George Floyd
Dear Stone Community,
We have all, of course, been paying very close attention to the extraordinary local, national, and international events which have occurred since George Floyd was killed on March 25th. As former President George W. Bush so eloquently wrote yesterday:
It remains a shocking failure that African Americans, especially young African American men, are threatened and harassed in their own country. It is a strength when protestors, protected by responsible law enforcement, march for a better future. This tragedy — in a long series of similar tragedies — raises a long overdue question: How do we end systemic racism in our society? The only way to see ourselves in a true light is to listen to the voices of so many who are hurting and grieving. Those who set out to silence those voices do not understand the meaning of America — or how it becomes a better place.
Today, I’m reaching out to our entire community in very long form to try to do a difficult thing: to try to contextualize our responsibility as a community of learners to this tragedy. This message is indeed long; the subject matter certainly demands sustained and careful meditation. And to begin, I’d like to begin by considering Stone’s relationship to “activism”.
Since our earliest days, we have said explicitly and regularly that we believe that “citizenship” and “engagement” by their very nature go hand-in-hand. In fact, our Mission is inherently vectored toward a broad notion of “justice work” -- we do indeed expect that our students regularly practice empathy, ethicality, and gratitude; we do intend to graduate students who are “committed to making the world a measurably better place”. As I say at most of our Open Houses: we do indeed believe that we are a community of inveterate “do-gooders”. In its brief history, Stone has a rich tradition of bipartisan activism: three years ago, Jacob Ruzow, ‘18 was one of the original architects of the “March for Our Lives"; just a few weeks ago, Stone students designed, printed, and delivered nearly 1000 parts for PPE’s -- both represent important kinds of “activism”, of citizenship, of “doing”. Between that first and that most recent act of deep citizenship, there have been dozens and dozens of acts committed by Stone students which fall under the very loose categories of citizenship, engagement, and activism. Across the political spectrum, Stone students bias toward “doing” -- they have worked on greening/environmental campaigns, they have pitched to politicians the merits of bitcoin machines, they have battled pipelines, they have presented policy briefs to Senator Scott Martin, they have marched in support of LGBTQ+ rights, they have worked on and for a variety of political campaigns which speak directly to what they believe “a measurably better place” to be.
This intentional practice of active citizenship is so ingrained in who we are that we actually have written a policy for “walkouts” which supports those students who feel called to urgent local work; this kind of citizenship is so ingrained in who we are that we have a channel on Slack (#advocacy) designated to create space for the conversations necessary to support that work. Over our three years, we have built a curriculum that is expressly suspicious of the traditional “canon” in literature; which emphasizes non-Western thought; which asks our students to look at history (and specifically cartography) through a multitude of lenses; which believes decision science is an antidote to our own invisible biases; which — at a 50,000 ft level — seeks to train all of our students to look beyond “events” in order to seek system-wide change and solutions.
Ingrained in all that we do is the belief that viewing “problems” of any kind from a “systems perspective” — from the strictly mathematical to the broady social — allows for richer and more truthful answers. We emphasize that kind of thinking when it comes to issues of justice; we emphasize that kind of thinking when it comes to food sourcing and production; we emphasize that kind of thinking when it comes to figuring out how to keep the mezzanine clean (we’re still working on that one): Stone is a systems-thinking school.
In the case of the George Floyd tragedy, I find myself able to think about the “event” in pretty clear terms and, as with most “event-oriented thinking”, I find it easy and satisfying to position myself in clear opposition to the act and the obvious injustice; in contrast, I find my understanding of a “response” to the larger systems in play here much less clear, much less certain. To ground a narrow portion of my thinking, I’ve read letters from a multitude of school leaders over the last few days -- here is an extraordinary letter from Scott Looney, the Head of School at Hawken; here is one from Lancaster Mennonite; here is one from our friends at the Calhoun School; Linden Hall and Lancaster Mennonite went “black” on social media yesterday (as did Stone); our friends at LCDS posted a “Black Lives Matter” photograph on instagram yesterday. I share this body of work as a way to say: schools of all kinds and all backgrounds are engaging this issue directly because it speaks to the very heart of what learning is for. As a school leader, it seems obvious to me that we must clearly:
Condemn the killing of George Floyd,
Assert that Black Lives Matter,
And, as ever, stand with those who work to dismantle systems of racism, oppression, and injustice.
What I will admit today is that I am unclear how, on a personal level, I go from a statement of “this I believe” to “this I must do”. That, of course, is the profound challenge inherent to all meaningful acts of citizenship. In a normal school year we would collect at Morning Meeting, share our experiences, disseminate healthy conversations, process together, and encourage those students who wish to be involved in additional conversations to be so. In our current context, it is “harder” -- but certainly no less urgent -- to have these conversations.
We have taken a few preliminary steps to consider ways that we can contextualize what is happening around us, to support those who would like our support, and to honor healthy conversations. Yesterday I spent time communicating with our faculty as well our Faculty Diversity/Inclusion Committee about how we will develop rich ways to work to with and support our students; I also met yesterday with Student Government so that I could ask, “What are you feeling? What do you need right now?” This afternoon at 4pm Mr. Hermeling -- who serves on our Diversity/Inclusion Committee -- will be facilitating a large group discussion open to all students interested in sharing their ideas, feelings, and experiences regarding this situation. And, we will share resources in the #advocacy channel for those of you who wish to learn more about disparate ways to get involved.
When we opened this school year, I spoke to each of you about vulnerability: that in order to practice vulnerability we each must both believe in something, and be able to listen for something. I know definitively what I believe: that an act of unimaginable injustice occurred on March 25th, and that we must work to understand and dismantle the systems in play which allowed for that act to occur. What I can not say with any certainty is: here is what must come next. To that end, our community will work in the manner that we always do: we will rely on real expertise, we will engage in healthy and difficult conversation, we will commit to vulnerability, we will practice empathy and ethicality and gratitude, we will remain remain steadfast in our belief that we can make the world a measurably better place.
As ever, I welcome your thoughts. Please don’t ever hesitate to email me at simpsonm@stoneindependent.org.
Mike Simpson, Head of School