Last month a group of school leaders asked us what we thought about police in their schools. We only had a few minutes left in our 3-hour session. I wasn’t satisfied with my response. Here is what I should have said and will next time:

The what is simple: get police out of your school; use those resources to fund counselors, community mentors, and restorative justice. The how is bit more complicated, but that’s only because there are so many ways to do actually do it, and you have to come to consensus on one approach. And you’ve already answered the why — that you should get police out of your school because their presence undermines the very function of your schools for the students you are consistently already underserving. 

Your concern is probably about something else: white parents. You’ll have to muster the courage to withstand the rage white parents will deploy when you take this deliberate stance toward protecting the spirits of Black children in schools. It’s not because white people hate Black children. It’s because white people love police. We’ve imagined them as our protectors since childhood, intervening between us and the dark bodied threads we invent, imagine, or hear about — usually from other white people. As adults, we believe police will do the same for our white children when they are in close proximity with dark children in schools. Those of us who no longer love the police didn’t get to this stance on our own. We got here most likely by seeing the terror police have inflicted on specific Black people we know by name, touch, and voice who we also — by some circumstances — came to love. If we hadn’t come to love these Black people, we would still love the police. 

Someone I don’t know very well but nonetheless respect once said to a big room of people, “Leadership means disappointing white people.” I don’t know if it matters in this instance — but I’ll say it because you’re probably wondering — but she is white, just like most of you. So I wonder how you might become free to do what you know in your belly is right if you accept that you absolutely will provoke and under all circumstances must withstand the rage of white parents in order to do your job.