Xiomara Padamsee:
One of the tensions that I feel every single day is this idea of working toward equity by necessity because we’re working within existing systems that are so built up while wanting for liberation. For me, equity is about having a fair shot within an existing system. It’s a critically important thing because we can’t wipe the slate clean. We are operating in existing systems, and so as much as I would love to wave a magic wand and say, let’s just have a do-over, unfortunately the systems exist, but also so do all of our habits and structures and we are breathing the very same toxic air all the time. But doing that while also trying to redefine what would it look like if we could wave a magic wand, if we could start over, what would liberation look like outside of the confines and constraints of existing systems that are still anchored in the same mess, that is a tension for me every single day.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Xiomara Padamsee, founder and CEO of Promise54. This episode is a recording of a den talk at the Gates Foundation Network for School Improvement, Fall 2022, Community of Practice event in San Diego. If the term den talk is new to you, it’s basically a cross between a traditional panel discussion and eavesdropping on a really interesting conversation happening at the next table in a café. This particular conversation takes place between Xiomara, who you just heard, and Adelric McCain, Senior Director of Transformation and Impact with the Network for College Success. And it’s moderated by Michelle Sadrena Pledger. Xiomara and Adelric have a wealth of experience and insight between them and we are so excited to share this episode with you.

Michelle Sadrena Pledger:
So, welcome. My name is Dr. Michelle Sadrena Pledger, and you are at a den talk called Weaving Equity Work and Improvement Work. And we are here with Xiomara Padamsee from Promise54 and Adelric McCain from Network for College Success. Now the way, yes, let’s clap for that. So just in case you’ve never come to a den talk, the way it works is they’re going to have an intimate conversation with each other that we are just observing, like creepers. We’re just listening in on their conversation. So they may not be looking directly at you like in a panel formation, they’re talking to each other. We’re going to listen in and learn as well, and then there’s going to be a time about 25 minutes in or so, I’ll interrupt their conversation and you’ll be like, oh, I want to hear that last point, and then we’ll let them finish that sentence and then we’re going to turn it over to Q&A from the audience, right. And so you’ll get to ask both of them questions.
We do ask that they’re actual questions because you know how sometimes people get a mic and they’re like, like with me, they just want to talk and it’s not really a question, they just want to share their thoughts about something? In this situation, we do want an actual question. And then the speakers are going to try to be as efficient as they can and economize their words so we can get to as many of your questions as possible. And then the last five minutes, I’ll invite them to share their closing thoughts with you so they’ll have about two and a half minutes each to do that. And we have opposite of Vegas rules here. So what happens in the den, we don’t want it to stay here. We want that learning to go as far and wide and be supportive of your context in all of the work that you do. All right, let’s let the intimate conversation begin.

Xiomara Padamsee:
Well, hello.

Adelric McCain:
Hello, Xiomara. How are you?

Xiomara Padamsee:
So we just met, we should probably start with some intros.

Adelric McCain:
Let’s do that. Let’s do that.

Xiomara Padamsee:
You want me to go first?

Adelric McCain:
Please, please, please.

Xiomara Padamsee:
All right. Well, I’m super excited to meet you. I’m very excited for this conversation wherever it goes. I’m Xiomara, my pronouns are she and her, and I guess some important things to know about me are I’m a descendant of the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean. I identify in lots of ways, many of them very, very important to me. I identify as a cisgender able-bodied woman. I identify as a mom, as a wife. I identify as queer, Latina, also multiethnic. My parents both grew up low income by US standards. My mom’s Puerto Rican and Cuban from the South Bronx, proud Nuyorican woman, and my father is Muslim Indian from Bombay, and he was first-gen immigrant to the United States at 18 alone. And they met in college, they were first generation, both of them.
They actually met at Brandeis University, which is a Jewish college in Boston. They were both part of the diversity efforts. So my mom was in the domestic arm, my father the international, and they stuck together like glue and they hit it off. They fell madly in love, and together through education, through their support and love of one another, they broke the intergenerational cycle of poverty for our family. They fell in love with education as a way to define their own life prospects and ended up each getting their masters, each getting their PhDs, and by the time I came along, we were comfortably middle class. My house was full of spices from all around the world and different rhythms and language and religion and countries of origin and really learning and seeing about each other and all those differences and valuing and affirming and loving each other through that. That was their definition of love for themselves as a couple and it’s the environment where I grew up with my big sister.
And it was beautiful and it was full and it was loud and it was inside my house. So every time I left my house in the morning, I was surrounded by whiteness. I was surrounded by white kids and white adults because my parents had moved to a middle class neighborhood that was white, all white. Not largely white, it was all white. And so every time I left my house in the morning as a child, I was the only brown child around and that’s true for my schools and my social environment. And so I learned super, super, super early about what white dominant culture looks like and what it means to protect white comfort and how to read a room and navigate an environment and figure out what is expected of me and how should I move in order to be seen as enough and valid and worthwhile and smart.
And I built those skills super early and used them all the way through school and ultimately ended up doing social justice work because of being super passionate about needing to be in a world that is different, understanding the racialized dynamics of our society, but wanting to change the realities for the future to one of equity and liberation and joy and humanity. And so I went into social justice work and I found myself surrounded by white supremacy culture. And so I spent 20 plus years as a queer, brown woman in social justice organizations working for equity in this country, primarily education and still very much using all my skills around navigating white supremacy culture.
And now about eight years ago, I kind of broke off from that in an effort to build a different kind of way. So I’m now the CEO and founder of Promise54, which is a national nonprofit working to help support organizations doing social justice work to create internal environments where their people can thrive, bring all of that, all of what’s really them, be whole and, in so doing, thrive and do better work for our communities and for our kids and for our families and for our country, but also just because we all deserve it. So that’s a little bit about me.

Adelric McCain:
Thank you. That was a gift. Thank you so much.

Xiomara Padamsee:
My pleasure.

Adelric McCain:
So I’m Del. We have a connection in that I was born in Boston and my family is from the east coast, all up and down the east coast. So my mother’s side of the family is from rural Virginia and she grew up with my father, but my father was actually from New Jersey and moved down to Virginia. They both met at Virginia State University. My mom grew up rural, poor. My dad grew up in seemingly, at the time for Black middle class, my maternal, what’s it, my paternal grandmother actually got an advanced degree in the ’50s. She was a Black woman who did psychology and she was a school psychologist for all of Petersburg, Virginia. So education in my family has been forefront.
But both of them growing up in the Jim Crow South informed how they raised me, right. And so born in Boston, my dad has a job with Honeywell, which then moved into the headquarters in Minnesota in 1981. So I went from Boston, which was every single group of people. You talk about the spices. I remember as a child walking out in the summertime with my mom and out of people’s houses, you just smelled just different flavors, right. And then I moved to the whitest place on the [inaudible 00:09:04], right. I mean, people I know think Oregon is, but at the time-

Xiomara Padamsee:
Minnesota.

Adelric McCain:
… there was no Black families on our block and in our neighborhood when we first moved there. And immediately I was introduced to the virulent hate of white supremacy and white culture just by, I remember distinctly my mom pulling into a Cub Foods, which is a supermarket, parking spot, and unbeknownst to her, she maybe took someone’s spot, but the guy took a point off to say, got out his car and called my mom the N word and bitch. And I’m six and taking this all in and I’m like, this is nowhere near what I experienced in Boston, even though Boston has its own racism, right, but you have your neighborhoods and your pockets and you can be with your own people, felt such isolation. That was my schooling pretty much growing up. I mean, mind you, more people of color started coming into the school systems.
I also need to note that I didn’t… I started off in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which was more diverse. But my mom moved us out to Bloomington, Minnesota, and I don’t know if you know anything about Minnesota, at that time, again, it was very homogeneous. I didn’t have a Black teacher ever. I had a Black coach and I hated school. I did it because my family valued it so much and my mom’s single premise is don’t do anything to embarrass us, so that’s why I did school. But I did everything to avoid doing school the traditional way. So I skipped, and instead of reading Shakespeare, I was reading Derrick Bell’s Faces at the Bottom of the Well at the pool hall, right, while we’re at the pool hall. But I came back for tests so that I could stay eligible because my worth at my school was only how fast I could run around a track or how much I could kick a ball, right.
So I got into education early. So it was actually my junior year, it was a teacher who saw me for once, it was a white teacher, his name is Kent Pekel and he used to be the President of Search Institute that does a lot of work around developmental relationships and it’s just funny that he, as my 11th grade teacher, changed my whole trajectory about what I was thinking about with education. I was ready just to graduate from high school and be done. He’s like, no, you’re going to college. I just can’t see it. And he said, and I want you to go to Morehouse, right. And at the time, I wasn’t even thinking about Morehouse College, I wasn’t even thinking. But this guy, he saw me and through his support, I ended up being able to attend Morehouse, which also just shaped my worldview significantly, especially coming from Minnesota. And I’m like, I want to do what that guy does. I want to touch young folks in a way that actually you can build relationships and it actually changes their thinking and their worldview.
And so very eager, so even in 11th grade summer, I got into a program where we were able to do summer school with younger folks or whatever, so I was all out into education. When I got their freshman year at Morehouse, I knew I was going to do education even though they didn’t have an ed department. And so I studied that course and I finally got into my classroom and I knew my why. I knew my why. So in about three years into teaching, I had the opportunity to be in a program of critical friends group training and it was with Greg Peters was a trainer, and Camilla Green, and the only reason I’m name dropping is because these folks just really changed my life. What they got me to understand is like, oh my God, I’ve been doing my babies so much harm in my classroom for the past three years because I’m sitting there pushing the masters crap. You know what I mean?
And I really, like, it hit me like a ton of bricks how much disservice I’d done for those three years. Luckily I’ve been trying to dedicate my life in education, even though I’m out of the classroom, to interrupting that way of being in the classroom. And now as a Senior Director of Transformation and Impact at Network for College Success, I’m no longer in the classroom but I’m trying to expand our impact so that we are not only just interrupting but actually transforming the way that we do school, right, because it’s just not working. So that’s me.

Xiomara Padamsee:
Ooh, that’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing all that.

Adelric McCain:
Thank you.

Xiomara Padamsee:
I love how you talk about some of the formative moments, interactions, relationships that sounds like opened up your thinking in your world and how some of those go way back. I remember, it’s striking to hear you talk about your early education and I also had all white teachers all the way up through 12th grade with the exception of one year, which was first grade, and I’ll tell you, I’m 48 years old and I remember this, which was the one Black or brown teacher I ever had, which was first grade, Mrs. Lee. I don’t remember much about being in first grade, but I remember sitting in a circle and I just remember wanting to soak her in. It was like, I don’t know what I’m experiencing but it’s different and it feels like home in a way that I am not used to. It feels like I can let down my guard and just be absorbing, and I just remember wanting to soak her in. I don’t remember much else but Mrs. Lee, I will never forget Mrs. Lee, my first grade teacher.
And I love how you talk about when you knew and how you knew so early and then you went to Morehouse knowing you wanted to do education, and I think… I didn’t know I wanted to do education. I had no idea I would end up in the field of education, but I think I can retrofit the steps. There was a moment in my middle school where despite, I also hated school. I hated school because I didn’t belong anywhere and I hated school because it never came easy. I had to work really hard and it was the double education of the education and then also trying to navigate the system all the time and it was exhausting and I hated that. And so I was in honors classes in the tracked system, that was very hardcore in my middle school. And despite that, when it came time to figure out kind of what classes are we putting kids into for high school, they were channeling me into the basic of three paths.
And I remember that moment and I remember sitting in a guidance counselor’s office and I remember being like, I don’t entirely understand what’s happening, but something feels off. I remember when I went home and I remember the rage in my house and I remember my parents literally dropping everything and having the privilege to do so and marching down to that school and not leaving the school until they changed what was going to happen, which changed the trajectory of my entire life. So that was probably one of the first moments where I realized there’s a path for me and there is a massive amount of privilege in the fact that I have parents who can navigate this system to make that path available for me, and that’s not a privilege that I earned. It’s a privilege I was born into and it shouldn’t be a privilege, it should just be a right. And so I think that was probably my first moment where I was like, huh, something has to really fundamentally change.

Adelric McCain:
I resonate with that hard, especially now as a parent and having a child in a school system that sees her but doesn’t honor all of her brilliance. And that’s the case for the majority of Black children that attend this school and in this school system. And the fact that I have some educational chops and the fact that her mom, my partner, is a advocacy lawyer, we’re up in their cakes all the time, okay. But I recognize that not everybody has that, and I know that even for me growing up, my mom was a strong advocate, but she worked three jobs just so that we could stay where she wanted us to stay at. So if you don’t have that advocacy, if you don’t have that, you could get caught up in this system. And that’s the work that I’m trying to, you shouldn’t have to have someone who’s savvy who has to navigate all that just for educators to see the brilliance of all children, specifically Black and brown children.

Xiomara Padamsee:
That’s right, absolutely. And the toll that it takes on the entire family unit, right, to have to be advocating in that way, but then also for the child who has to witness these moments and these experiences, whether it’s parking lots or classrooms, and constantly face that dual pressure of how you have to navigate this world that doesn’t, not just not feeling a sense of belonging in but actually would prefer you not to be there. That was my experience. We would actually prefer for your presence to not be here. I remember a moment in my early middle school, there were maybe four other BIPOC, any students of color in the school and none of them were in any of my classes. And so we would stick together like glue, like my parents in college. And I remember a moment my mother called the school, the principal answered, something about navigating after school, whatever, who knows. And all I remember is the principal said, oh, the social butterfly’s not around, with this incredible dripping, sarcastic, just disdain.
It was disdain from my absolute, just the craziness that I would want to find any sort of connection or belonging with other Black and brown students and have the audacity to cross the lines between the honors classes and the rest of what’s going on in those schools to find any little morsel of belonging. It takes such an incredible toll on the entire family unit and it’s just the vestiges of 400 years of crazy.

Adelric McCain:
So how are you thinking in your approach to both interruption and transformation with your work? What does that look like for you on a day-to-day, and then what are some of the aspirational kind of goals with that work?

Xiomara Padamsee:
Yeah. I mean, for me, my whole kind of mind frame, mindset, my whole frame is that this entire country was founded on this fundamental underlying racialized paradigm of supremacy. And it’s so deeply baked into absolutely everything from structures and systems to interactions and relationships and from micro micro moments, and I am deeply grateful to be living in a time where now it has reached mass vernacular to talk about things like anti-racism, to realize that ongoing incredible violence is happening every single day, all the time around us, based in that exact same thinking, 400 plus years later. I’m grateful about the idea of we have to spot and interrupt racism and break it down and pull it apart. But where I find myself still craving or lacking in an answer is, and replace it with what? Because I have never lived in a society based in any other paradigm, nor have my parents or their parents or their parents before them.
And so where I find myself spending a lot of my intellectual energy and emotional energy and work is in thinking about what is a different paradigm? What could actually replace white supremacy as an underlying paradigm for everything? And so for me, I have come to this and I’m sort of thinking through this idea around what I call radical humanity as an alternate paradigm. So we walk this anti-racist path, we break down racism as a fundamental underlying paradigm, we need to replace it with something. And so I think about what is the crux of white supremacy? And it is this idea of white people being more than and anyone else not being enough, and I think, well, that just strips away our humanity in such deep and profound and fundamental base ways.
And so what if we instead were to actually center our humanity in all of its nuance and complexity and beauty and all the spices and all the smells, and what if our relationships and our systems and our structures, our schools, our organizations, were actually anchored in that, in seeing each other as full humans, in starting from a place of we are enough because we are. The end. Not because of our title or our networks or our organizational accomplishments or our whatever. It’s all based in the same crap. And so how about if we just strip it all away and just see each other as full humans who are enough just because we are humans who are brilliant.
And so a lot of my work is around how do you take that idea and implant it at the base of a relationship or a structure or a system or a practice and then live that out and try to figure out what does it look like to actually be and live in a way that is anchored in a fundamentally different paradigm around the fullness of whole humanity and enoughness for all of us. So that’s maybe a little meta, but…

Adelric McCain:
I love it. I love it. I’m totally picking up what you’re putting down, and I like radical humanity. That’s why I’m not even really interested in having conversations or in being in work around equity. I feel like even now, because of the, let’s just name it for what it is, the bastardization of that term at this particular point, right-

Xiomara Padamsee:
Absolutely.

Adelric McCain:
… has been, it’s been whitewashed and it centers whiteness still, right?

Xiomara Padamsee:
Exactly.

Adelric McCain:
To me, liberation is really the key. And I really like what you are saying as far as thinking about things that have not existed in the way. Because if we go back to what has been prior to, all we’re going to have come back to is white supremacy structures and white supremacy ways of being. So I really appreciate this foundation of it going back to humanity, which, let’s name it, hegemony has also separated white people from humanity as well.

Xiomara Padamsee:
Absolutely.

Adelric McCain:
This system has really separated everybody from that idea of thriving and being joyful. I think that can we imagine schools where young people are extremely happy to be there because their whole identity is not only just validated, but it’s uplifted as being essential to our fabric of our community. And I think that that’s the piece that I’m finding right now is the root of hegemonic ways of being is that individualism that I have to overtop, you come over and instead of we all make it. And that’s one thing that I hold so strongly to with my experience at Morehouse College. Your success wasn’t measured by you. They charged you as the hidden curriculum and it’s actually pretty explicit. You need to make sure that seven brothers that just look like you have a similar experience and access to it, then you’re successful. You’re not successful just on your own. And so how do we create communities that actually see that if any of our kids are suffering, then we have failed.

Xiomara Padamsee:
We are all failing, yeah.

Adelric McCain:
Yeah.

Xiomara Padamsee:
Absolutely. I love that. And one of the ways in which, one of the tensions that I feel every single day is this idea of working toward equity by necessity because we’re working within existing systems that are so built up while wanting for liberation. And for me the difference between those two things is if we strip away the bastardization of the term equity, I think was how you put it, which I love and agree with, and get down to the core of it. For me, equity is about having a fair shot within an existing system. It’s a critically important thing because we can’t wipe the slate clean. We are operating in existing systems. And so as much as I would love to wave a magic wand and say, let’s just have a do-over, unfortunately the systems exist, but also so do all of our habits and structures and we are breathing the very same toxic air all the time.
So there’s no magic wand, we can’t start over. So we have to make changes within existing systems which, to me, is the work for equity at the core. How do we make sure that all of us have a fair shot within existing systems, but doing that while also trying to redefine what would it look like if we could wave a magic wand, if we could start over, what would liberation look like outside of the confines and constraints of existing systems that are still anchored in the same mess? That is a tension for me every single day, and I think I spend a lot of my days helping myself, my team, and mostly all the different leaders that we work with in organizations across the country, think about equity, creating fairness within existing structures and systems, but trying to help push people a little bit further into this idea of, but what could it look like if actually the system were different?
Because what I find is there are usually pockets and places where, if we push ourselves, we can actually redefine in a way that is not anchored in the current system, and sometimes it’s just as simple as my own personal liberation as an individual and a human and a leader. So I can work toward equity in my structures and systems around me, but I’m going to hold myself toward my own personal liberation, which is way beyond that for me, and the same with the team members that I work with. And so I find that there’s usually pockets where we can actually redefine, but it requires that kind of double consciousness all the time. I mean, the good news is a life full of living double consciousness builds you some skills.

Adelric McCain:
Yep, yep, yep. Exactly. Exactly. And one distinction that I had to make early on that I wasn’t understanding at first when trying to engage in this work in meaningful and intentional ways, and I know that in our topic, we’re kind of supposed to be melding in some improvement science, but this is one thing that’s kind of interesting here, right? Distinguishing between the discourse or discursive space that you’re entering the work in, right. I was reminded early on when I got that big thud on the head that you’re doing this education classroom thing all wrong, right, for your Black and brown kids. I was introduced to this article, Eubanks Parish article that was written about the deseg of Rockford Illinois schools, right, and they talked about discourse one and discourse two. Discourse one talks about change but actually maintains status quo, whereas discourse two gets to the actual heart of the matter and actually changes things, right.
And what I’m finding is that many of us who are having conversations about equity and then saying for improvement science, we say we’re improving and we might improve those test scores, but at the soul and spirit of the Black and brown kid, are you doing it? That’s still maintaining status quo.

Xiomara Padamsee:
That’s right.

Adelric McCain:
And you’re still talking about change and you’re seeing quote unquote improvement in scores, but Black and brown babies, blood is on the ground. They are hurting the school system. So my goal now is to make sure that when we’re entering into this work, making sure we’re checking where the discursive level is and making sure that we are not even just aspirational. We have to touch into discourse two and get to the root causes if we’re going to actually change anything.

Michelle Sadrena Pledger:
And speaking of discourse, it is now time to… Let’s thank that preamble, that conversation. Let’s just first celebrate that and we’re going to keep the party going. And so if you have a question, please raise your hand. And yes, it really is important for you to speak into the mic just because of the recording. So I know some of you maybe don’t prefer it, but thank you so much for agreeing to use it. Who wants to kick off? Kick us off.

Audience Member 1:
First, thank you. Second, if nothing were standing in your way, what might be your first step in order to see the truly liberated society, workplace, whichever context do you want to put it in?

Adelric McCain:
First step, mayor of the world. Because less bureaucracy when you’re mayor, right? I don’t care if you are an engineer, if you are entering into a school and you’re an adult, you have to go through a journey of reflection, introspection, critical interrogation of your past, so that you show up for those kids and not doing things to the kids in the building. And I don’t care who you are, if you’re an adult and you’re collecting a check and you have access to healthcare because of, all that stuff that you got going on, work that out before you go and talk to our kids. All right? Because we’re all carrying around a lot of hurt and we bring that hurt into the classroom and a lot of times that hurt gets taken out on Black and brown kids in different ways. So I would require that everybody goes through that first step of going through some process of personal transformation.

Xiomara Padamsee:
I love that. I love that. And my thoughts were headed in a really similar direction, too. I was thinking the place where there is very little that can actually stand in my way, in part because of work I’ve done and in part because of privileges that I have that are unearned, is my own personal growth and journey. And so the thing that I have already done and I’m continuing to do and I hope will continue to do for the rest of my life is be deeply engaged in my own personal journey to liberate myself. And that means to liberate my thinking, to liberate my past and to think about what does liberation look like for my future?
And that has involved deep, as you say, reflection and introspection. It has involved hard interrogation of the things that I have done in my past and sometimes in my present to perpetuate white supremacy culture and that create harm and to take responsibility for those things and to ask for or forgive, well, really to take responsibility and apologize for those things, to forgive myself for those things and to learn how to be in a different way. This has been hours upon hours upon hours of work and therapy and coaching, and I am like a fundamentally different person than I was five years ago, eight years ago, and certainly before that.
I have language to be able to, I have the ability to spot when there are risk factors for me, like I’m going to fall into old cycles right now. I have learned white supremacy culture. I can do white supremacy culture. I am an expert in white supremacy culture as I think are all of us. But I had now learned how to spot it in ways that are way closer to real time or in real time, and then I’ve built language to be able to articulate to myself what’s happening and I’m building the skill to be able to define a different way even when it requires me to just plain innovate it in the moment. And my point in saying all this is not to be self-congratulatory. God knows I have plenty of work ahead. My point in saying this is to say that, to me, has been the biggest key toward being able to even imagine or envision a relationship, an interaction or a world that could be based in something different, and therefore, the first thing I would absolutely go to as well is making it the case…
Required has such a scary feel about it, but it would absolutely be a necessity to be a human on this earth, to be a person in this society to go through that same sort of journey, and I would say that would be something that is built into our school curriculums, our professional curriculums. It’s an absolute necessity so that we can each, there’s no way to create a different way if we don’t first learn, have the kind of meta process to spot the original way. It’s so baked into the fabric, right, that we just do it, we’re not thinking about it. So in order to do something different, I would say yes, start with that personal economy of words. I’m going to stop here.

Adelric McCain:
I just want to quickly shout out though, so if there’s there any hip hoppers in here, what you’re talking about just reminded me of Black Star, Mos Def and Talib Kweli. In their album insert, they have this thing where the guy’s just talking. He’s like, I’m so conditioned, my condition’s conditioned. And that is where we’re at right now.

Xiomara Padamsee:
That’s right.

Adelric McCain:
And I really appreciate that.

Michelle Sadrena Pledger:
All right.

Audience Member 2:
Xiomara, you mentioned not really knowing what the alternative is, and I think the backlash we’re seeing right now is that a lot of folks think the alternative to white supremacy is Black and brown supremacy. And so that is such a caged dog in a corner, I’m fighting like, if it’s not going to be me, I don’t want it to be you if that’s at my expense. And so I would love to hear how you have conversations with people who are like, it’s either two sides of a coin rather than I can have the coin sitting in the middle, right, and I know we don’t want to say equity, but what does that look like, or how do we have conversations where people don’t automatically go to, well, because we did it for 400 years, if I give that up, you’re going to do it to me for 400 years, but we ain’t like that. So how do you have that conversation?

Xiomara Padamsee:
Yeah, absolutely. You have thoughts you want to start with or you want me to go?

Adelric McCain:
You go ahead.

Xiomara Padamsee:
Okay. Okay, you chime in. So for me, the way I think about it is that this is why I use the word paradigm because it’s the underlying ground. It’s so deeply embedded in the core. And for me, the way that I would articulate what is the thing that was the fundamental underlying paradigm 400 plus years ago and remains true today is it’s two components clicked together. It’s supremacy as a concept connected to racialization, and those two things have been pulled together. Now we can talk about a different way to racialization, but if we don’t actually also stop the supremacy, we’re just recreating the same thing. It’s just master’s tools applied in a different way. It’s not going to get us to a different outcome fundamentally as a society or as individuals. We have to actually break down the racialization and the supremacy itself.
By the way, I’m not saying we don’t see race. We’re pretty far down a path. This is not what I’m arguing for, but what I’m saying is if the supremacy concept is still core to the alternative we’re trying to work, we are going to end up at a different iteration of the exact same outcome. Which is why for me, we stop short as a society when we say anti-racism is the answer. Anti-racism is critical, let’s be clear, but it can’t be the end answer because we need something to replace it with because literally, no humans alive today in this society have lived in a different way, and so we have nothing to base it on, which means we must innovate, which is part of, I talked a little bit about this yesterday for anyone who was with me in the room, but it’s a little bit of why I have a bit of a trigger personally. I do a lot of coaching, I do a lot of consulting, and I have a little bit of a trigger around people saying show me the best practice. What’s the org that’s getting it right? Where do I go for the model of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah?
I have a hard time with those questions because it’s looking backward. And anything we do to look backward is saying show me how to do it right in a context that is wrong. We’re not going to find the answer that way. That’s not to say people aren’t innovating and coming up with new thinking that we can learn from, like let’s learn from each other. But if the fundamental frame is like, oh, I’m going to figure it out by figuring out where’s the best practice and I’m going to go emulate and do what that whole system is doing. If that existed, we would already have carved a path toward the future. We have to innovate. And so to me, if supremacy is at the core, we end up at the same result.

Adelric McCain:
I would just add, I think that one of the most powerful steps towards liberation and to just engage in this work is to avoid binaries. I think part of the control of white supremacy is to create binaries and say if it’s not this then it has to be that, versus something that has never existed before, something that is new. And I always laugh when I think about, I grew up, like I said, I grew up in Minnesota and it was very, very white, and I was like, it’s not about us taking over. I got to be honest with you. I’d just like you all to leave me alone. Let me just be, right. And so if we can just start there, right, just finding spaces of joy, liberatory spaces where we can be our full selves, that’s not about supremacy, that’s just about being a human and wanting to thrive, right.
And so if we can get to avoiding the binaries and saying free your mind, it doesn’t have to be this or that, it can be something we’ve never thought about before and let’s create spaces of joy, that’s how I would like to combat that.

Audience Member 3:
Thank you so much. I just want to stay here for one moment and I’m so sorry. You talked about-

Xiomara Padamsee:
Don’t be sorry.

Audience Member 3:
Yeah, you talked about the replacement being radical humanity. So I just want to talk about what is the basis of radical humanity, and who gets a seat at the table to define that?

Xiomara Padamsee:
Yeah. So my perspective, which is just mine, is that… I think I’m going to answer your question, but I’m going to reframe it just a little bit. You keep me honest if I didn’t answer your question. The thing about this conversation and a risk here is because we’re in such a macro level system that’s so deeply entrenched for such a long time period in one underlying paradigm, I think it’s natural to think about, okay, well, if we’re going to create an alternative, then it needs to be baked at that same level. The alternative needs to be a macro level system solution that’s based in a fundamentally different paradigm, and that’s very overwhelming. My perspective is that the path to this alternative paradigm about radical humanity actually happens through something that I call micro activism.
What I mean by that is, in any given day as humans walking through the world, we have, I don’t know, thousands, millions of micro moments with other humans, and we get to actually choose how we interact in those micro moments. And if we choose a way that is anchored in liberation or anchored in this idea of recognizing and appreciating and being with the radical beauty that is our humanity just from being, well then we can actually, in that micro moment, create a different reality. And if we do enough of these micro moments in a given hour or day or year or one person’s experience, they build up to a different ultimate way.
So to me, as opposed to backward mapping to like, okay, let’s create another different alternate massive system paradigm and figure out who gets a seat at the table to define it and structure it, et cetera, I instead say let’s rewind all the way back to this moment and figure out what is a different interaction in this very moment, in this micro moment, which means we all get a seat at the table because we’re all players, we’re all activists in either continuing white supremacy culture or creating an alternative. Either way, we’re doing something. So there’s no opportunity to do neither of those things.
So if I choose in the micro moment to think about what is a way in which I can see and value you in your full humanity and convey that through our interaction non-verbally or verbally, well, then I have recreated a reality in just this micro moment right now. And then if I do that in the next moment and the next moment every time I can, it will add up and build up and ultimately it will result in a different paradigm at a systems level. But to me, it makes more sense. It feels less overwhelming and more accessible, but also more real and true if, instead of backward mapping from a new macro level reality to who gets to define what it is and gets a seat at the table et cetera, that’s familiar thinking to me, which automatically makes me have a little bit of alarm bells.
And so I would instead say, for me, what feels right is rewind all the way back to just in this interaction in this moment, can I do a thing or say a thing that’s different? Can I demonstrate my vulnerability or bring my humanity or interrupt what might be expected in a moment anchored in white supremacy culture and instead anchor it in full humanity? And if I do that enough, if we all do that enough, it will build up to a different way. I don’t know if I spoke to your question, so you need to keep me honest.

Michelle Sadrena Pledger:
Other questions? Other questions?

Audience Member 4:
You mentioned earlier that you’ve become really good at noticing white supremacy culture and then doing something different, and that connects to what you just said about micro moments. If you feel comfortable, I would love if you could share a story of a micro moment that felt really immense to you.

Xiomara Padamsee:
Yeah.

Adelric McCain:
We have a partnership. I’m going to try to be as anonymous as possible. We have a partnership with a district in Texas, and if anybody knows what’s happening in Texas, you’re going to talk about race. And matter of fact, when I was down there watching, always when I’m traveling somewhere, I watch the news just to check the weather. And they actually had on the local news, a Black male principal being fired because of this idea of bringing in critical race theory. So don’t talk about race, and we were actually doing a PD. And this is after we had a preconditions assessment where we did focus groups with the students, and the students were saying in the focus group they don’t see my racial identity, they don’t talk about it or honor it at all. All right?
And so we’re bringing in data and what we do is we disaggregate data by race. That’s what we do. Don’t ask us not to or don’t work with us. But yet the folks who, especially the district folks that are kind of concerned about what this means, because again, people are losing their jobs around this. And so I’m having a lot of practice within working through and around the system, specifically around school systems. Like, oh, you closed that door that I couldn’t get out of, now we’ll try to find the other door that I can get out of. So instead of us putting this data all on the walls, I’m like, let’s have a lunch conversation for those people who want to talk about the racial disparities within your data. We don’t have to necessarily mention this to anybody. I’m just going to be here for lunch if you want to talk about it. Now, mind you, all of the Black principles within this district were sitting at the table, couple white principles and two Latinx principles, I remember distinctly.
Wasn’t everybody, but it was enough where in that conversation they decided that they wanted to take up some change actions and do that, bring it back. And it was unbeknownst to anybody in the district. I’m like, it’s your schools. Do what you want to do, right? And so I felt like that was a moment where it didn’t have to be big, we didn’t have to put anything on front street, it was a small conversation that actually led to them changing something in their practice. So that to me is an effective professional development space versus not doing it and not talking about it.

Michelle Sadrena Pledger:
Yeah. All right. All right. We have time for one or two more questions, so…

Audience Member 5:
Can you think of a micro intervention or micro activism that didn’t go well and what you learned from that?

Adelric McCain:
I’m just trying to check, just one.

Xiomara Padamsee:
I got them. I can share. It’s not quite as specific. I’m searching for a specific story to tell you, which I don’t have at the moment, but you got something? You want to go?

Adelric McCain:
No, it’s all right, you can go. [inaudible 00:46:12]. Please, please.

Xiomara Padamsee:
Okay. I can say I try to live this out in all of my interactions and the work that my organization does is coaching, consulting, training, and so people aren’t always ready for it. So there’s a lot of times I would say where there are these micro moments where I try or our team tries to bring this sort of frame and it’s like, Ooh, no, forget it. And it’s kind of like what you said a minute ago, or don’t work with us. It’s okay, everybody’s not ready. And to be honest with you, I would say there was a massive uptick of 2020, there was a massive uptick and people knocking on the door being help us with our DEI and culture. And the difference between pre-summer 2020 and post was that first, increase in volume, but the second is that pre-summer 2020, literally, I will tell you, would take us on average four to six months of working with an organization and a leadership team to be able to utter the words white dominant culture, forget white supremacy culture.
So it was like post 2020, it would be the web inquiry from the first point of contact is like, please help us on white supremacy culture. We need interruption immediately. The literacy popped up really fast, but the readiness didn’t come with it. So because of that, we were in a much higher frequency of situations where we were bringing this kind of like, okay, let’s redefine, let’s create a different way in all the micro moments, and we were getting an uptick also in the like, whoo, I want the outcome, but not the work. Is there any other way to the end besides through? And we’re like, no friends, sorry, we got to go through. So it’s not specific, but that’s coming to mind.

Adelric McCain:
I was thinking about, in summers we do trainings around equity-based leadership, but also I do trainings in San Francisco with a group that’s similar. And I remember having a, we’d moved from an affinity space to the general space, and I brought into the space something that somebody taught me, which is racial battle fatigue, right, and just being exhausted of just being a person of color having to fight white supremacy culture every single day from your micro moments to the larger parts of your work and all of that.
And I talked about my exhaustion and I was saying that in terms, and I knew better than this, in terms I was speaking for almost, like, I was speaking for all Black folks, and this Black elder was in our space in our training, and she interrupted my behind so hardcore and just basically, you don’t speak for me, and it’s like, I am tired, but I would never let anybody know that I’m tired because I have to wake up and fight every day for my kids. And I thought that that was such a moment for me to actually hear that and to be humbled by that, right? Because I also take that strength, still exhausted, but nevertheless, you don’t have to let people know. And she’s like, she kind of pulled me aside, especially don’t let them know that you’re tired. All right. This is one of them queens from Oakland, so you don’t play. I was like, all right, you’re right.

Michelle Sadrena Pledger:
Oh my goodness, I could listen to y’all talk all day long. We have time for you to have any closing words, final thoughts, calls to action, whatever you want for our group. And so you have about a minute and a half per person. Who would like to go first? I’m going to set a timer, too.

Adelric McCain:
I would just like for us to really interrogate what we’re doing and in service of what, and I’m going back to that looking at discourse one versus discourse two. And what I want to say is that our work can seemingly be like we’re changing something and we’re improving something. But if you strip the veneer a little bit, you’ll understand and see that it’s not for every student, specifically Black and brown students. And I want us to always think in the spirit of targeted universalism, right. If we can address the needs of people who are owed, communities that are owed in educational debt because of the system and how it has been for decades upon decades just beating communities down, right, if we can look and say our work is focused on improving the experience for this group, it will trickle up for everybody.
So as we do our work and we engage in our work, I know sometimes it’s easy for us to put our heads down and keep grinding away, but I really hope and want us to stop for a second and interrogate, is this going to work for everybody? Is this going to really work for Black and brown community members in our educational spaces?

Xiomara Padamsee:
I think the closing thought on my mind is just this idea of, as I think about the connection between creating a different way or a different future and improvement science, I think about it fits together really nicely in the spirit of we need to create a different way, which is going to require innovation. And so it feels very deeply connected, and, it’s like I want to highlight a both/and. Yes, we need to pilot things and we need to fail fast and we need to innovate, and we need to try different ways because what we’ve been doing clearly doesn’t work. That part is clear. But the and here is always having a level of compassion and intentionality for on whose back, right?
Because as we innovate and we try, we pilot and we fail fast, there are still consequences to the failures, even when the intention is progress or the intention is reaching just a fundamentally different paradigm. So it’s sort of a necessary path but let’s walk it responsibly and intentionally with the compassion that, just like for 400 plus years, it’s been on the backs disproportionately of Black and brown people in this country. So, too, will the failures, the consequences, and the burden of the work and the failures fall disproportionately to Black and brown students and families and community members. And so let’s do it, but let’s not do it blindly. Let’s do it with some real thought and compassion and care and intentionality for the both/and in there.

Michelle Sadrena Pledger:
Ooh, wow. It is 11 o’clock. Let’s thank both of our den speakers. Wow.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Michelle Pledger, Xiomara Padamsee and Adelric McCain. This is part of a series of three episodes from the Gates Foundation Network for School Improvement Fall 2022 Community of Practice event. You can also find recordings of all the den talks from the event at the High Tech High Unboxed YouTube channel. There’s a link to that in our show notes. Thanks for listening.