Dave and Shelley Burgess both recently published blog posts after many BIPOC educators on Twitter have called for white educelebrities to end their silence about police violence against Black people and about racism more generally. There’s a lot that I agree with in their posts and I’m especially happy to hear when they mention people they are learning from, such as Shelley Burgess mentioning Bettina Love.
I’m also very happy to see that Dr. Rosa Isiah-Perez is going to write a book about equity for Pirate press! Her work on Twitter has really brought out reflection on equity among several Pirate authors.
My criticism here is constructive in the sense that Shelley Burgess and Beth Houf define it in their book Lead Like a Pirate: “The insights that accompany constructive criticism can help make you and your school better and can help you to recalculate if you’ve gone off course.” My aim is to help create some more reflection about what anti-racism might look like if you happen to run a large education press and marketing network with over 100 books and 50 speakers. For what it’s worth, this isn’t my first attempt to shift the Pirate thinking: Beyond Champions and Pirates, Empowerwashing Education, Gamifying Setter Colonialism, #BrandEd, and Making Room for Asset Pedagogies.
After the constructive criticism, there are some concrete suggestions to help recalcualte a course at the end.
Responding to Shelly Burgess’ Post
In her ‘A Few Thoughts’, Shelly Burgess writes that she’s “a very private person”: “There won’t be anything about my politics or my personal reactions to news stories. Those are the types of conversations I have always reserved for the people I’m closest to.”
I’m a deeply private person, too. I carefully select what parts of my personal life to share on social media, but there’s no way to draw a clean line between what we privately believe about racism and the police murdering Black people - they are more than just ‘news stories’ - and what we do publicly and politically, especially if you happen to run a very public publishing and marketing business that influences how a lot of teachers think about education. You might even say the drawing of that line is itself a political act.
Most of our meaningful conversations about anything are going to happen outside of the public eye. Hopefully, we all have people that we trust and can talk things through with in direct messages, our staff rooms, and our homes. However, we should expect to see some of the results of our learning about racism reflected in what we do publicly. For example, the pattern of which authors we cite and the ideas we share about education should shift as we learn and grow. We should change our minds about the best ways to educate students and communicate those shifts in thinking if we’ve previously written about them publicly.
In her post, Shelley Burgess writes that she wants to “give you an idea of where I stand”, and I think that’s all most people have wanted from the largely white educelbrities that have stayed silent about racism for far too long. Shana V. White has called out the silence of white educelebrities again and again, and it’s good that the silence is starting to break. In fact, communicating our stance is the advice that Shelley Burgess and Beth Houf give in their book Lead Like a Pirate:
“Our passions are what drive us! They help us determine the direction we point our compass. They influence the plans we put in place, the decisions we make, the actions we take, and the reactions we have. We want our crew to know us, to know who we are, what we believe in, what we stand for. We don’t want them to have to guess. We don’t want them to ever feel blindsided. So we share our passions with our crew freely and openly. We believe it’s a critical part of being transparent and authentic as a leader.”
If you’re passionate about anti-racism, that’s going to determine where your compass points. The private and the public are intertwined. In her recent post, Shelly Burgess even acknowledges one kind of privilege around the division she is able to draw between her private and public life: “I actually have the luxury and the privilege to be able to just shut off the news or close down social media and go on with my life without much changing in my life.” Getting to keep our stances to ourselves is another kind of privilege. If your students and colleagues and 60k Twitter followers are wondering if you think #BlackLivesMatter, you’re hiding behind a kind of privilege that negatively impacts everyone else.
There’s actually a fair bit of good advice in Lead Like a Pirate that applies to speaking up about racism:
Make time for priorities:
“Not only do you need to be crystal clear about your highest priorities, you must communicate them incessantly. Never let an opportunity to make reference to your vision, focus, or goals pass you by. Be intentional about constantly pointing out the things that are moving your school or district forward on your journey, and, when necessary, help your team members recalculate if they get a bit off course.”
‘Get the right people on the ship’ (probably not the best metaphor):
Burgess and Houf describe an interview process:
“And then I’ll push you a little and ask you to tell me what you would then do if your first solution didn’t work, and then what you would do if you still weren’t successful. These questions aren’t meant to frustrate or cause more anxiety, but they are designed to reveal the people who have what it takes to join our crew. I want to see the sparkle of resiliency and the gumption of a risk taker. I want to see their passion for learning come to life in the answers they share. I want to know before they leave that they are willing to revise, redo, change, take risks, fail forward, and do whatever it takes to help our students succeed.”
What will Shelley and Dave Burgess do if their first attempts at talking publicly about racism don’t work? Will they have the resiliency and the gumption to fail forward? Will they show us their passion in the direction their press takes?
Walk the talk
“Finally, I always close interviews with a simple question that reveals so much: ‘What is something you’ve read lately that has influenced you as an educator?’ Their answer tells the interview panel if our prospective crew member is truly a lifelong learner. It also lets us know if their beliefs and practices are aligned to our mission, vision, and collective commitments. The answer reveals whether the potential pirate really walks the talk.”
Will Dave and Shelley Burgess share what they are reading and how they are learning?
Importance of developing a ‘PLN’:
“It is also important to connect with people who have similar and contrasting views to your own so that you will be pushed to consider multiple viewpoints and contrasting ideas.”
This has been one of the most alarming parts of the Pirate network: that when racist ideas circulate in Pirate books, tweets, and blog posts, they go unchallenged from within the Pirate community.
Responding to Dave Burgess’ Post
Dave Burgess called his post … (checks notes) … “Neutrality is a Neutered Cowardice”, which fits with the hypermasculine idea of turning a largely feminized profession into Pirates. I’m not so sure that Dave Burgess can claim that he’s been ‘neutral’ up until now, though.
At the beginning of Teach Like a Pirate (2012), Burgess positions himself as a founding second wave feminist: “I’m hoping to be the Betty Friedan for you and I’m hoping this book will forever free you of this deep, dark secret that burdens your soul.” By the end of Teach Like a Pirate, Burgess has become a radical civil rights hero: “I don’t want to play small—I want to be larger than life. Teaching is a poker game that must be played ‘all in’. Don’t allow anything to stop you. Be willing to have, as Malcolm X would say, a ‘by any means necessary’ attitude. Don’t hang around negative people; they will sap your super powers as sure as kryptonite.”
You have to read to the end of my essay to find out the real problem with Dave Burgess being Betty Friedan. If you don’t know the problem with him invoking Malcolm X here, then there’s probably not much I can do for you.
In between being Friedan and Malcolm X, Burgess explains what the real law of attraction is (I’m not shitting you), gets his students to have some ‘fun’ and ‘excitement’ by trying to fit into a box like Henry ‘Box’ Brown did when he escaped slavery, and takes his students on a Trail of Tears walk around the school campus.
These ‘passionate’ enactments with his students are not neutral silence on the issue of racism, but they in fact encourage a kind of enjoyment that will harm Black and Indigenous students especially. This pattern of turning to role playing continues when another Pirate book gamifies settler colonialism and has spread so broadly there was even an article in Slate about it (though the author does not trace the trend back to Teach Like a Pirate).
Burgess presents the Henry ‘Box’ Brown activity as a way to get students moving and build some excitement:
“It’s never a bad idea to inject some kinesthetic activity into your class, even if the primary goal is to just have some fun. Recently, I presented a lecture about the resistance to slavery and the unique ways slaves sought freedom. After telling them the story of Henry “Box” Brown being mailed to freedom, I challenged my students to try to fit into a box that was smaller in every way than Henry’s. We discussed the dimensions and then I let them have at it. I used a large plastic storage bin and they had to get in far enough for me to be able to close the lid. As the day went on things got wilder and wilder! I mentioned to my third period that four students made it in second period, so they proceeded to fit nineteen people in the box. Twenty if you count the campus supervisor who came to deliver a pass and agreed to give it a try. ”
Somehow, Burgess seems proud of the outcome:
“I saw students getting to ponder the experience of Henry and put themselves in his shoes. I saw students excited about the challenge. … You don’t have to apologize for ramping up the entertainment level of your class. In fact, you should apologize to your students if you don’t. It’s not necessarily about putting students in the box; it’s about thinking outside of the box for creative ideas.”
While Burgess thinks this is the kind of lesson you “could sell tickets to”, it’s in fact one of the most harmful lessons I’ve seen in print. Writing for Slate, Rebecca Onion states, “One danger of poorly executed simulations of the darkest parts of our history is that white or otherwise privileged students may revel in what they see as the dramatic aspects of these situations—they may actually enjoy themselves.”
According to PBS, the real story behind Henry Brown is this:
Henry “Box” Brown was born enslaved in Louisa County, Virginia in 1815. When he was 15, he was sent to Richmond to work in a tobacco factory. His life was filled with unrewarded drudgery, although he had it better than most of his enslaved peers. The loss of freedom prevented him from living with his wife, Nancy, who was owned by a slave master on an adjacent plantation. She was pregnant with their fourth child when, in 1848, he heard the tragic news: Nancy and his children were to be sold to a plantation in North Carolina. He stood with tears in his eyes on the side of the street as he watched 350 slaves in chains walk by him, including his wife with their unborn child and three young children. He could only wish them a tearful last farewell— he was helpless to save them.
After months of mourning his loss, Henry resolved to escape from slavery.
…
During the 27- hour journey, the box was turned upside down on several occasions and handled roughly. Henry wrote that he “was resolved to conquer or die, I felt my eyes swelling as if they would burst from their sockets; and the veins on my temples were dreadfully distended with pressure of blood upon my head.” At one point, Henry thought that he might die, but fortunately two men needed a place to sit down and, “so perceiving my box, standing on end, one of the men threw it down and the two sat upon it. I was thus relieved from a state of agony which may be more imagined than described.”
In what Burgess calls ‘The Safari Hook’, he writes about role playing a Trail of Tears walk:
“Each year I take my students on the Trail of Tears walk. It is a forty-minute walk along a trail that goes around some of the outer fields of the campus. I arrive way before school starts and set up the trail with all sorts of props and scenes. During the class period, we walk together as a group. When we come upon one of the areas set up with props, the whole class pulls in tight so they can hear the lecture. What better way to teach about the Trail of Tears than to actually walk along a trail?”
Actually, there’s probably no worse way you could teach about the Trail of Tears unless your aim is to inflict trauma upon Indigenous students. There’s no exciting scene to arrive upon except the slaughter of people.
In An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Roxane Dunar-Ortiz quotes a journalist’s description from:
“Under Scott’s orders the troops were disposed at various points throughout the Cherokee country, where stockade forts were erected for gathering in and holding the Indians preparatory to removal. From these, squads of troops were sent to search out with rifle and bayonet every small cabin hidden away in the coves or by sides of mountain streams, to seize and bring in as prisoners all the occupants, however or wherever they might be found. Families at dinner were startled by the sudden gleam of bayonets in the doorway and rose up to be driven with blows and oaths along the weary miles of trail that led to the stockade. Men were seized in their fields or going along the road, women were taken from their wheels and children from their play. In many cases, on turning for one last look as they crossed the ridge, they saw their homes in flames, fired by the lawless rabble that followed on the heels of the soldiers to loot and pillage. So keen were these outlaws on the scene that in some instances they were driving off the cattle and other stock of the Indians almost before the soldiers had fairly started their owners in the other direction. Systematic hunts were made by the same men for Indian graves, to rob them of the silver pendants and other valuables deposited with the dead. A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: “I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.”
It’s hard to know which is more troubling: that Burgess claims to be “most passionate about teaching the Civil Rights Movement” and to “love to teach about the resistance to slavery”, or that no one withing his network challenges him on these activities in Teach Like a Pirate. If Burgess really knows the history, then he really knows the horrors.
So, what’s Burgess’s deep, dark Betty Friedan secret?
In the open of TLAP, Burgess tells us: “Here is the secret: We are not passionate about everything we teach. It’s OK! Let the freedom wash over you. ”
By invoking Friedan, Burgess is making the argument that the personal is political, which is what Friedan shows when she recounts how a group of women who were sharing personal stories in a coffee shop and “Suddenly they realized they all shared the same problem, the problem that has no name.”
But is not being passionate about everything we teach equivalent to the second wave feminist ‘problem with no name’? I doubt it, except in some ironic sense where the problem about passion has been manufactured by people like Dave Burgess and Tony Robbins so that they are then in a position to sell us a never ending line of seminars and solutions.
More on point for this present discussion about racism and education, Bettey Friedan’s work simultaneously kicked off second wave feminism and made sure that it was a white feminism. In her critique of Friedan in Feminism is For Everybody, bell hooks writes:
“She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women.” (p. 38)
The problem that Burgess has constructed around teacher passion is analogous to the ‘problem with no name’ that Friedan constructed for white upper and middle class women in that it’s one problem that speaks to some people, but leaves a whole lot of other people out in a patterned way. Besides an unnamed problem with passion, there’s a problem that a lot of Black, Indigenous, and Educators of Color have been naming for a long time.
What can Pirate Press do?
One first step white co-conspirators can take is naming that problem of white supremacy, too. It’s especially important to do this without centering your fragility or saviorism.
Next, as a press that still actively markets over 100 books and 50 speakers, please take the time to do some public reflection about missteps. Would you still encourage teachers to do a Trail of Tears walk? Why not? Please do engage in some consenting to learn in public before jumping into product launches.
You could also revisit and publicly acknowledge and thank people who have pushed you to learn. I’ve definitely seen Shana White do this.
As new books are conceived and edited, please don’t start by making anti-racism and social justice an ‘add on’ where it gets a separate chapter or book. Make it integral to the PIRATE lens in the way Passion is. Citation patterns in your books should reflect the BIPOC authors who have long been doing this work. Seek out prominent BIPOC authors and create a space they would feel welcomed in. Instead of asking if you can sell tickets to lessons, ask if you can make BIPOC want to be a part of what you do.
With a large and established marketing network, you should signal boost some things that aren’t Pirate. We probably don’t need a 15th fake MOOC promoting George Couros’ book from five years ago. Instead, actively engage with and promote BIPOC authors and what they have already written. Ask them to host chats and make sure they get paid.
Photo by Christian Joudrey on Unsplash