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.