Cultivating anti-racist professional cultures that support educators of color

Abstract

Maine’s Portland Public Schools has for years been committed to racial equity, but that commitment has been both an asset and a barrier to making the district hospitable to educators of color. The district’s progressive and anti-racist stance led many white educators to assume that their colleagues did not experience interpersonal or institutional racism. However, when Doris Santoro, Julia Hazel, and Alberto Morales interviewed educators throughout the district they found that experiences of racism were pervasive. Knowing that white educators might tend to deny that reality and not wanting to further burden the district’s educators of color with sharing their trauma or observing their colleagues’ ignorance, they undertook a deliberate process to share their findings in ways that considered the needs of all educators in the system.