My first real job was working as a summer camp counselor at Camp Ramapo, a residential program in upstate New York serving young people labeled as having “social, emotional and behavioral challenges.” I loved this work and spent the next 7 summers learning, growing and connecting with campers and counselors at Ramapo. I followed this passion to other roles in youth development—in residential care, the backcountry with Outward Bound, as an after-school program director in Brooklyn and an intervention specialist in Oakland, CA. However, the more I learned and grew as a professional the more I realized how much systemic racism shaped the institutions in which I was working and how rarely and superficially this was acknowledged and explored by myself and my white colleagues. I became interested in understanding this more deeply which brought me to an interest in history and in particular the threads of white supremacy woven into the fabric of educational and social services institutions. I had the privilege of studying at the Graduate School of Education at the University of California at Berkeley and earned a PhD in Social and Cultural Studies in Education. My dissertation focused on how the institutionalization of punitive and criminalizing disciplinary policies that disproportionately harmed students of color in New York City was influenced by white resistance to school integration.

I have worked with hundreds of schools and youth development organizations with a focus on building the capacity of adults to understand and respond to behavior as communication. This includes understanding their own behavior, triggers and responses by engaging in reflective practice. For white educators in particular this practice requires an analysis of how they have been socialized to participate in systems that harm, exclude and label students of color disproportionately.

James Baldwin wrote: “I am what time, circumstance and history have made me, certainly, but I am also much more than that. So are we all.” As an educator, scholar, mother and collaborator I seek to recognize how I have been shaped by time, circumstance and history while striving to also be much more than that.