Parent and Juvenile Defender Visits 6th Grade History and Social Studies

As part of the recent work in 6th grade history and social studies classes, teacher Keedra Gibba has guided students through a reading of Stamped, Racism, Antiracism and You by Ibram Kendi and Jason Reynolds. She rates the experience a success because students learned how and why racism was constructed in history, and, more importantly, they studied a tradition of resistance to racism.

 

Throughout the year, Gibba has invited parents to the classroom to share their work, especially related to social justice and making our world a better place, which aligns with Parker’s curriculum and institutional mission.

 

To date, Gibba’s 6th grade students have hosted visiting parent professionals working in climate justice, journalism and, most recently, the criminal justice system, when Marjorie Berk Moss recently joined the class for a Zoom gathering.

 

As a social work supervisor and staff attorney at Northwestern University’s Bluhm Legal Clinic Children and Family Justice Center, where she established the Juvenile Defender Resource Institute, Berk Moss described the three broad categories of her current efforts  as she works directly with black and brown youth charged with crimes, those currently incarcerated and have been wrongly convicted and those who have served their time, ensuring they can be successful when they leave prison.

 

In describing what drew her to this type of work, Berk Moss shared her personal story of coming to appreciate the power of storytelling to advocate for the abused and neglected. Storytelling enables her in humanizing her clients involved in the legal process and break down a host of assumptions and stereotypes associated with the racial identity.

 

She offered a range of examples from past clients to further illustrate the pervasiveness of racism and its impact. She told the story of a client who was shot on the way home from meeting with her and taken to a prison rather than a hospital despite having committed no crime. This story helped illuminate how the construction of the black criminal stereotype popularized after Emancipation still serves to justify violence towards black people even when there is no evidence of criminal activity. A client helped her understand that, for black and brown kids, clothing can do more than make you “cool”—it can get you killed, as evidenced by his conscious efforts to drop his hoodie while passing by people in the “nicer” part of town. With the story of a judge mistakenly identifying a Northwestern law student, who happened to be black, as a criminal in a courtroom, Berk Moss reminded those gathered that racism is real, it is everywhere, and antiracism is necessary to change the system.

 

Berk Moss spoke about the prison system and that artificially high costs for communication with imprisoned people structurally limits the ability of those incarcerated to connect with loved ones and maintain their support network while behind bars. She also noted the very low wages of prison workers, often no more than $0.50 per hour. Students’ study of the Prison Industrial Complex prompted them to question such low wages for prison labor.  

 

While Gibba’s students already had a basic understanding about the construction of racism, justifications for policing and how prisons are punitive and costly for some while making boatloads of money for others, Berk Moss’ personal examples made their learning all the more real. “These issues you are learning about in Ms. Gibba’s classroom are really all around you,” Berk Moss said before fielding questions from her 6th grade audience.

 

Reflecting upon the importance of bringing real-world practitioners into the classroom, Gibba commented, “Students are hopefully inspired by everyday people who use their skills and passions to improve our current world. People of every identity have joined a long legacy of freedom fighting, and so, too, can they.”