Dr Wyatt Tee Walker was a pastor, civil rights leader and anti-apartheid campaigner. Among many other roles, he served as chief of staff to Martin Luther King. Walker and Steve Klinsky founded the Sisulu-Walker Charter School of Harlem. They talk about the principles and importance of the school in the page A Light Shines in Harlem.
While the number of charter schools has increased, it seems that society’s divisions along racial, religious and economic lines have only grown wider. Anger leads to rough discourse, which leads to violence, which leads to more anger. How can such divisions be bridged? How can common cause be found?
The answer lies in education. Education of the head, and education of the heart.
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… As Dr. Walker has said since 1998, charter schools and education reform constitute the civil rights issue of our day. Equity should be restored.
Even more fundamental, though, is education of the heart: the explicit realization that every person deserves an abiding and equal respect for the spark of divine light inside of them. This light is innate; separate and independent from race, wealth, ethnicity or any other identifier.
Today, too many “remedies” – such as Critical Race Theory, the increasingly fashionable post-Marxist/postmodernist approach that analyzes society as institutional group power structures rather than on a spiritual or one-to-one human level – are taking us in the wrong direction: separating even elementary school children into explicit racial groups, and emphasizing differences instead of similarities.
The answer is to go deeper than race, deeper than wealth, deeper than ethnic identity, deeper than gender. To teach ourselves to comprehend each person, not as a symbol of a group, but as a unique and special individual within a common context of shared humanity. To go to that fundamental place where we are all simply mortal creatures, seeking to create order, beauty, family, and connection in a world that – on its own – seems to bend too often toward randomness and entropy.