Responding to Intolerance: Leadership for a Multiracial Democracy
by John Rogers and Joseph Kahne
Michelle Kenup is a principal of a racially diverse high school in a politically conservative community in the southeastern United States. One of her chief goals is to prepare young people to be respectful and thoughtful community members. This isn’t a platitude for her. She wants her students to be able to wrestle with local and national political issues and to teach them, in her words, “how to have that dialogue and that disagreement without it turning violent or angry or so aggressive.”
Unfortunately, like many leaders, Kenup has found that the national political environment as well as local political and racial divisions, is making that goal more difficult. In Kenup’s district, the hottest topics are bound up in broader debates on race and immigration. Harmful acts of intolerance are common, such as students directing chants of “build the wall” toward immigrant classmates. As she explains, “When it starts boiling over outside, sometimes it will carry over here [in school].”
Principal Kenup tries to be proactive, regularly communicating the importance of respect and civility to her students. She employs discipline to address violations of these norms. For example, when a white student told a Latino classmate he “needed to go back to Mexico,” Kenup initiated discipline proceedings and facilitated a discussion between the victimizer and the victim. Through this kind of restorative practice, she hopes to create a community in which everyone comes to “accept our similarities and our differences.” She also reported the affair to the white student’s father. Unfortunately, parents are sometimes unsupportive of her approach. While she was hoping that the victimizer’s family would be a partner in the school’s efforts to treat his classmates with respect, this was not the case.