Assignment: Diversity in Action—Life Lessons Learned

EDUC6164: Perspectives on Diversity and Equity “In Her Own Voice: Nadiyah Taylor”

Program Transcript NARRATOR: Human diversity is multifaceted. It can present great challenges, especially when biases and prejudices influence interactions with others. Yet these challenges can also be turned into opportunities to acknowledge our common humanity, contribute to our professional and personal lives, and to inspire efforts that work for greater equality and social justice. The video presentations this week introduce you to the inspiring stories of three early childhood professionals. Each personally experienced the challenging sides of diversity, and each has been able not only to critically reflect on these challenges, but use lessons learned to help them become culturally responsive early childhood professionals committed to social justice and equity work. NARRATOR: In this first segment, Nadiyah Taylor traces her journey from her own early childhood through college and shares the ways in which her experiences continue to shape her professional choices as well as her role as a parent. NADIYAH TAYLOR: I think my journey started probably from the time that I was born. I grew up with a family of five children in Chicago, and we were lower income. And I remember having to interface, for instance, with different types of public agencies for health care or we used to get, for a little while, we got food stamps and things like that. And I feel like, because of just where we lived and how our family was structured and the fact that we were dealing with some issues related to poverty, that I got some understanding of what it feels like economically, for instance, to not feel quite a part of other more typical circumstances. NADIYAH TAYLOR: I also, you know, I was born in the early seventies, and my family was very much involved in the civil rights movement. And so from very early, we would have conversations about stereotypes. And we'd watch TV, it used to bug me, but we'd watch TV and my mom would say, "So do you see that stereotype? Is that true? Do you think that's true of you?" And so I think we had an awareness growing up. That was really important. And very much interested in education and us learning to be critical thinkers, that was really important in our family. So there were some expectations around treating people fairly, and that our goal in life was to be involved in social justice or change somehow. There's five of us, and I'm an educator and I have two sisters who are social workers and a brother who's a community activist and a brother who does, like,

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law, to help people stay in their homes. So somehow the message got through along the way. NADIYAH TAYLOR: So I grew up in Chicago with my mom and dad and my siblings, and when I was about four, somewhere between three and five, my family converted, and we had been Catholic and we converted to being Muslim. And that was a pretty big change in our family in terms of people's willingness to sort of accept our change religiously, but it also made a big difference for me in my educational experience as a child. I think I went to public schools at a time when 90% of the curriculum was really around holidays, and I couldn't participate in any of those experiences for a number of reasons, and so there was a little bit of rigidity in terms of my experience in school. And so when there will be school celebrations or school holidays, and I just remember really clearly that it would be me and the one Jehovah's Witness, you know, sort of sitting in the corner and really feeling that we were a burden to the teachers. It was a problem that they had to think about the fact that we weren't gonna participate in the things that they had planned. I don't remember that there was ever any accommodation. They didn't change their plans because of that, but there was a frustration that we weren't sort of going along, and that stands out. NADIYAH TAYLOR: Growing up, we weren't in deep poverty. You know, I think we were sort of working poor, lower middle--lower class, but there were--I just--I remember having the feeling of not being able to do some of the things that my friends could do, and I'm having to pay attention to things that my friends didn't have to pay attention to in terms of when money was gonna be available if we were gonna go on field trips and things like that, that it wasn't 100% sure that I would be able to do those things. And so I just remember that there were pieces of feeling sort of left out or different through circumstances that weren't my own or things that I hadn't caused anyway. I didn't get a sense of partnership with the teachers, definitely. NADIYAH TAYLOR: So I think in some ways, when I was younger, I had sort of my family experience of being different because of our religion, both publicly different and different within our own family setting, as well as these differences in terms of my early education, and also, I think just a consistent message from my family about we have a responsibility to do good things in the world and to look deeply and not take things for granted and to not let people stereotype us in ways that aren't fair, but also an awareness that stereotypes existed and that racism and sexism and classism and oppression existed. And as a child, that was actually kind of hard for me. I would say I had a lot of--I had friends who were sort of different races, and my parents would, you know, would say, "You know, I think you need to be aware that racism exists, and you need to be careful

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about who your choice of friends are, because they may not treat you in the ways that you're expecting," and I was really resistant to that message. NADIYAH TAYLOR: So I went away to college and went to school in Minnesota. And at the time--I think it's changed--but at the time, I think there were probably 2% black people in the entire state. And I moved from Chicago, which is a very, very diverse city, and it was really different. It was wonderful in some ways because there was a climate there of really wanting to be progressive and move forward and try out new things, but at the same time, it was a state where lots of people didn't have experience with differences, at least not racial differences. I'd be on the buses and people would sort of be staring at me, like--and I had a student who said, "I've never talked to a black person or met a black person before," and wanting me to kind of represent black people, which I just thought was funny because people would say that I don't speak like a black person. I would think there's lots of black people who wouldn't say that I'm representative of them, but there was a desire for me to be sort of representative. And I remember feeling how uncomfortable that was and also feeling like I wasn't exactly sure. We did have, like, a black student union on campus, and I didn't know whether to align myself with that or what I wanted to do. And I just remember that there was a lot of uncertainty about my race and my identity. And so trying to figure out how I could fit into that environment was tricky because of monetary reasons. I remember having a roommate came home and she's like, "Oh, my gosh, I have no money," and I was like, "Oh, yeah, that sucks. I know how that is." And then she said, "Yeah, I've only got $300 in the bank." And I thought, wow, your definition of no money and my definition of no money are vastly different. And so there was just--I just remember feeling like I had a lot of experiences trying to negotiate identity and what that meant. NADIYAH TAYLOR: And I went to school at a time when we were sort of still in the swing of the women's movement. Like the first week of classes, I remember them saying, you know, "You are not girls anymore. You are women. No one calls you girls." I was in this process of kind of trying to figure out where my family identity ended and my own personal identity ended--or began around some of these topics. I came into college really clear that I wanted to be a teacher. And the whole time I was there, I was teaching and I was getting a degree in psychology and also getting my teaching license. And I don't know if it was just the nature of the college and partially 'cause of who I am and how I had been brought up, but in all of my classes, you know, things around stereotyping or people not being inclusive, people coming from a sense of privilege that they didn't recognize that they had privilege around, those things were really starting to stand out for me. And so I was really drawn into the idea of multicultural education at the time, and at the same time I was getting a psychology degree and I was looking at stereotyping and why we stereotype and what's the impact

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on children and adults of stereotyping and looking at the media, and things were sort of culminating in that direction. NADIYAH TAYLOR: And I was doing my student teaching and was in my last semester of student teaching, and I was taking two classes. So one was the student teaching class where we would meet and talk about and then plan curriculum, and another class was sort of perspectives on education or something. And so in the student teaching class, I met a woman named Stacey York, who was involved with doing anti-bias education. And I remember thinking, holy moly, I've never heard of this, and how is it that in my last semester, in my last time of student teaching before I hear about this? Intuitively, it made more sense to me than what I have been learning about multicultural education, you know, the idea of helping children specifically to think about their identity and specifically to talk about bias and how bias impacts them and to stand up for bias. That made a lot of sense to me. I had no idea how to do it. It seemed completely overwhelming, but it made sense to me intuitively. And at the same time, I'm in this other class where we're having arguments with a professor who's arguing that multicultural education and ethnic studies classes are ridiculous and we don't need to have those kinds of things because everybody should have the exact same base of knowledge. And it should only be, you know, this very prescribed canon where other voices have no place, you know women's voices, and people of color and stories from around the world. And it was just such an interesting kind of duality that was happening. I feel like I'm fighting for something over here and trying to figure out, you know, is there a way that I really, in my life, can make change so that other children aren't experiencing, at least in the same degree, the way that I experienced things in my own life as it relates to education? NADIYAH TAYLOR: And so in that class, I made the decision that I was gonna go, I was gonna move to California, and I was gonna find the person who had written that book, and I was gonna go to that college and I did. And it was just, you know, a culmination of all of these things coming together, really, in a way that I felt like I was coming to different understanding around my identity. I was teaching at a preschool for a while, where I was the only one who was working on these things and everyone else was like, "Why are you doing that? Just celebrate Valentine's Day," you know, "just get going on that," you know? And I remember it being really challenging to kind of try to hold my own and say, "No, I think this is really important. And I'd like to drag you along, and if you don't come along, I'm still gonna do what I have to do." And I felt like I made some difference in the lives of the children that I was working with. And I think that, you know, I stumbled along the way. I was a new teacher, and I think something that I've learned over time is just that, you know, I'm not gonna have all the answers in the

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beginning and I have to trust that it's a process and that things are gonna happen as they happen. NADIYAH TAYLOR: So I actually had to stop teaching, because when I moved to California, I took, like, a huge cut in pay. Preschool teachers don't make a lot of money, sadly. I could pay my bills, but then I had to buy groceries and gas and things on credit cards even though working two jobs, and so I ended up stopping teaching. And I remember like I had failed. There's all this really important work to do with children, but I can't make a living at it. And so, you know, somehow I'm failing myself and I'm failing these children. I remember that was really hard. NADIYAH TAYLOR: And so in some ways it was sort of a relief when Louise kind of convinced me to do some teaching with her, with adults. It became clear that through education with adults, that I could still do that kind of work and I could still push boundaries and, including boundaries on myself and boundaries with others, and use that as a platform to sort of have this ripple effect out to lots of different families and lots of different children. NADIYAH TAYLOR: Now I'm teaching full time at a community college. Most of the time, I'm teaching people who are much older than me. It's painful on the one hand to have someone come and talk about privilege and be in their 60s and for the first time think about privilege and watch an entire worldview kind of crumble and how hard that has been to watch, and on this other hand, it's profoundly amazing, you know, to see those changes happen in adults. I can think back over my experiences and there's, you know, a few that stand out for me as being really crucial, I think, to this idea of change. NADIYAH TAYLOR: One thing that I remember really clearly was I had and still have a very, very good friend of mine in high school. We've been friends since we were 14, and she's a white woman. They called us Frick and Frack, like we were together all the time, inseparable, and I trusted her like really implicitly and still do. But I remember we were applying for colleges. And so she and I and a group of people had applied to similar schools, and I remember that she didn't get into some of the schools that she had planned to get into. And I think there must have been one that she and I had both tried to get into and I got into. And I remember we were sitting in English class and I said, "Oh, I'm so excited I got into" whatever school it was. And so she looked frustrated and she said, "Yeah, you probably in got in 'cause you're black." And I remembered just feeling like, just devastated, like the ground had dropped out, and I thought, well, no, I worked really hard. So I just remembered that how hard it was that I had to kind of think about facing a reality that here is someone who I completely trusted, and I think that she would never purposefully say anything that was mean or hurtful or anything like that, but it was an easy enough fallback option that somehow I

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hadn't quite earned it. And that just brought home a lot of stuff for me, you know, thinking that this constant question about being a person of color or a woman or someone who's lower income, like, did you really earn your spot? Do you really have the skills and the abilities necessary to do the work that you wanna do? And the extra pressure of feeling like I had to--like I owed somebody. NADIYAH TAYLOR: I think when I was in college, I had an experience. At the time, at the University of Minnesota, there was a person who was a self- proclaimed white supremacist and he would go on campus and was talking. He was a student at the University of Minnesota, and there tended to be a lot of violence that would follow after his speeches. And so we were at a private college in St. Paul, and there was a conservative student group on campus, and so they offered an invitation to him to come speak, and lots of students of color, and many white students, but definitely students of color were like, what, why are you doing this? This doesn't make any sense. And I remember just being like a basket case the whole time because there were people, again, people that I thought were my friends, who had seemed to share so many experiences with me, but literally could not understand what the big deal was. So here's this guy, he's gonna come and say like a bunch of hateful stuff about you and people who look like you and feel like you, but it shouldn't be a big deal 'cause intellectually we all know that it's not okay. And so I was sort of nervous for my physical safety, and I was definitely nervous for my emotional safety and feeling sort of let down in a lot of places because people couldn't understand that. And I remember calling home and my mom said, "You know, I'm really sorry that you're having this experience and I'm really glad that you're having this experience because, you know, racism is real. It's not something that's an intellectual idea. It happens, and it's painful and it's scary." NADIYAH TAYLOR: Interestingly, the other piece that relates to that, that also came out of it was from that I noticed that my group of friends became more ethnically diverse and linguistically diverse. Suddenly, people started talking about identity. And, you know, I had a friend who is Korean ethnically and had been adopted by a white family, and she's like, "Ethnically I'm white, and nobody gives me--considers that in terms of when they see me and my experience." And, you know, I had a friend who was biracial and talked about sort of being left out of parts of her family because people didn't like the fact that her family members had married interracially. And another friend who talked about experiences of racism when she was growing up and sexism, and so suddenly out of this kind of really painful experience, suddenly I can talk about identity and the fact that it was hard and, "Oh, my gosh, you don't understand it either? Oh, good, I'm not the only," you know, and to be able to realize that it was hard for everybody. NADIYAH TAYLOR: When I was getting my master's at Pacific Oaks, we had lots

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of conversations about institutional oppression and bias and pain. And I remember thinking that as a student of color who had thought about some of these issues and was working on some of these issues and a woman and still at that time fairly low income, that I would sit in class and I wasn't getting to have the same aha moments as other students who weren't having--who hadn't had those same experiences. So we talk about institutional bias and they go, "Oh, my gosh, really? Tell me your experience. Could you tell me again your experience as a person of color, as a woman, or as a poor person?" And like my pain became their aha moment, and I didn't exactly know what to do with that, and at the same time that people are ripping open these wounds so that people can really talk and have some sharing of experiences, there was still a constant, like, "No that's not really true. I don't really think that you had that experience," or "I think that you should interpret that experience really differently." And I remember one day in class saying, "You know, so I just wanna say that like, as a person of color and as a woman and as a person who's poor and all these things, like, it is not easy for me to agree and to like and accept that racism exists or sexism exits. This isn't something that I came out of the womb liking and accepting. I had to figure it out because it's a part of my life. And so, if you're having a hard time accepting it, know that you're not the only one, and you've got privilege supporting you in your process, and I don't have that. So, like, back off." NADIYAH TAYLOR: I am married to a white man, and we have a biracial child who is nine. And it has been a really interesting experience being a parent and both having been a preschool teacher, and then a preschool teacher that focuses on diversity and then sort of doing anti-bias diversity work professionally. My husband's a preschool teacher, like, I think we felt like we had this parenting thing made. And I think I was unprepared for how challenging it was just to be a parent in general, that all of my early childhood stuff didn't help as much as I thought it would help in the beginning. And I also thought, you know, I'm a person of color, right, so I'll have a child of color and I'll be able to help him through some of these minefields in a different way. And I have become aware that as a person who is, for some people, racially ambiguous in terms of how he looks, and actually in some ways gender ambiguous 'cause he has a very pretty face, I'm not having that same experience. I didn't have the same experiences that he's growing up with. And so that has been hard in some ways, because in a really uncertain world of bias and oppression, I had anticipated having some certainty about what I was doing. And so some of that certainty, I think, has been removed just because I have an awareness that he's gonna have a different experience. NADIYAH TAYLOR: And I think as a mother, there's a piece of me that really wants to protect him from everything. And so I think in some ways, that there's been some--a few mistakes probably that we have made along the way in

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hindsight. So we were really clear that we would identify him until he wanted to identify himself. We would identify him as a biracial child. And we talked a lot about race when he was little. Like, we would read stories for people who were of different races, and we talked about gender roles and we talked about different religions and languages and, you know, family structures, all that kind of stuff really fluidly with him, which was fabulous. But we realized around three that we never really talked to him about his identity, specifically around race. And I think that's because we didn't want him to feel kind of captured yet by the idea of race. NADIYAH TAYLOR: And so, you know, he had an experience in preschool. He still has the long hair, but it was very curly, big, big curly hair. And he used to wear it out, and literally people would be walking down the street and they'd stop and go, "Oh, my gosh, I love your hair," you know? People always thought he was a girl. He didn't really like the attention, and he certainly didn't like being called a girl and trying to figure out how to manage that. And I think that we didn't really realize sort of the extent to which that was bothering him. And so there was this one particular day where he had asked me to put his hair in braids, to like cornrow it. And he and his dad went to the same school. So his dad worked there, and he was a child there. And so my husband saw him, like a few--like an hour later, and his hair was out of the cornrows, and he was like, "Why did you take your hair out?" And my son--well, my husband describes it as my son just looking completely devastated, and he just said, you know, "I didn't want that person to make fun of me, and so I took it out before someone can make fun of me." And my husband said just the look of pain on my son's face about not being sure about what to do and how to sort of protect himself from this feeling of being just constantly noticed and made fun of. NADIYAH TAYLOR: How did I not know that that was going on in such a consistent way or that it was impacting him in that way? We realized as parents that it was--we needed to help him sort of define for himself and give himself a label and have a name for who he was and the experiences that he was having and to do some more specific work around his identity. We tried to give him back some power around that situation. He still gets that now and he'll go, or he'll just roll his eyes now, "Okay, yeah, I'm a boy," you know? It doesn't seem to impact him in the same way, but, you know, the issues around his hair, still pretty big, like he doesn't like people to look at his hair. He still--he won't cut it. He has it long, but he wears it in a ponytail. And so now he won't let anybody see him with his hair out in curls unless it's after like we've washed it and we're combing it, you know? And so it's hard because, on the one hand as a parent, we wanna push and go, "No, love that part of your identity. It's who you are, and there's--that is somebody else's issue. That is not your issue." But it is his issue, and so we had to back off and let him have that defining of his identity, even though it's painful to watch and we would want him to be in a different place.

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NADIYAH TAYLOR: So as an early childhood professional who interacts with children and families, bringing in a sense of culture and inclusion, I think, enriches everything that we do. I think it allows us to have deep connections with families and children. I think most people wanna be seen in their truest way. And so when we open ourselves up to a sense of uncertainty and a willingness to say "I don't know everything" and a willingness to be transparent, I think that we get those things back from other people, and it helps them to be better in their role as a family member and it helps us to be better in our role as a professional. And I really think that it really, really changes children. It allows children to flourish and be whole, and be the people who are gonna step out there in the future and say, you know, "That's not fair, and I'm gonna stand up and I'm gonna do something different and make my life different, and make the lives of others around us different." And so I say gain a disposition toward flexibility of thinking and a tolerance for uncertainty and an ability to have both and thinking that it's not usually either/or. It's usually a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and I think those things kind of take us a long way, definitely.

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