ECS Student, Hannah Blomgren, Pens Op-Ed

Silence on Racism Is Not Neutral

Dr. Leticia Alvarez Gutiérrez teaches students how to apply theoretical concepts in her ECS 6820/7820: Juvenile (IN)Justice and Education course. As part of the course, Alvarez Gutiérrez requires assignments that "link theory with praxis and contextualize what young people are experiencing in schools/communities today in relation to the school-to-prison pipeline." Such activities include writing op-eds, as two students, Hannah Blomgren and Javier H. Hernandez, recently did.

Hannah Blomgren, a master of education student in the Department of Education, Culture & Society with an emphasis in secondary physics teaching, took what she learned in Alvarez Gutiérrez's class and penned an op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune: Utah's Teachers and Students are Afraid to Speak Out about Racism .

Blomgren did an excellent job of applying the course concepts. Her op-ed begins with two powerful anecdotes about local high school students donning Halloween costumes that represented the bullying racial stereotypes of their peers—one dressed as a cockroach and the other as a "human-eating cat" because that is what their peers had labeled them.

These troubling narratives demonstrate the individual harm (e.g., bullying, name-calling, personal distress, and decreased mental, emotional, and social well-being) that children experience when educators and students are prohibited from having conversations around racism and white privilege. But of course, the harm doesn't stop there. Blomgren goes on to detail how the Utah Legislature's recent audit, labeling topics like white privilege, racism, settler colonialism, slavery, genocide, and land theft as "potentially questionable content," will lead to systemic harm—including poorer educational outcomes and a continued school-to-prison pipeline for students of color because these issues are left unaddressed.

"Teachers are knowledgeable experts in pedagogical standards, but they are not being treated as such," writes Blomgren. If we are to truly combat racism, then—as Blomgren notes at the end of her op-ed—"We must be able to confront racism head-on as teachers, explicitly and meaningfully with our students in the classroom."

We are proud of Blomgren's real-world application of what she's learned in Alvarez Gutiérrez's class and her eloquent, well-supported response to silence on racism as a non-neutral stance.