Stamped, Chapters 1-4

What and how do we translate what we’ve learned from “Stamped” in our music classroom?

The main takeaways from these chapters, to me, are as follows:

• Racism is everywhere, and, “whether it’s a scream or a whisper, just won’t go away.” (p. 3)

• No one is one thing. “Life can rarely be wrapped into a single word.” (p. 4)

• How easy it can be to justify any brand of thinking.

• Systems keep trying to pit us against each other, and it often seems to be for money reasons.

• We’ve washed nearly every history clean - including figures like Locke and Aristotle.

• “You know how death is. Your body goes, but your ideas don’t.” (p. 36)

Translating these ideas into the classroom don’t all need to be translated. We as educators can recognize that racism is baked into every corner of society, including the repertoire that has made it to the present, who built the system we teach in, and who gets hired. (Hell, I’m more likely to be a teacher because I’m white, and because I’m a teacher, it’s statistically probable that I’m white. And I am.) It’s important that we make sure every student is seen and heard, truly seen and truly heard, that their culture is represented, that we check our interactions and foster positive ones between our students, and that we don’t overly-stigmatize their innocent mistakes as they are raised in a system in which they are unknowingly indoctrinated. We can directly preach that second bullet point - no one person is one thing. We can all have anti-racism in us, and we can all slip up, often because of the giant mechanism of our society.

We have to constantly check ourselves on that third bullet point - it can be really, really easy to justify any school of thought, good or bad. We have to look critically at what and why we teach what we do, and we have to encourage our students to question everything as well. “Don’t just buy this because I put it on your desk. What do you actually think of this?”

Creating a space in our classroom that unifies the group of students is important, especially along class and race lines, because, apparently, politics and industry keep trying to make us compete about stuff. Music can be a great equalizer, and stressing everyone’s vital importance and ability in any given piece of music is critical.

We can take an uplifting message from that last quote. “Your body goes, but your ideas don’t.” It’s true that racism has been perpetuated this way, but it’s another call to constantly evaluate what we say, how we say it, and the values we exhibit in our classrooms. Because long after we leave our students’ lives as teachers, we will have impact.

Reynolds, J., & Kendi, I. X. (2020). Stamped: racism, antiracism, and you. New York, NY: Little, Brown

and Company.