Guest Blog
SEL & Anti-Racism
Rachel Henes is the founder of Rachel Henes Consulting, where she provides workshops, strategy, and consultation for independent school parents and educators in fostering social-emotional health and equity within predominantly white, affluent spaces.
Hello RIISE community! I’m honored to be in conversation with all of you today. Thank you to RIISE and to Gina for the opportunity to have space on this blog.
I’m Rachel Henes, a white parent, social worker, and consultant to many independent schools in the NYC area. I’ve been working with independent school parents, educators, and school leaders for almost a decade, with a focus on promoting social-emotional health within cultures of affluence and achievement pressure.
When I was getting my social work degree, I never imagined that I’d end up working within highly resourced and privileged communities. I started out focusing on how I could help poor communities of color, as I’d been taught that those were the folks who needed my help and intervention. I had a basic understanding of structural racism but no analysis of whiteness or how it operates. It took me participating in multiple rounds of the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond’s Undoing Racism workshop to start to awaken. One day, during a break-out group for white folks at a conference, I pondered aloud about whether I could be more helpful to anti-racism work by focusing on white communities - and one of the facilitators said “Go get your people”. Since that moment, I’ve been on a path to learn how to do just that. And it has been centered not around knowledge acquisition, but around social and emotional growth and development.
SEL (social-emotional learning) is a term that is thrown around a lot in our schools, and for good reason. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) defines five core SEL competencies, including self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. SEL is foundational to our mental and physical health and associated with a host of positive outcomes.
SEL is also an integral part of anti-racism work, especially for white people. Understanding who you are, what triggers you, how to slow down and take in new perspectives, how cultural norms impact and shape you, how to recognize and respond to emotional reactivity - this exploration of your inner life - and how it is shaped by systems and structures - is a continual part of the messy process of learning and becoming (the endless becoming) anti-racist.
And therein lies a big challenge on the path towards independent schools becoming anti-racist. Predominately white institutions weren’t set up to foster SEL, and certainly not transformative SEL. Instead, they were designed to help students “succeed”, which translates historically to getting an acceptance letter from an elite college. In this context, SEL is often viewed as an add-on (at best) or competition for class time. When SEL is given time and space, through say stress-management or self-care workshops, it is often reactionary, short-term and without cultural or socio-political context or examination.
This watered down version of SEL reflects a cultural and systemic lack of investment in and care for the well-being of young people. And it comes at a huge cost. It contributes to the rates of stress, anxiety, depression and substance use in “high-achieving schools” that are alarmingly higher than national norms and that put kids in our communities “at-risk”.
It also shuts down and derails anti-racist work - again and again. I’ve been part of many conversations about race in many classrooms and schools over the years. I’ve never seen a trained facilitator intentionally try to shame a student. What I have seen though, over and over, is the lack of ability of white students (and some white staff) to tolerate feelings of discomfort, and as such, to immediately shut down or lash out when racism is brought up.
When white children are socially and emotionally underdeveloped, everyone is at risk. First and foremost, people of color are at-risk - as history has shown us and repeats daily, white discomfort turned into rage or rampage can destroy the careers, families, lives, and dreams impacted in an instant. In my years surveying students and conducting interviews with independent school faculty and students about social and emotional health, I heard countless stories about students of color experiencing racial harm - microaggressions, invisibility, tokenization, harassment. Who was causing this racial harm? Their mostly well-meaning white peers, teachers and administrators - who often had little to no insight into their behaviors or awareness of their impact.
Underdeveloped social-emotional skills in white kids is also dangerous for….white kids. Kids who aren’t able to take in new information without attacking it, who aren’t able to slow down and listen, who respond to hard feelings or difficult conversations by mocking, lashing out or shutting down, who intellectualize and gaslight rather than ask and learn - these are kids who are in need of intense emotional support and intervention. They have been taught something that is toxic and traumatic: that their worth lies not in who they are, but in what they acquire. And therefore anything that gets in their way of amassing external markers of “success”, whether it be a bad grade, a challenging emotion, a discussion about racism - is a potential nuisance or threat to be negotiated or overcome. They are playing the role required of them in a white supremacist system, designed to center their trajectory to power and resources more than their health and humanity.
This means that we, white adults in our independent school communities, need to address the social and emotional under-development of white students, and the cultural context that enables it. We need to invest in their - and our - growth so we will not cause more harm through our shame, confusion, rage and anxiety. It means that we, white parents, need to look at the ways that we are complicit in having our children believe that what matters about them is what they accomplish - and that our job is to keep their journey clear of obstacles so they can claim what is theirs.
Instead of organizing to stop anti-racist work through fear mongering, white parents need to put every ounce of energy into supporting it. Anti-racist work is not just about lessening individual acts of racial harm - although that is, of course, of primary importance. It is also about healing and reimagining our schools so that they allow the brilliance of all young people to shine. Imagine the gifts and talents that would surface if we centered SEL and equity for our students? What new ways of learning and interacting can emerge if all students know they have inherent value and can divest from a culture of perfectionism and urgency? What types of future leaders could emerge from schools that prioritize empathy, relationships and self-awareness? Undoing racism is the path towards re-discovering our individual and shared humanity. This is nothing short of a lifeline in a system that reduces young people to test scores and transcripts.
There are two things that keep me encouraged in the face of the current backlash to anti-racism. First, there are so many incredible educators, parents, and administrators in our independent schools - (shout out to RIISE!) - and they are making progress. They are changing the fabric of the schools so they can live up to their missions. Second, the social and emotional skills that white kids need to engage with anti-racist curricula can be learned. Young people are still developing and changing. They can heal and grow. These skills must be learned so that white fragility does not continue to derail and stall social justice and equity.
What does this look like in our independent school communities? We’ll need to figure that out together but there are incredible scholars and thinkers leading the way, such as:
Thank you to RIISE and Gina for giving me space on this blog and for the work that you do.
If you are a parent, educator or school leader who would like to talk more about SEL and anti-racism, please reach out to me at rachel@rachelhenes.com or leave a note here.
To learn more about my services for parents and schools, you can visit www.rachelhenes.com.
References:
Abolitionist Teaching Network - Teaching to Thrive from ATN - Teaching To Thrive | Podcast Episode
Dena Simmons: Why SEL Alone Isn't Enough - Educational Leadership
Dena Simmons: How to Change the Story about Students of Color
CASEL: Toward Transformative Social and Emotional Learning: Using an Equity Lens
The Traumatic Roots of White Body Supremacy and Racism in America - Resmaa Menakem - HPP 65
Suniya Luthar: Speaking of Psychology: The mental price of affluence
Washington Post: Perspective | Students in high-achieving schools are now named an ‘at-risk’ group, study says