June 15, 2020 Reflection

Dr. Samantha Cutrara:        Casey, it is so nice to see you again. I feel like it has been an age since we did our original video. So we talked on May 19th. It is now — I mean, your video was actually going up around June 19th, but on May 25th, George Floyd was murdered by the police and it has sparked, as you know, the revolution. The Black Lives Matter revolution. And I’m so glad that you wanted to touch base really quickly to kind of put some context to our first video.

Casey Burkholder:        I think one of the things I want to say is, and I think we talked about anti-Black racism a bit in the video, is that is deeply horrific that the police killed George Floyd, but this is business as usual for the police. This is not a special case. The special case I think is that a lot of white folks have taken notice and are joining in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, at least in the context of Fredericton where I’m living.

So Black Lives Matter Fredericton has just been incorporated, but it’s really a Black youth-led movement here, and a lot of the young people were saying that in 2016, when they tried to make a March, they just couldn’t get interest. And so this time when they had a march, there were three different events over the course of a week in solidarity with what’s happening in the US and also acknowledging the anti-Black racism in Wolastoqiyik [New Brunswick]. And there were tons of folks there, which I find very exciting, including some of my B. Ed. students who I haven’t seen in person, of course, since March when the Pandemic began. So, it’s kind of nice to see them in the world.

But in New Brunswick, we also have the murder, the police murder of Chantel Moore in Edmundston, New Brunswick that just happened on June 4th. And then just the other day, we had the death of Rodney Levi also at the hands of the police. So police violence, of course, is all about anti-Black racism, but in the context of New Brunswick, yes, it’s anti-Black racism and it’s also about anti-Indigenous racism too.

Clearly, the police are not doing what they’re — I mean, what do they meant to do, right? They’re doing exactly what they’re meant to do. What I’m saying is like the police are a broken system. This is not a new conversation either, right? Like, how long has Angela Davis been writing—decades?

SC:        Exactly. And I mean, even before that, like she also stood on the shoulders of giants, right?

CB:        Yeah. I know.

SC:        And it’s not just New Brunswick. Like it’s Canada completely that police systems have been charged with keeping down particular racialized minorities in particular ways to support white property, white people, and it isn’t new. And there is, you know, I’m sure you are also seeing all the different readings and things that are going out there, but when I’m interested in this, how is that manifesting in your class right now? Because when we talked before, you were just about to teach. Like you haven’t even started the course.

CB:        Yeah, that’s right. So I’m co-teaching the course with Katie Hamill, who’s a Ph.D. student at the University of New Brunswick, and originally, we planned this course about geography teaching in March. We were both really thinking about geographies in sort of almost a personal way. Like how are you experiencing the feeling of “I want to be trusting of the government” and on the other hand, “I don’t trust the government.” Simultaneously trusting of their neighbors and yet not trusting of their neighbors.

So we wanted to get students to think about psychogeography, their experiences of space and place, and how that shifts in a pandemic time. But of course, as we’ve been teaching, we had planned for example, readings on digital activism and many of these readings were about environmentalism because in the beginning of March, there was a couple of pieces about climate protests and how that would be moving online. And then we started thinking about the anti-Black racism within the readings that we chose, even though we were trying to be really thoughtful about race and place and space. The readings we chose really didn’t work in the Pandemic in June. We were recording a video lecture on June 10th about digital activism and obviously we were talking about Black Lives Matter. We were talking about solidarity actions across North America and the world, and we sort of threw away our original readings. We said, okay those are the readings that we originally suggested, but here are so many better readings.

CB:        Then we’ve been talking a lot about digital space and performativity, like performative activism. For example, those like black squares that primarily white folks were posting on Instagram, especially white folks in solidarity, but it was like optical allyship (Ibrahim, 2020). I think in terms of protest spaces, I’ve really seen a shift here too. Since March, I have attended two political public gatherings: a healing walk and a protest and solidarity march. The healing walk was to honour the life of Chantel Moore and the other was a Black Lives Matter protest. Protest spaces are so different amidst the Pandemic Like masking up, making sure that you’re distant from folks, but also taking to the streets and still being that sort of mass of people despite the risk to your personal health, I think it’s really interesting to see how solidarity shifts. In a performative way, but also in a solidarity way.

SC:        Well, Julian Chambliss who I interviewed at the beginning of March, beginning of June after the protests have started, we were talking about that. About like COVID is still happening, and yet thousands of people are out on the streets. And he’s like, yeah, like COVID isn’t going after Black people. Police are going after Black people. And so like this is a moment where people are saying my personal safety or my personal health is going to be mitigated, the risk is going to be mitigated because it is more important to be together as a group to demonstrate the ways that we want to make change in the world.

CB:        I think the only other thing I wanted to say was that one of the things I’ve been thinking about in the course is that racism is a pandemic (Newman-Bremang, 2020). COVID, is a new pandemic on the scene, but structural racism has been around ever since colonialism in this country.

SC:        And it has been really interesting to look back on the Pandemic Pedagogy videos because it’s like, as a historian as it were, all of the videos, we talked about structural change and that’s showing the difficulties and structures, and how the structures aren’t working, and the inequities it’s highlighting, and how are we going to do things differently, imagining a new we differently after this moment. And then this happens, and it’s like, right, we’ve been seeing that for months, and we had been isolated for months, and we had, for some of us, have been without services or recognizing how we are privileged.

And so, yes, highlighting that racism as a pandemic highlights that it was in the air. Like in a way that it doesn’t seem quite now that we’re a couple weeks into more like the second wave of these Black Lives Matter activism, it doesn’t feel quite as like a surprise that’s happening during COVID the way it may have that first weekend flash week.

CB:        I think the other thing we have to think about too is like, yeah, obviously, the justice system is broken. That’s an easy conversation for educators to have, but like look at the violence that we enact in our work as educators. And like education, the erasures of history education, the erasures that we continue to perpetuate through curriculum through the kinds of people who do history education, I think we’re really implicated in this too, and I don’t know what it looks like to reform.

And like we talked about a month ago — I don’t think I’m the one to say, but I’m really interested in how that might look, those actual structural reforms. What that would look like?

SC:        Yeah, yeah. I think that there’s a lot here that we can think through and do, and like listen, and like resist in good ways. Like resist structures that we recognize don’t serve all of us equally. And I hope people like our talk from a month ago, even though we aren’t talking about this. But I think this little introduction is a really good way to articulate a lot of the ideas that we had in that first talk in this particular moment. Thanks so much for like coming back to do this extra little video.

CB:        My pleasure. Thank you for having me.

May 20, 2020

Dr. Samantha Cutrara:        Casey, thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me today. I know that you are extra busy right now because you are a full-time parent, and so many full-time parents are trying to figure out how to balance their full-time jobs and being a full-time parent. So thank you so much for finding the time to speak with me today.

Casey Burkholder:        Happy to do so.

SC:        Do you want to introduce yourself before we get started?

CB:        Sure. My name is Casey Burkholder. I’m an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of New Brunswick. I teach pre-service teachers and master’s of education students primarily, and my area of teaching focus includes social studies education, visual art education, and then at the master’s level, my teaching focuses on research methodologies, particularly participatory visual methodologies which I always sneak into my pre-service social studies teaching.

SC:        You know, I was talking with someone today who’s a history teacher in Ontario and she also has a drama in English background. And I was saying like, those intersections with like social studies, history and art, to me, are some of the most powerful intersections. So that’s why I’m extra happy to talk with you today.

CB:        Excellent.

SC:        So, I start with this first question, which I ask everyone which is, have you thought of history any different because of this moment? And some people were like, “I just haven’t had time to think about the subject.” And other people have been saying things like, “You know, I recognize the perspective that I was in, now challenges the interpretations that I’ve had.” So, have you thought of history any different because of this moment?

CB:        I think I’ve been thinking about how I teach history a little bit differently, and also how I teach geography a little bit differently. I’m gearing up to teach a course next week, which of course was supposed to be face-to-face and it’s now being reimagined in the digital realm. And this course really focuses on the ways in which we teach and think about space, place, and time in school and society.

And so I taught the course last year. I really enjoyed it. I used the Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods edited collection, “Black Geographies and Politics of Place,” which I think is really important in terms of getting pre-service teachers to think more politically about race and bodies in the classroom. In this year’s iteration of the course, I have been using their text in connection with more journalistic articles to really dive into notions of protest, privilege, and space amidst the pandemic. So questions like, what’s the cost of progress is something we would have talked about last year. Now we can look at it through the key study of what’s going on right now including in New Brunswick, the murders of Chantal Moore and Rodney Levi by the RCMP during wellness check. We are also thinking about psychogeographies within the course, more or less thinking about the ways in which we act within particular spaces, how certain bodies are policed in particular ways, or how we police ourselves in particular spaces. We are looking at spaces like schools and spaces within the wider society, and then thinking about how we move similarly and differnetly through space amidst the Pandemic.

One of the assignments I have designed is for students to map their quarantine spaces for psychogeographies. Like how do these spaces make you think and feel? And then as an exemplar text, I examined the same prompt with my three-year-old kid about how spaces within our quarantine space make her think and feel. So within this work, I have been thinking about how I could bring my parent life into my teaching life and then put all of these policized and critical race theory-informed ideas that I want pre-service teachers to think about like time, and space, and bodies, and whose stories are told, whose stories are not told, who gets to retell these different stories. All of that is sort of coming into focus, specifically in the pandemic.  These questions feel much more alive to me now. The ideas are less static as thinking about them before. To me, these ideas feel very present now.

I think one of the research projects that I was imagining before the pandemic is like really amazing to think about in the current context. It’s a project with Dr. Funké Aladejebi, and Dr. Jennifer Thompson. Last year, we started thinking about exploring notions of dystopia with youth not just as a future topic, but also as a present situation and a past situation.

So looking at dystopia in the context of New Brunswick, how do we understand dystopic conditions if we think about contact and settler colonialism as dystopic conditions for Mi’kmaq and Wolastokiyik peoples? If we think about the ways in which people and communities have been physically moved for “progress,” like for example, Africville in Nova Scotia. So dystopia has always been around especially for Black and Indigenous communities, and now of course, like everyone is talking about dystopia because we’re all like either shut in our homes or being forced to work in these not safe conditions or protesting the ongoing violence against and policing of Black and Indigenous peoples and communities.

Anyway, the pandemic has maybe not changed the questions we are asking so much as made them feel more urgent.

SC:        More like forced percolation maybe too?

CB:        Yeah. Or maybe like a rethinking or an added urgency to the work. Many of the pre-service teachers I teach in the University of New Brunswick are primary middle-class, white folk. And so I think the pandemic conditions have been maybe some of their opportunities for the first time to feel deeply destabilized and thinking differently about the state, and their relationship to their communities, to other folks, to other communities. I think this might be a politicizing moment. Or anyway, I hope it’s a politicizing moment. Maybe everyone is just going to retreat and do more of the same, but I hope not.

SC:        Yeah. I mean, it will be interesting. One of the things that came up really in a lot of the early conversations, but hasn’t come up in the same way in the latter ones. And I think that’s because people are in it a little bit more than this moment, although I should just preface that nobody else use this language but me. So I just brought this language to things people were saying, but then it like reveals this deconstruction. That it reveals the ways that the system doesn’t work the way that the system is always broken. And I think of Andrea Hawkman and Sarah Shear’s interview when they’re saying, “Well, actually, no. This system was designed for this inequity and now we’re just seeing it reveals that.”

And so when you’re saying like to get people to think about the geographies of their own quarantine space, for example, to me that forces you to think about your spaces in political ways that you might not have before.

SC:        And I was talking with Mark Currie, who’s a doctoral candidate, that was also talking about geographies and how our like public spaces, we can really question how and in what ways these spaces were created and how they function. So interesting. I’m so excited to hear how these ideas will keep growing. And I also think it’s really interesting and cool about bringing in some of the parenting to the teaching as well because — rather than have them fight each other, which I’m sure it feels like all the time that I think —

CB:        Like they also fight each other?

SC:        [inaudible 0:08:28.0]

CB:        Let’s be clear about that.

SC:        Yeah. That it’s kind of an acknowledgment of humanness too, right? Like, “Oh, I also have this three-year-old at home and we’re figuring things out too.”

CB:        Oh, totally. It’s a mess. Like really it’s a mess, but it’s fine. You know what I mean?

SC:        Yeah, yeah.

CB:        Sometimes I think myself and some of my friends who are also employed in university positions and, we have a tendency to lament the time before in relation to our work conditions. Like, “Oh, I just wish I had time to write right now,” and, “Oh, I just wish I could be alone in my office.” But also, that’s so deeply privileged. And if anything — I think the pandemic has also reminded me of this privilege big flashing lights. Like, holy moly, look at your privilege and how are you using it in your working life, in your personal life, in your community life?

I think that a pandemic can encourage people to turn inward, but it can also hopefully give you the opportunity to look outward and to see what’s going on in your community and hopefully not police other people in your community. Because I also see l so much community and behavior policing in a really depressing way. Like for example, online forums. Like there was a group that was created in my local context that was about ‘care mongering’, but then it ended up it felt like being more about policing neighborhood behavior. For example, “did you see person X do this thing in Neighbourhood Spot”. It didn’t feel caring. It felt oppressive to me.

I’m really nervous about that kind of like watching. And I feel that there’s something — that the way in which maybe people or individuals or communities are policing other communities, it reminds me a lot of the policing of young people in schools. You know what I mean?

CB:        Like the ways in which young people are watched these like very particular ways. For example, “I know the way that you’re supposed to be acting in the space and I see that you’re acting in a different way.” I think that’s super problematic, but again, it’s making me think about school and what is the function of school. I mean, it’s so custodial. Isn’t that what I miss about childcare? I miss the custodial piece. I don’t really care for the educative piece at all. I feel like we’re dealing with the educative piece at home very well, but boy, I miss the custodial piece.

SC:        I mean, there’s a few things I want to tease out there. One, I want to point viewers to Funke Aladejebi’s talk because she identified that a lot of things that people are talking about now as inequities are things that Black activists in particular and racialized activists in particular have been like fighting against forever. And one of those things is policing, right? Hyper policing. And as a white person with white privilege, it wasn’t something that I thought of to connect those two pieces.

Another thing she had said was like, “The hope is important, but action is more important.” And so to me, those were such powerful connections that she made to be like, right, we don’t need to start new movements. We need to work with the activists that are already there to figure out how to be allies, to figure out how to fight against things that people have been identifying. And I think policing is a really good piece of that.

So yeah, like, thanks for making that connection. I mean, it’s not a great topic to make these connections, but I think the more we’re thinking about those things, the more important. Because again, like I think about teachers saying, like, “I feel a lot more freedom because I’m not doing curriculum stuff so much as I’m just ensuring the care and relationship building of my students.” And so then, what function does curriculum and the schoolings do other than keep students in line and doing this type of discipline?

So I’m hoping that it will also shake up the ways that we’re thinking about our content, we’re thinking about our teaching practices to make it less disciplinary and more relationship-based. Because I’ve talked to teachers too that are like, “Oh, the curriculum is really open,” until there’s something I don’t really want to do. And then all of a sudden, that curriculum could really shutdown. And I think that’s where that disciplining comes in.

CB:        Yeah. In the context of New Brunswick, our curriculum is not, especially the social studies, history curriculum, K-12 is not particularly open. Like, elementary is more open, but secondary hasn’t been updated in so long. I did this research project with these wonderful Ph.D. student, Amelia Thorpe, and we looked at curriculum documents and policies, exploring through a discourse analysis the ways in which the terms queer, trans, nonbinary, gay and cis women were represented or not represented in the curriculum. The only time that gay people came up at all was in grade 12, there was like an assignment suggestion that said, “You know, write a letter to the editor for or against gay marriage.” So I think curriculum does a lot more harm than good a lot of times, especially when curriculum writers with good intentions sort of try to do some kind of social justice work, but don’t deeply think about, negotiate with, or talk to community members about the kinds of histories they’d like to have represented. I think we will see a lot of problematic “anti-racist” curriculum writing by primarily white folk in my context (New Brunswick) in the coming years. And it’s a kind of violence too. A kind of erasure. Who gets a seat at the table to write curriculum for Social Studies? Who doesn’t? In our context in New Brunswick, there are Black and Indigenous historians like Mary McCarthy and Elders Dave and Imelda Perley who have so much knowledge about the histories of Black and Indigenous peoples in this place, but again, the curriculum is often written and reviewed by white folks. It’s a problem.

SC:        Well, I think of Ian Duncan who’s a teacher who is really interested in teaching more LGBTQ to spirit histories. And he’s like, the LGBTQ issues are not mentioned in the curriculum, but it’s in the glossary? So like, how do you then reconcile that? Like, why are we defining it if we aren’t interested in exploring these histories?

And of course, like in Ontario, there is a lot of options. But you need to know and be comfortable with those histories in order to be like, I’m going to use this as an example of whatever, right?

CB:        Yeah, for sure. And I think that is the activist component of history education, is figuring out the ways in which you can sneak in and create opportunities for people to learn about stories and communities that they wouldn’t learn about because it’s not like Vimy Ridge  blah, blah, blah, World War I. Do you know what I mean?

I think that that’s the space for people like me who teach social studies education where you can see the teaching and research coming together. Part of this work is in creating kind of opportunities for pre-service teachers, but then also in-service teachers to learn about histories from this place. Because there’s this assumption, when you teach history in New Brunswick for example, that queer people didn’t exist here. And Wolastokiyik and Mi’kmaq communities and Black communities don’t exist here. And of course, that’s not the case at all.

SC:        Oh, really? It was just like a whole province of straight people.

CB:        And white people.

SC:        Right.

CB:        If you look at the way we teach history here, it’s about many men who were White and propertied.

SC:        Right. Yeah. And one of the things that I like to talk about in the series, but also like the video series, the bigger not “Pandemic Pedagogy” more generally is for teachers really to understand their purpose of teaching history. Because research has shown that teachers teach with the purpose they define before coming into a teacher education program.

So, if people start articulating that and being clear with that, then they might be able to have a better understanding of where the things that they don’t know lie, right? Like for me, I understand the purpose of teaching history as to make change in the world. And in that being my purpose, I recognize that perhaps some people might see things that I’m doing as less practical than what’s needed in the classroom. And I try to balance that, but like being explicit about my perspective allows me to understand implicit parts. And I think that this allows for a moment for people to kind of think about their purpose and hopefully to maybe recognize how it could shift and change their teaching once they get back to the classroom. Because if we’re just doing the same thing that we did six months ago, six months from now, that would feel really weird.

So that kind of segues to my second question about do you think we will teach history any different because of this moment? A lot of people say we should, but do you think we actually will?

CB:        I don’t know about ‘we’, but I think I will. Like, I can’t speak for all history educators. Yeah, I think that the pandemic for me, it’s going to provide a way to go back. To get people to empathize maybe more explicitly with other histories and communities that they haven’t learned about in their own formal schooling maybe. As you’re speaking about here, like things that they didn’t learn about before, they’re not going to be comfortable teaching, but we can always bring it back to the experiences they had during the pandemic experiences of isolation and confusion and like on one hand, deeply trusting the state and then also like should I trust the state? I feel like those experiences that people are having on an individual and community level are very useful in thinking about the experiences that other folks, other communities—particularly Black and Indigenous communities—have had in the territory that we are calling Canada.

I think that there’s a lot of opportunities in terms of rethinking assessment. The kinds of things we want students to do and learn. I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who teaches pre-service teachers about teaching history. I think about how I assess the work that they do. And more and more, I want them to make things. To make art, to make critique, to learn about something that happened before, and then make something new out of it. To make a film, to make — I don’t know. To make lots of different things.

Like I’m so inspired by the Graphic History Collective and their Remember/Resist/Redraw poster project. I like to get my pre-service teacher elementary students to do a similar practice from the context of New Brunswick. So, a person, a place, an event that you didn’t know about, but you think is worth talking about in the context of social studies or history education. Those kinds of assessments, to me, are deeply interesting and important.

And then I think about the Wolastoqiyik musician Jeremy Dutcher who’s from Tobique First Nation and his Polaris-prize winning CD which is really a history project. I’m so interested in people following that kind of methodology. Jeremy Dutcher went to The Archives at the Canadian Museum of History and he found this anthropologist collection on wax cylinders of songs from his community from like 100 years ago, and then he used that , listened to it, l reproduced it and then added more of his own voice, like his own reinterpretation of what he had heard. He is literally singing alongside his past relations. So it’s like activism, it’s creation, it’s looking back and looking forward and creating something new, and that’s the way I want to teach people to do history in New Brunswick.

SC:        Well, that’s the way I would like people to teach history around the world. So [inaudible 0:21:09.6*used to start] with New Brunswick. And as we will together, we will make it bigger.

But like I spoke to a student that I did research with when she was in high school, but I spoke to her now as an adult, and she said that the most powerful lessons, history lessons that she ever learned were the ones in elementary school because they were creating, they were doing. They were engaging in arts, they were doing interdisciplinary work. Whereas I think once you get to high school, it’s so much like, they need to know this because they’re about to go out in the world. And it’s like, well, no, let them create, let them do, let them activate, let them understand themselves, let them understand the world because this is where history is going to have that lasting resonance with them.

CB:        Yeah, I think so.

SC:        Yeah. And that’s why in my work, in my research, I say that we need to imagine a new ‘we’ in order to make change in the world and while ‘we’ is not mono — well, I mean, I guess ‘we’ by definition is monolithic. It’s not the ‘we’ that we’re using now, but a ‘we’ that is challenged by all of these different experiences. But the imagining part is as important for me because it has to be based in some sort of vision of something different and that vision often comes from the arts. So do you have any — as a way to kind of wrap up our conversation, which we could probably keep going all night, do you have any thoughts about this notion of imagining a new ‘we’ during this time or after this time?

CB:        I mean, I hope for a new more community-minded collective way of thinking, but I’m a little bit skeptical. I’m a little bit maybe pessimistic about a coming together. I don’t know. Like in my teaching, when I do this kind of work where I push people to think maybe uncomfortably about the careful friendship between white supremacy and history, or to think about the deep friendship between patriarchy and history.  I find there’s so much pushback to these very easy to prove critiques, and that’s even within a room of history-minded folk who are interested in thinking and teaching differently about history, and they want to make change in some way.

Even within that microcosm of the classroom, I don’t know if I’m making change. And if that, if I can’t imagine change within that group of keen 25 students, I don’t know. I guess I’m concerned about who this imagined we would be.  I worry that a reimagined ‘we’ might be a more palatable version of what we’ve got already. A more watered down version of white supremacy in history curriculum and teaching Do you know what I mean?

SC:        Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that’s a valid pessimism. No, I think that’s a very valid concern. I think that’s a very valid concern. With any sort of ‘we’, especially when the conversation comes from an understanding that the way that we often think about a ‘we’ in Canada is through a multicultural lens which uses whiteness as center. One —

CB:        And a neutral center.

SC:        That’s right. Whiteness as a neutral unmarked, don’t need to say it. Just the Canadian center.

CB:        The notion that “I have no culture, just whiteness” is so problematic, but also so pervasive—especially in teacher education in New Brunswick.

SC:        No culture, that’s right. One of the things I found in my research which I talk about in my upcoming book is how easy it was, and I know that you have experienced this as well. Although we haven’t talked about it, so that’s an assumption. How easy it is to be like — to look at students who are racialized and be like those students need to learn my history as a white person. And like once that happens, we can just move along and then maybe we can do those other histories as well. And that was such a problematic stance to witness and to see reproduced over and over and over again.

My hope drawing on things that you were saying earlier is that people seeing different perspectives of experiences might allow them to come into classroom spaces with an openness to recognize that things that they might have seen or expected were different because of the pandemic.

So, I mean, that draws from your second answer. I don’t know if — I don’t know. What do you think about that?

CB:        I don’t know. Like, if you think about something like the erasure of settler colonialism in the context of history teaching here, I wonder like what would it mean for people to think about settler colonialism in a move toward action? Like what does that actually — what does that mean in this territory? In New Brunswick? In unceded and unsurrendered Wolastoqiyik and Mi’kmaq territory?

And I think that if we’re imagining a ‘we’ and we’re talking about things like settler colonialism, I can’t be the one to redesign or re imagine what this looks like. -Even though I’m the white face teaching history with my Ph.D. or whatever, I can’t be the one talking about what that ‘we’ looks like. I think that’s my reticence or my fear about this notion of ‘we’ is like who gets to define who “we” are or what “we” looks like. Settler colonialism is one example. I mean, anti-racism in the context of the Maritimes is another example. In my teaching, I talk about how anti-Black racism is bad in society and in history teaching. Like, of course, that’s true, but in order to take action against anti-black racism as communities, I think that one thing I have to do is take a deep step back and listen to community members. For example, in Fredericton, primarily Black students have stared a Black Lives Matter- New Brunswick chapter. One of the things that they are calling for is donations and access to space to meet. These are things that I can listen to, and act upon. So, I think imagining a ‘we’ could be imagining how to step back as a person who benefits from white supremacy, I guess. That would be my version of what a reimagined ‘we’ in the context of history teaching might look like. It should be a stepping back white supremacy, stepping back patriarchy and transphobia and homophobia and what that might look like. But I don’t know that I should be the one who’s going to be able to drive that ‘we’ if that makes any sense.

SC:        Yeah, I think that’s a really powerful way to end, and that’s certainly come up in some other conversations too. Like if the ‘we’ just looks like an expanded version of what you have, then that’s nothing. That we have to ‘we’ — whoever that ‘we’ is in that particular sentence, we have to really have a keen ear and eye and heart to be able to recognize the ways that we perhaps as white people can step back to be able to understand that it will look different than what we’ve had before. And that is scary, but also kind of an exciting possibility after this time. I mean, it’s a big leap, but I think that again, if we want to hope, then we have to do. And so, what would that look like?

And I guess I put that out to the people that are watching, like what would that look like? What does it look like for people who are white, for example, to take a step back to be able to think about settler colonialism and open up a new version of ‘we’.

So thank you so much, Casey, for bringing those complex ideas to this conversation. I think it’s a really powerful element to a conversation. We’ve had like 30 people now in the series, and this just adds to the complexity. So thank you again. It was so wonderful to talk with you.

CB:        Thank you so much for having me.