Category Archives: social justice

Nature Abhors A Vacuum

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“Nature abhors a vacuum.” was first theorized by Aristotle. This theory was brought into doubt in the 1600’s when experiments were conducted that appear to prove creating a total vacuum is possible. I don’t see why the possibility of there being a vacuum does not mean that nature abhors one. I thought about this when I was contemplating on how to get people to seriously consider what must be done to save the world. It seems that people abhor the thought of destroying the world, but can’t stop doing it. There are some people who live a “green” life, so we know, like a vacuum, it can be accomplished. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people continue to buy, sell, and destroy the environment with abandon. We know this must stop, but what are we doing to stop it? Are we even capable of making ourselves stop it, or are we just resigned to going down in a firestorm of global warming?

The final project in Economics is about saving the world. The students are enthusiastic about the project. They get it. Humans are destroying the world. But what are they doing about it? Only one of my first period students posted something on social media about saving the world. This is not going to cut it. So much more needs to be done. Beyond learning, my lessons must include a call to action.

I do hear snippets from my students that others are teaching about this same subject. Maybe it is a video in biology class, a book in English class or using recycled materials in art class. Things are being done. I would like to know what everyone else is doing and how we can make a coordinated effort to educate our students about the magnitude of this problem and about what can be done to alter our path to one that makes sustainability possible. Wouldn’t it be great to have some calls to action on a school-wide basis, backed by what we are learning in class? That would be project based learning at its best.

Speaking of a vacuum reminds me of the Pink Floyd song “Is There Anybody Out There.” If you are out there and read this, do you also believe it is time to translate our thoughts into actions? Our students, their children and grandchildren deserve nothing less.

Whose Space? White Space and the Fallacy of Inclusion

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While learning about social justice and inclusion, I started visualizing the idea of white space. I am referring both to physical and conceptual spaces that appear to be designed for white people to exist and thrive in them. An extreme example of what I call “white space” is any suburban neighborhood where a young teen can be killed just for being black and wearing a hoodie. It is not labeled as “whites-only space”  but some non-written rules widely proclaim it and make it so. Even a bird-watching area in Central Park, New York can become white space once a white person enters it and decides so. These are extreme cases that make national headlines but, how about our spaces? What are the rules of engagement in our places of work, study, worship, where we shop for groceries, workout, etc? What kind of spaces are our classrooms and our school? Implicit and unconscious bias are forms of bias nonetheless. Are we sending unintentional messages to our students that white behaviors and culture will determine success and adaptation in our spaces? Are we willing to entertain the idea that we provide spaces where white students are more comfortable and at ease than their black or brown counterparts?  I often hear from BPOC activists that outside of their home, they have to change aspects of their identity, personality, way of speaking, in order to fit in their workplace, school, or other spaces where certain rules of engagement are seen as the norm.

Brenda Leaks*,head of School of Seattle Girls School talks about unspoken codes that black women in particular have to abide by in order to seem competent at their school and workplace.  She says: “What we end up asking of the black people in our communities is: …we need you to adjust and to adapt yourself so that you fit in with our culture and our community, so that we don’t feel threatened by your presence;  and I feel people get used to doing that, you figure out how to cope and then eventually ends up being an exhausting burden that you can no longer carry. As a black head of school, I will say that the burden that I carry, with every step I take, I (also) take the step of a person that looks like me, that has not reached this far before. The burden of carrying that, of fitting in, only gets heavier. We have to change that.”

If this is the case for some of our students, our spaces may not be as inclusive as we like to think. Proclaiming ourselves as inclusive might be not enough and even misleading and confusing for students that don’t feel ownership in our spaces. Furthermore, if the behaviors are unintentional and implicit, it is possible that even our BPOC students accept them and consider them the norm. This would make it hard to identify them and justify a need for change.  Ultimately, finding out if we are engaging in these types of behaviors requires effort, self reflection and listening to BPOC voices with curiosity, wanting to learn what is really like for them and willing to find neutral ground. 

Tema Okun**, a well known author and facilitator in the field of social justice has put together a list of attitudes and behaviors that show up in white supremacist culture at work places. They are the following:


  • Perfectionism

  • Sense of urgency

  • Defensiveness

  • Quantity over quality

  • Worship of the written word

  • Only one right way

  • Paternalism

  • Either/or thinking

  • Power hoarding

  • Fear of open conflict

  • Individualism 

  • I’m the only one

  • Progress is bigger and more

  • Objectivity

  • Right to comfort


This is a link with Okun’s whole document. It is well worth the read. It is a good exercise to self reflect and see if we can identify some of these attitudes on the list in the way we carry ourselves and in how we set up expectations from our students. It is also worth it considering the “antidotes”  suggested in the article, as helpful avenues for reimagining our classrooms as places truly inclusive.


*Brenda Leaks was one of my favorite speakers at the NCGS Symposium that some of us teachers and administrators at the school attended recently. Brenda struck me as very personal and honest in her words. She is the head of the Seattle Girls School which is very similar to CHS also in that the majority of the student body is white. She recently wrote an Op-ed piece at the Seattle’s times discussing how to talk to your children about racism.

**Tema Okun is an author and facilitator who has spent many years working in the social justice field has written the book The emperor Has no Clothes:Teaching About Race and Racism to People Who Don’t Want to Know.”

Building Anti-Racists White Educators

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Racism, sexism, and elitism were institutionalized long before the first English settlers arrived at Jamestown in 1607. The class I just finished through the UC Berkeley History Social Science Project focused on racism in the United States and what we, as educators, can do to help our students and the public understand the long standing and  insidious nature of racism and to pursue actions to  accelerate the process of ending racism.

Racism in the United States is a subject that cannot be ignored. We read in the news about  white people carrying guns while protesting coronavirus restrictions. These people are praised by our president. We read about a black man who is shot for jogging in the wrong place at the wrong time. The discrepancy is obvious. These are just two examples of endemic racism in white America.

Closer to home, when I hear my Carondelet black students telling me about how they are followed by store employees when shopping alone or with their mother, but not when they are accompanied by white friends. And when I hear about Carondelet Latina students telling me about white adults telling them they should go back to where they came from, it shows how deeply racism is ingrained in the minds of so many white Americans. This is not something happening in some southern state or in the midwest. These are Carondelet students who experience racism on an almost daily basis right here in Contra Costa County.

We also need to acknowledge that it is white people who are the problem. And that includes all of us white people. Sure, none of us are racist, but can we even pretend to know what it is like to be not seen by others as being white? Can we know what non-white students hear when we speak to them? We can have the purest hearts in the world and still be seen as racist. We need to talk about racism as teachers who want to better understand how it affects our non-white students. We need to talk to students to see our reflections in their eyes. Most important, we need to explain to our white students how ingrained racism is in our society and what can be done to eradicate racism before the next 400 years pass by. Understanding is the first step to making change. Doing nothing is not an option, not for those of us who wish to “serve the dear neighbor.” 

Social Justice

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Social justice is a cornerstone of every class I teach. It is so wonderful that Carondelet embraces this belief in social justice. How can any student truly understand the concept of “leadership and service to the dear neighbor without distinction” without first understanding the meaning of social justice? I consider myself so lucky to be in a school where these values are not just tolerated, but truly embraced.


Jeff Bezos is the world’s lone hectobillionaire.

This brings me to the topic at hand. Amazon. I love Amazon. It is so easy, and they have everything under the sun from my weird refrigerator water filters to the latest literature about education. But this convenience comes at a price. There is the environmental impact of packaging and fuel. There is the cost to local businesses, and even other online businesses. But the really big cost, the one that gets me the most is the human cost. The more I read about what Amazon is doing to its employees, and the comparison to the obscene income of Jeff Bezos, the more I realize that Amazon is becoming a giant symbol of social injustice.


Amazon is the leader of the new robber baron companies. The more I read, the more I realize how much I need to find ways to protest Amazon. A recent Atlantic Monthly article brought to my attention just how bad Amazon is for its employees and how bad an example it is of a “successful” company. “Bezos is the world’s lone hectobillionaire. He is worth what the average American family is, nearly two million times over.” Amazon pays below the going average wages for unskilled labor. Amazon works its labor force at a grueling pace. This is not Bangladesh or some other third world country. This is the American mainstream labor force. No wonder we have so many social problems.

Bringing this back to Carondelet, Amazon is only one of real world problems we present to our students. This is the type of problem that has the power to truly engage our students. As I see how our students respond to such problems, as I witness our students’ empathy, I am given hope that these are the students that will go out into the world and make a real difference. Carondelet is preparing students to bring light to an otherwise dark future. How many schools can make that claim?

When Going Back to Step 1 is a Good Thing (and Your Students Agree)

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As I pass the midway point in the Semester, I have found that my Social Advocacy class is realizing that each team needs to be on different steps in the Design Think process. In the first half of the semester all of the teams were approaching the Design Think model in a linear fashion, and I believe that this served them well. Now that they have be testing their prototypes, they are realizing that they need to rethink their original plans.

In the class we discussed the idea that when we test, we are trying to discover the problems with our designs. Instead of taking the approach that we will succeed, rather we are eager to explore ways that we can grow in our designs. Realizing that we won’t have a perfect solution, this changes the emphasis of the project. Now instead of the teams look at the impact that they will be making on the social justice issue, they are invested in putting the user (the people effected by the issue) first and wanting to revise what they have planned to better serve them.

One specific group that I would like to highlight are a group looking into ways to reduce date rape on college campuses. They had an initial idea of using the idea of “Angel Shots”, but creating their own version of it to avoid copyright and permission issues. This faltered for a variety of reasons, but it hasn’t put a damper on their project. During a video conference with a Post Graduate student from Cambridge University, the team presented their project to date. Madi Vorva (Post Graduate Student) invited them to seek out other organizations and clubs to partner with them. Now the team is effectively going back to the Empathize Phase to learn more from people in college invested in this issue, just as the girls from Carondelet are. At our last meeting the team was reaching out to women empowerment clubs and Professors of Gender Studies at Colleges.

Although it could be seen as a negative that they are essentially back to step one, they see this as an exciting step because they know what didn’t work. They know that they need more support to make this project a success.

Interestingly I haven’t had any of my students ask what this will do to their grades. Throughout the project the emphasis has been on growth in the project, and that we are never done. Our goal is to keel pushing forward, and the most important people are those effected by the social justice issue. We aren’t the most important people. Our grades aren’t the primary focus. People matter more, and that is our motivation.

MLK Jr. and His Personal Struggle

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Film: King in the Wilderness

Over spring break I was able to have some down time on the couch in front of the TV. Instead of browsing and binge watching on Netflix I decided to flip through the cable channels and HBO was televising a documentary about Martin Luther King Jr. called King in the Wilderness.

In the Spiritual Journey course for seniors I have chosen to discuss spiritual darkness. I dove into the idea of a “Dark Night of the Soul” from St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. I highlighted the spiritual darkness of Mother Teresa that we now know she was enduring thanks to the publication of Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light which includes her personal writings about her spiritual struggle.

I also chose to have students look at American spirituality. In particular I pointed them to Martin Luther King Jr. and the spiritual basis for his ministry of nonviolent protest. King in the Wilderness gives a glimpse into the last months of Dr. King’s life and the hardships that he endured in his ministry. The film highlights the criticism from the Black Power movement of his nonviolent philosophy, from those that were displeased with his speaking out against the Vietnam War, and from those that worked with him in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that felt he was spreading himself thin taking on African-American rights, poverty, and anti-war issues. An interesting thing that I learned from the film was the work of J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI to discredit Dr. King, labeling him a communist and morally bankrupt in his personal life. However, the most compelling part of the documentary was the highlighting of Dr. King’s spiritual struggle. He made jokes about assassination to his colleagues, expressed anger with himself and his colleagues that they were not doing enough, developed a tic, and expressed his thoughts that he would not live very long. In the end, according to the documentary, he had come to terms with death and no longer feared what was inevitable.

In history books, the lives of social justice heroes are often cut down to what is “inspirational” and deemed “important”. However, according to our Catholic faith, suffering is often an essential part of our life in Christ. It is in those moments that there are great “fruits”. I think it is important to remind students that everyone struggles. The spiritual struggle can be one of the hardest to endure but they are not alone. Even those who they see the face of Christ in so easily, have had periods of anger, doubt, and “nothingness” in their spiritual journey.

Love showing a documentary and having a student say thank you because she learned something completely new, shed some tears, and wants to watch it again!