swath of people is an example of the conscientious practice of UDL as well as what I’m calling organic DEI. 

But, I haven’t always been so thoughtful, and I'd like to share a little about that.

That time I “erased” my students’ home language

Back in the mid 2000s, when I was a much younger teacher working at a middle school for kids who were expelled from other schools, I asked my 6th grade and 7th grade students to create three large poster chart sheets that collected all the slang words that most of the students used. In very dark black letters, the students wrote the word “slang” on each poster chart sheet, and they drew a large red circle around each with a diagonal slash, indicating that in this classroom, students will not be using these words. We practice Standard American English here!

In other words, my clever activity announced to all of my students and colleagues that this English/Language Arts classroom was a slang-free zone. It is notable that 100 percent of my students in both classes were students of color. It is also notable that of those 100 percent students of color, the supermajority of them were African American. For the entire school year, these posters were prominently on display on top of the wall right above the chalkboard. I made this choice because I believed that the students would benefit from leaving behind their own organic and intimate ways of communicating with one another (discourse). I often explained to them that if they want to succeed in this world, they would have to master the “language of power.” That's the phrase I used.

Although I had not yet been trained in formal social justice theories, I already knew organically that if they wanted access to opportunities in the United States, they would have to speak that language. I even had a standard elevator pitch that I used every year in every class and that I continue to use to this very day:

“If you want to be an attorney or judge in the courtroom or hold your own as a plaintiff or defendant in the courtroom; if you want to be on the Congress floor, if you want to be the CEO of a company or on the Board of Directors of a company, you have to learn the language of power. You have to master what's called Standard American English, or what some call Academic English.”

Concept Creep and the Overuse of the word “harm”

People who are strict adherents of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) theories are likely to assign the word “racist” to the intentions I may have held those many years ago in compelling the students in my middle school classes to collude in the “erasure” of their own identities and subcultures. Some are also likely to be unforgiving not only to my intentions, but are likely to also pre-decide in accordance with their ideologically-conditioned beliefs that these students were traumatized, “erased,” or dehumanized due to this exercise. This type of condemnation is often due to the over-application of the word “harm” to events and scenarios that may not in fact be harmful. This phenomenon is what Dr. Nick Haslam investigated when he coined the term “Concept Creep” in his groundbreaking paper in 2016. Difficult or uncomfortable experiences and differences in perspective are not conclusively “harmful,” although I understand that this idea is the predominant one in the current era.

But, they would be wrong in condemning me. 

We have to allow room for people to evolve, grow, develop, and transcend previously held beliefs about themselves, others, and reality. After all, what is education (learning) for, if not to help people to transcend world views that were narrower before? Must we destroy people for not understanding what has not yet been understood? Why build an industry around education, which is about growth, if we are meant to condemn those who have not yet grown out of views that are not in alignment with the ideals of perfect inclusivity.  

It’s also important for me to acknowledge that this exercise was a  mistake that I and many other educators made at that time—one that I strive to no longer make. That mistake is the discounting of the legitimacy of my students’ own home culture and ways of speaking and communicating (discourses). I now understand that this can have the effect of rendering students of color as mere satellites orbiting around the “default” planet of legitimacy and formal acceptance that the language, norms, and customs of European-Americans have enjoyed as the primary culture-setters of the Western Hemisphere over the past two thousand years. This is a primary insight from post-colonial theory that I find useful.

To offset the delegitimizing of my students’ own communities, norms, and ways of communicating (discourses), I now add another part to the elevator pitch (paraphrased) I share with students in all the courses I teach:

“Language is fluid and is constantly changing. So much so that many are now using the term Language of Wider Communication (LWC), which includes English and its many influences from multiple other languages. The way you speak in your homes and in your communities is every bit as legitimate and beautiful as Standard American English. In fact, your own discourses (ways of speaking) impact the growth and development of LWC. In this class, we will learn to code-switch. No language is more appropriate or more legitimate than any other. We just need to know when to use which discourse (code) and in which circumstances.”

Over the past few years, I’ve come to appreciate the need to consistently work towards a balance that can best serve students from all backgrounds—holding high standards that everyone should strive to, adjusting the approach to teaching those standards so that everyone can be reached in their own unique ways, and empowering students to respect themselves enough to find their own ways through this dynamic.

In closing, I want to share something about my student Diane who thought she couldn’t read.

Several years after I moved onto another school, Diane called me up one morning and informed me that she was now an Advanced Placement student. She was so excited and proud of herself, and I was equally excited and proud of her. 

But not for a minute was I surprised.

Not for a minute.

There is something to be said about the power of identity in the shaping of outcomes in education. And there is much more to be said about the vital task that all educators are charged with—empowering our students with real-life nuts-and-bolts strategies that can give them access to opportunity, self-respect, dignity, and strength.

If we can learn to relate to our students’ multi-dimensional identities in an organic, less ideological, and more practical way, we have the opportunity to help clear a path for a genuinely fair society that responds to the rights and responsibilities of those who belong to majority groups and minoritized groups, now and in future years.

I honestly think that is a goal that educators share and are already dedicated to.

Let’s keep going.