By a written by a parent of two children at a Southwest elementary school

I'm three years into raising children in Minneapolis Public Schools. My partner and I spend time thinking about race in schools for a couple of reasons.

For starters, we are a racially mixed household. We have so many cultures represented in our home that we don't know which our children will identify with as they grow older, so we are trying to provide them with a foundation of loving self-assurance and diverse perspectives. I pray that they will escape the crises of confidence that my partner and I went through in our youth from growing up different in Minnesota.

But beyond all of that, my partner and I believe in the Oneness of Humanity. We strive to align all of our thoughts and actions with that principle. So our in-home diversity isn't the reason we strive for greater inclusivity as much as a deep-seated reminder of the need to support principles of unity and community.

Bringing all of those high-minded ideals to Minneapolis Public Schools has been harder than I expected. It was much easier to feel like racial unity was growing in my community when I didn't have kids. When it was just the two of us, my partner and I could travel to whatever multicultural spaces we wanted and imagine that to be our whole world. What we may have lacked in white privilege we sometimes made up for in the privilege to move in and out of white spaces. Now, our children root us in a school, in a neighborhood, and in a community. We try to remain connected to the whole world, but we have to be home for naptime. I was so excited to grow these roots, but now they also make me feel stuck.

I must emphasize, most of all, my children love school. In that sense, Minneapolis Public Schools has treated us well. Our kids love their teachers. They love their friends and classmates. They love learning. I often consider that such a love of learning might be the most valuable thing my children could learn in school.

From where I sit now, I can't honestly say what will prove to be the most valuable. I am sure my parents assumed that raising me in Minnesota's safe and well-rated mostly white schools was the best thing for me. They'll never know how many of my classmates threw racial slurs around like footballs at me or what it did to my self-esteem. I'm afraid I can't comprehend the 12 years that my children are going to spend in public schools. So maybe I can't prophesize how to best protect or support them.

For years, my education and income has placed my family in Minnesota's white middle-class where new parents are constantly talking about what will be best for their kids. But my race sometimes pulls me out of those conversations, like when you're watching a great movie for an hour until an otherwise excellent actor says something ignorant. You suddenly find yourself in a dark theater, surrounded by strangers looking past you, a little bloated from all the popcorn you ate.

This is a circuitous way for me to explain why the biggest surprise about Minneapolis Public Schools has been the race issues. My mixed kids are not the ones who are bullied for being brown. My kids' greatest challenges are not that obvious. It's mostly too subtle to shove into an op-ed like this. I'm not that good of a writer to connect the dots without exploring it together. And no one in the school has engaged me with enough patience and insight to help me understand or respond to those challenges.

So I'll touch on one of the blunter and more controversial examples. I regret that this is the part of my story that you're going to take out of context, but I'm not sure how else to start the conversation. Each of my children heard the N-word from some white kid from their school. Not out of ridicule, but childish ignorance. In each case, no one had a plan for how to respond. Several of my peers told me their kids have heard it much more often, sometimes with a less benign intent. When I raised questions about this with our kids' teachers we received tremendous compassion and understanding but also could see the limits of their influence in a classroom. The schools need to tackle these issues in bigger ways–with systems and policies. When my partner and I raised questions with administrators and offered to help, it got weird. I'm not going to recount the whole story because it would get long and overly critical.

I'm just going to present a few specific comments from other people out of context because that's always helpful. Administrators at my kids’ school and at the district level told me things like:

1. There's nothing we can do about that.

2. It's all the parents.

3. Kids just have to learn to deal with this type of stuff on their own.

4. I tell the upper-classmen, the 4th and 5th graders, that it's their job to take care of this.

5. The real problem is all of these Black kids I see in the hallways, they need to get to class.

I'm sorry, what?

And while the administrators in question said they are eager to listen and learn from others, each of these statements felt like it was intended to finish a conversation rather than open it up. And each was presented from a person employed to address equity and inclusion either at an individual school or for the district as a whole. I'm not going to name names partly because I think personalizing it will bring a type of criticism that distracts from solution-oriented policy. I am also not naming names because I don't want you, dear reader, to assume this isn't happening at your school.

I want you to feel that this is your problem. I want you to do something about it.

I have to say a word about other parents and caregivers. The vast majority are terribly awkward around this stuff which is sometimes a problem. As a community, we don't know how to talk about this stuff. We are great at posting signs in our yard but we usually don't talk about what the signs mean. The signs do the talking.

Some parents are great at talking about this stuff. Some are problematic. I could name two or three white parents who said they don't think they should have to respond to these issues because their children are white. One of those parents hasn't spoken to me since. The other I see regularly. I would call them a friend. Our kids have playdates and we talk about all kinds of things. I've never "called-out" the parent on that specific comment because I was caught off guard and the ripe opportunity kind of came and went, but I am confident that the relationship and understanding will grow nonetheless. The vast majority of the parent interactions are really good, and the school could make them great if parents were engaged more in learning about this stuff together.

That's what I'm really looking for, I guess. A community that's dynamic enough for us to learn from one another. I am happy to forgive Minneapolis Public Schools for the handful of comments I listed above which I would rate as very bad. I don't have any faith in any one race and equity expert swooping in and teaching a child, a class, or a school how to do all of this right. I want to be a part of a community that's learning together. I wish my school made more space for that in, around, and through the classroom. My partner and I made various efforts to create more of that dynamism and we were shocked by the resistance. I'm writing this letter to the community so we can learn from it.