September 19, 2023

It was 2004 when a teacher of color was sent by the girls’ school at which he taught to Hawaii for the People of Color Conference (POCC). Coincidently, it was also the start of a movement at independent schools to challenge the Western canon, an exciting pivot away from the Western survey course that this teacher had inherited. He had been accepted into College in the UK on the strength of his academic skills in History but was never exposed to a book like Europe and the People without History, which changed his outlook after he came to the United States. When he was a middle school student at one of the oldest and most iconic independent schools in the world, Harrow School, the school of Winston Churchill and Lord Byron, this teacher had endured racism as a South Asian, not from his teachers but from his fellow students. In his mind, then, as he flew to Hawaii, were the racial slurs an older boy hurled at him daily, deeply hurtful at 13 years old, and leading to tears and support from his older brother. He had developed his tools of retaliation. He simply outperformed all…