Readers React: Education inquality and ‘Black Lives Matter’
To the editor: I read this article with great interest, as it is such an important effort on the part of the Smithsonian Institution to document the “Black Lives Matter” movement. (“New Smithsonian museum curators pursue the stories in Baltimore’s protests,” June 7)
As I continued to read, however, this quote by the Smithsonian’s Deborah Tulani Salahu-Din struck me: “[The work] focuses also on the social, political and economic injustices that have been with us for quite some time.” She did not mention educational injustices.
Defining effort and progress has been made historically in educational settings, but the current and startling lack of equity in schools that many students of color attend in America is both disturbing and the most undemocratic condition imaginable in a country like this.
Black lives matter, and this mattering begins in the classroom.
Margo T. Pensavalle, Los Angeles
The writer is a clinical professor of education at USC.
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