Love as a Necessary Corrective: Toward Antiracist Schools for Our Children

Abstract

In this essay, the authors draw on their experiences as teachers, scholars, and parents who identify as Chinese American and Chicana to articulate their vision of antiracist schools. The essay names love as a necessary corrective to systemic violence and othering in schools—specifically, love for children who routinely traverse racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic borders in their full humanity, elevating their ways of being, knowing, living, sensing, and thinking. This concept is explored in terms of three kinds of relationships, all of which require an ethic of love: teachers loving children, children loving one another, and loving relationships between adults.

Notes

1 The partnership is ongoing and has centrally involved our colleagues Carl Grant, Leema Berland, and Kathleen Nichols; graduate students Laura Roeker, Ana Mireya Díaz de la Guardia, and Jalessa Bryant; and dozens of teachers, staff, and parents at two local elementary schools, all of whom have contributed to our thinking about antiracist schools.

2 We put these terms in quotation marks to highlight that they are not neutral or objective but rather, are sociopolitical constructions that reify and reproduce racialized deficit discourses (Louie, Adiredja, & Jessup, 2021).