Pull Back the Curtain

Before leaving the Whitney Plantation, I noticed there was a big bulletin board with comments from the visitors written on Posts-Its. Things like:

 

• More kindness and understanding.

 

• Learn from extraordinary resilience of black people, apologize and thank them for all they’ve given to uplift all lives.

 

• Learn history to not repeat.

 

I didn’t have time to add my own, but this is what I would have written (evoking the scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy pulls back the curtain to reveal the sham Wizard and his illusory special effects); 

 

• Pull back the curtain and expose all the guiding narrative that both excuses and causes atrocities against fellow human beings. 

 

• Pull back the curtain to expose the ways the privileged who benefit from the false narrative bamboozle voters and pass laws to keep it going.

 

• Pull back the curtain and vote.

 

• Pull back the curtain on the stage and sing, dance, play music, recite poetry, exhibit artwork that tells truth in all its multiple dimensions— intellectual, emotional and spiritual. 

 

• Pull back the curtain between the Other World and Our World to reveal the presence of the Ancestors. Heal their world of unmourned restless wandering ghosts through knowledge, right speech and truth-telling, and feel them help heal our world as they gather beside us when properly called. 

 

Indeed, this is one way to express my philosophy of education. A constant revelation as the teacher pulls back the curtain that blocks our view of the truth, of the miraculous, of the way things actually are and the ways they actually work. While the privileged fearful keep dropping curtains to hide what we need to know and feel and understand, our job is pull them aside one by one. Let’s get to work.