It was a single, brutal act of violence that would reveal to Lee Mun Wah that his purpose in life was to be a man of peace and an agent for change.
Photo by Mark Regan
In February 1985, Lee's mother was fatally shot in the head five times by an African American male. Lee, then a special education teacher in the San Francisco Unified School District, was plunged into an all-consuming state of grief. "That one event changed my whole life," he told his audience of educators at ASCD's 55th Annual Conference and Exhibit Show. "For one whole year, I lived in terror."
In that year, Lee would confront the racist attitudes, long suppressed, that flared in the aftermath of his mother's death. "All the stereotypes I had had of black men came back to me," Lee recalled. Still, somehow, he emerged from that somber time with a commitment to take on "the great crisis" in the United States. Lee, an author, filmmaker, and consultant on diversity issues, now leads a peaceful but fearless crusade against the racism, sexism, and heterosexism "that tear the spirit and hopes of one generation after another."
We cannot blame these problems on someone else, Lee maintained. He urged educators to be first among those who will take responsibility to break down racial, cultural, and gender barriers. An initial step, he suggested, is for teachers to "really get to know" their students.
Lee recalled that when he first began teaching, he asked his students to describe their lives. Most of those students had witnessed a murder or seen a shooting in their neighborhoods; most had had nothing for breakfast. "Most of my students came to school hungry, and tense, and suspicious," Lee said. What was amazing, he added, was that "my students had never told anybody about their lives."
Lee's comments implied that awareness leads to understanding, which leads to compassion. Such compassion can help educators make wiser decisions, especially when considering the long-term implications of strictly adhering to rules and regulations.
"My Asian students came to me and told me that they were deathly afraid of the African American students in my classroom because they were stealing their pencils," Lee said. "Now, I could easily have suspended those students, or sent them to the counselor's office." Instead, Lee brought 22 pencils to school, "all sharpened and new," and gave them to his Asian students to distribute to students who needed them.
"Those Asian students became empowered, and the African American students began to see them in a different way," Lee explained. "If I had simply enforced the rule of not stealing in my classes, I would have told those Asian students that they had no power." That, Lee said, would have denied them the possibility of establishing "any relationship with those black students" and would have reinforced the Asian students' fears.
Lee pointed to an incident in Decatur, Ill., as a more recent example of how rigidly enforcing the rules can hurt more than help. In Decatur, a group of African American students were expelled after they started a brawl at a high school football game. Lee criticized the decision to expel those students because, in doing so, officials "simply put away the problem." Instead, Lee argued, "we needed to have those 18 students apologize to the student body" and to "work at the next football game to enforce the appropriate attitudes and behavior." Educators in Decatur, Lee insisted, "needed to integrate these children back into the school," not just put them away.
For putting the problem away doesn't solve it; isolating students only fuels angry feelings, Lee pointed out. Indeed, the man who killed his mother had once been expelled.
"We can never expel enough students to end the violence and the hatred in our schools" and in the United States, Lee declared. The only thing that will help, he stated, is to really see who is missing and to acknowledge that "this nation will never be great, will never be healed, and will never be whole," unless all are represented.