TNP and Anti-Racism: A Path Forward

“In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist.” 

~ Angela Davis

The movement to fight racial injustice is not new to our country; however, the events of the Summer of 2020 led to a new awakening for racial justice in our nation.  The Nora Project, since its organizational inception, has fought to dismantle oppressive, dehumanizing cultural narratives and will continue to do so in an effort to challenge systemic inequities.  We find it imperative to examine and amend our classroom materials through the lens of intersectionality, in an effort to explicitly tie our anti-ableist agenda to an anti-racist one.  In June, shortly after the murder of George Floyd by police officers, The Nora Project put out an Anti-Racist Position Statement and Action Plan. Since that time our staff and Board of Directors have been taking steps to broaden our personal understanding of anti-bias, anti-racist work and to provide the same opportunities for our participating teachers and students. 

This summer, we forged a partnership with the co-founders of Conscious Roots LLC, Nady Persons and Porscha Williams, and award-winning TNP Project Leader, Alex Parker.  Nady and Porscha, former classroom teachers, founded Conscious Roots in 2015 with a mission to make outstanding diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice professional development accessible and available to all.  Their goals, and passions are rooted in “designing excellent, engaging content that makes examining and reimagining oppressive, racist, and harmful structures feel do-able.”  Within his school district, La Grange District 102, Alex is working to create a revised structure for equity-based professional development.  He has also worked with his Teach Plus Illinois Policy Fellowship cohort in order to create an anti-bias, anti-racist toolkit for educators across the state.  

Alex, Nady, and Porscha are looking at our curricula to identify moments throughout the school year where educators teaching all of our programs can smoothly transition from a disability-based conversation to one rooted in intersectionality, where racial identity and other marginalized identities can be addressed concurrently. 

The team will ultimately be creating a companion guide called Pivot Points, which teachers can reference as they teach The Nora Project programs. The guide will offer suggestions for how to extend discussions and connect what students are learning about disability to other aspects of human diversity and conversations about equity more broadly. Educators will have the opportunity to have meaningful dialogue with students in an effort to develop their students as co-conspirators in the fight against racist, ableist, and other social injustices.  We are so excited about this collaboration and can’t wait to provide our participating schools with this important tool.