Why Just Stories? Why Now?

Tell me why teaching justice is important to you.

Yeah, probably the simplest answer is there is a lot of injustice.

And it is actually painful to me a lot of the time.

And I know that's true for a lot of other people.

I was raised in a faith tradition and in my family to pay attention to those kinds of things.

But it was sort of the water around me.

It wasn't that I was a little kid walking around thinking about injustice and justice.

Although there was a time in sixth grade where a bunch of us were marching around the school building at recess, chanting Black Power slogans.

That was probably something that I picked up.

You know, I was a kid in the 60s.

And so picking up the kinds of things that were going on around me.

So I want to balance it.

That must have felt empowering as a sixth grader to march around the school like that.

It's hard to imagine that happening today.

It was kind of fun.

And it was... probably a weird thing to do.

But speaking of what was going on, I had teachers who became teachers in that era.

And so as with many of our students today, you can sort of see them seeing the world around them going into a profession where they want to make some kind of change and feeding messages to us.

And so the air around me was full of people thinking about these kinds of things.

And so

And where was this school?

In Cleveland, Ohio.

Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio.

Lived there until I came here in the early 2000s.

Okay.