Promoting Division in the Homeschooling World

Promoting Division in the Homeschooling World - Heritage Mom

source: https://heritagemom.com/2023/04/20/promoting-division-in-the-homeschooling-world/

Have you ever wondered what it's like to be hunted? To have people sniffing around, salivating, waiting for you to say or do something "wrong" so they can give themselves permission to erase or demean you?

I'm sharing a story with you, but not because I want pity. Instead, I want to expose what happens behind the scenes in the hope that it will convince others to stop this awful behavior. I want to educate people who don't know some of what it's like to be a Black voice in the Christian homeschooling world today.

Disclaimer: What I'm about to write does NOT apply to all Christian homeschool conferences. I speak at multiple Christian conferences run by people who would not allow things like this to happen on their watch. Please don't misquote me or say that I've said anything other than what I'm choosing to write.

I was asked to be a keynote speaker at a Christian homeschooling conference taking place this weekend in Spokane, Washington. I agreed to speak, and it was a pretty easy decision because I knew that I'd have so much in common with their audience. As we chatted about flight info, they asked for a list of speaking topics to choose from. I sent this list of possible speaking topics upon request (actual screenshot):

I was looking forward to sharing my experiences as a homeschooling mom and was completely caught off guard by their next email, which simply asked:

What is your stance on CRT, wokeness, the 1619 project, and cancel culture?

Huh? What does that have to do with ANY of the topics I offered to share?

ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

I wrote back with the following note. Here is the Instagram post referenced in the screenshot below.

The woman confirmed that they had not asked previous speakers about these issues. I quickly checked the speaker line-up (which has mysteriously disappeared since I first spoke about it publicly) on their website to confirm what I assumed to be true. I was the only Black speaker and the only one who had to answer this set of questions. She also shared that one of the board members found a video where I was interviewed by the founder of the history curriculum company, Woke Homeschooling, and she was concerned about some of the terminology used.

I was confused by the Woke Homeschooling interview reference. The interviewer was my friend Delina, and though I couldn't remember every detail of our recorded conversation, I couldn't imagine that we'd said something offensive or worrisome. I went back and listened to the entire recording again, and I found it to be a lovely interview. In fact, I think it's one of my best ones ever. It was mostly about my book, and no special terminology was used.

Clearly, they didn't actually listen to the "scary" interview, but they're reacting solely to the name of her business. In any case, it's one of 50+ interviews I've done in the past few years, and they could've listened to any of them as many are linked on my website. It made me especially uncomfortable that they focused on one of the few interviews of me speaking with another Black woman and felt that I should explain it away and prove myself worthy of speaking to their audience.

It felt like a witch hunt. As if they were looking for some small opening that would permit them to easily discredit my work. Searching for something that might stain their stage. It was clear to me that they didn't even listen to the interview because then they would've heard a beautiful conversation. The affiliation was enough.

"Amber's cousin's sister rode a bus last year and she sat next to Oprah's hairdresser who's married to a guy who wore a woke t-shirt to the gym. Twice. So I think we should talk to her about it because she might bring it up in her talk on morning-time poetry."

I realized that it obviously wasn't really about the interview at all. It was about me as a person, and that made the whole thing especially icky. It's almost like reaching out to a speaker who will be discussing "Reading Aloud to Children" and "Finding Beauty in Nature" and asking:

What's your stance on abortion?

How do you feel about immigration?

Did you vote for Trump or Biden?

Do you stand for or against gun ownership?

And did the January 6th incident at the Capitol make you happy or sad?

Who does that?

And even if the crazy world does do that, why would we, as homeschooling moms and, in this particular case, sisters in Christ, do that to each other?

When will the madness stop?

This growing obsession with "outing" Black people who may or may not feel differently than you on politicized topics is turning into the new Jim Crow homeschooling version of voter literacy tests. In these cases, Black conference speakers receive a different set of politically charged questions than white speakers, and we're not permitted to speak if we don't answer them satisfactorily. Thus, keeping these particular conferences as white as they've always been.

Behind-the-scenes conversation (as I imagine it):

"I have a live one here, folks. I can't tell whether she's tame or one of those Blackity-Black ones. We better ask her, so we'll know for sure that she'll be a worthy puppet for us. If we have a good Christian Black-ish one on the website, we won't be criticized for being all white, but they're getting harder to find.

What's that? You think I should ask all of the speakers the same questions?

Why would I do that? I mean, obviously, the white speakers are acceptable. We only have to vet the feral Black ones because they might say something Black on stage.

What? She's our sister in Christ?

Hahahaha! That doesn't matter anymore. It's 2023! The MOST crucial information for us to capture for this Christian conference is her position on politicized topics that she won't be speaking on.

I don't even want her talking about books, poetry, or finding beauty in unexpected places if she might say something that goes against my most closely held political beliefs, the beliefs that override any and everything else.

Did I ask the speakers what they thought about abortion, Charlottesville, January 6th, white nationalism, the Confederate flag, or immigration?

Oh no! I would never ask a good, safe white person those questions. My goodness! What kind of a person do you think I am? That would be so rude and off-topic. No, no. I don't question our fellow white people. I know that they all agree with me. I only ask Black people about all of the universal Black stuff I see them whining about online because it's all evil. Sinful.

Do I ask white speakers if they're racist before allowing them to speak about math and raising children to love the Lord? Nooooo. That's not important. They're safe and Christian enough for me as long as they're white!

We must be relentless with the Blackity-Black ones, though, because God forbid we allow a might-be-woke one to slip through the cracks. She may say something helpful from the stage or strike up a meaningful conversation with attendees in the hall, and we can't have that.

She pushed back on answering our irrelevant racial questions? {GASP} She's one of THEM. Well, we'll show her. So glad that we dodged that bullet!

Now we can honestly say that we tried to get a Black one, and no one will be able to criticize our lily-white conference.

What happened next

After respectfully expressing my concerns about the nature of the questions (being unrelated to my speaking topics) and being singled out with these questions, here's the official email that I received:

My thoughts on being "unasked" to speak

Everyone has boundaries, and I'm holding onto mine. I will not participate in this game. And if that means that I'm not asked to speak at these types of conferences, then so be it. I will sleep soundly at night knowing that I didn't tap dance for the lost.

No one is getting rich from speaking at homeschooling conferences. Trust me. After considering all the hours spent on preparation, travel, and the conference itself, I actually lose money half the time. And when the conference is too far away to drive, I'm also away from my loving family and safe village of friends. The only reason I do this is that I care and want to share my experience and knowledge with others.

It's not worth the abuse, and I will not participate in the witch hunt.

This is not the first time I've endured bullying in the Christian homeschool world. When I speak, attendees regularly approach me and say the most ignorant things. They ask racially and politically motivated questions for no reason other than me breathing and being Black. I've been uninvited to things before and for similar reasons.

It all needs to stop.

I've had plenty of Black friends question why I bother to put myself in these spaces, and I always give the same answer:

I want to show up for the mom who needs to see and hear me.

I was that mom a decade ago, and I felt terribly alone. Now I have just enough of a platform to help others, and I want to do that. But when I experience these setbacks, I begin to question if the effort is worthwhile.

A couple of years ago, a woman on Instagram heard an interview where I stated that homeschooling conference organizers should invite more people of color to speak. She commented that Black speakers should just put themselves out there and stop expecting the white conference organizers to do all the work of finding and asking us.

I laughed at the time, and I'm laughing now. It reminds me of this clip from James Baldwin:

I know that some people won't see the correlation with this video, but I see it very clearly. Baldwin is responding to a gross oversimplification of his stated concerns after his lived experiences are denied and swept under the rug as inconsequential. Baldwin is being blamed for daring to state the obvious. As if, somehow, our circumstances would improve if we would just stop telling the truth. No folks, this "is not the paranoia of my own mind."

When it comes to speaking at these conferences, it's absolutely not about just putting yourself out there. It's not like we (Black speakers) can always just show up with our talks on literature, travel, and poetry like everyone else and be accepted.

In some cases, there are gatekeepers who want to control not only what we say on stage but what we think in our homes or when we're in safe spaces with our friends. They evaluate our associations looking for areas on which to pounce, and when they find nothing, they invent things to help satisfy their predatory hunger.

There are people who are so terrified of being unable to control the narrative that they try to prevent us from opening our mouths in their presence, even if some of the conference attendees would greatly benefit from hearing us speak. They're so threatened by what they see on TV and conjure up in their imaginations that they'll rescind speaking offers to a Christian peer who refuses to answer a particular set of "Black speaker" questions.

I've thought long and hard about publicly sharing this conference's name. Every day, I go back and forth. Ultimately, I've decided to share the name of the conference because the organization should be able to stand behind the Board's choices. However, I've masked the names of the individual women who emailed me because I couldn't make peace with sharing their names. Please remember that it's not only about this conference. It's about the entire toxic environment that allows this type of behavior to exist.

What do I want you to take away from this?

The Christian homeschooling world can be an abusive and toxic environment for Black people.

Within that world, there are beautiful people who show welcoming love and kindness. Some of them are my dear friends and biggest supporters, and I hope they'll call out their peers who are behaving this way whenever they see it. I hope that they'll demand better.

If you're one of the people obsessed with the questions above, I hope you'll see that you're stirring up malice and inventing division even where there is none. YOU are making everything worse. And by abusing your gatekeeper role at the homeschool conferences to silence Black voices that won't bow down to your ridiculous ways, you're proving the very point of all the things you're railing against.

I was canceled for not sharing my thoughts on cancel culture. Does anyone else see the silliness in this?

I'm the only homeschooling speaker that I know of who repeatedly talks about the need for every child to be seen and valued. For all of us to come together to raise a generation of kids who not just tolerate one another but truly feel connected. And to my knowledge, I'm the only homeschooler to appear on stage after stage and emphatically state that cross-racial relationships - particularly those between women of color and white women - are critical for our health, the health of our families, and the health of our nation. I even wrote a book about it! (Please read A Place to Belong) So why, then, of all the people they could pick on, would they come up with me being the potential loose canon that they have to question, monitor, and control?

It makes no sense. Unless... my very presence made them feel nervous and like they were taking a big gamble by giving a mic to someone who may or may not think differently than them on topics that they've deemed the most important and relevant. Unless they feel that my skin color makes me potentially harmful or dangerous to the women that might be in the room when I speak, women like many of you.

When you block Black speakers, you block Black attendees. When we're not on stage, many of the families you purport to serve don't feel comfortable attending. Why? Because they wisely figure that there must be an issue. And I think that's something you care absolutely nothing about.

Please stop pretending that you're a welcoming crowd. You are not. You're a dangerous crowd, and you should add a disclaimer on your website:

Though we claim to be Christian, we don't actually hold ourselves to standards of behavior that would demonstrate our faith. We hold our political beliefs to be above the Word, and if you're Black, you cannot hold a mic in our presence if you don't first prove that you think just like us. Please note: Proof of past voting record is required at the door.

Please get yourself together.

"Sometimes the first step toward change is closing our eyes, taking a breath, and imagining a different way." - Jacqueline Woodson, Author

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