The Trauma and Racial Melancholia of Ungrieved Endings: An Embodied Understanding of Teachers of Color Who Have Left

• In Event: Healing Racialized Trauma: Grief and Love as a Praxis for Racial Justice

Abstract

As a classroom teacher, I wish I was more prepared to navigate several hard truths: that racial oppression is a permanent feature embedded in the structures of American society (Bell, 1992), including school systems rooted in dehumanizing ideologies predicated upon Black, Indigenous, disenfranchised communities of color (Stovall, 2018); and as such, racial trauma and racialized grief are harsh inevitabilities of teaching in these communities. Acknowledging this reality directs our energy towards uprooting and refusing the inherent violence of schooling that perpetuates loss and social death through anti-Blackness, historical erasure, and forced assimilation (Marie & Watson, 2020). Drawing upon the conceptualization of racial melancholia (Grinage, 2019; Chang, 2004), this study examines teacher of color attrition as a distinct form of racialized trauma and grief, especially when educators are unable to fully mourn leaving the classroom.
Although districts across the nation are working to recruit and retain teachers, teachers of color are still leaving their classrooms to other school sites, into leadership or higher education, or leaving the field altogether (Diliberti & Schwartz, 2023). In general, 55% educators are considering leaving the profession, with 62% Black and 59% Latinx educators feeling compelled to leave (Walker, 2022). The field of education is often quick to consider solutions to the teacher shortage problem without feeling into what is right in front of us and within us: overwhelming, unmetabolized grief (Cariaga, 2023). Utilizing online ethnography, I examine the embodied meaning-making of four women of color who left their classrooms through these questions:
• How do teachers of color describe their experience of leaving?
• What did they need during that transition?
• How might embodied frameworks help us better understand & support the grieving process of teachers of color who have left?
I employ an adaptation of Pham’s (2022) embodied raciolinguistic analysis, as I unveil expressions of sorrow and anger from teachers of color and other visceral meaning-making that often gets punished and silenced within schools that reproduce systems of domination and disembodiment (Cariaga, 2019). This year’s AERA theme calls us to disrupt racial injustice by moving from discomfort to responsible action and care. Through participants’ narratives, this study demonstrates how pausing inside of the discomfort of grief and racial melancholia can actually lessen the disproportionate burden of trauma and grief on educators of color and the communities they serve. Because the colonial project of schooling teaches students and all who serve them to disconnect from their embodied and cultural intuition (Camangian & Cariaga, 2021; Delgado Bernal & Villalpando, 2002), focusing on feeling and allowing a full range of emotions can be a counter-hegemonic strategy to disrupt racial injustice in schools. Such grief work can help educational leaders understand that any deeply felt and cared for transition – whether to a new classroom, school, district, or outside of the field – can be an opportunity to cultivate conditions of humanization that not just honor endings, but also cultivate better beginnings in schools and beyond.

Author

• Stephanie Cariaga, California State University - Dominguez Hills