Getting Punched in the 3rd Grade Made Me Think a Lot About Civic/ Institutional Trust

As a child I went to a Christian private school in Richmond, VA. The school still exists and is part of a larger institution that includes a nearby high school and a church, and the two schools shared resources. This broader system had a general vision and mission of transformation via a very pronounced moral worldview, and enforced it with frequent church services and forced mantras, but to me it was clear that the day-to-day reality was far from that. I’ve talked about this in my book, A Kids Book About Radical Dreaming, but I faced racialized physical and verbal bullying almost daily from older white students, and the school constantly did nothing about it even as both I and my parents constantly raised the issue.  It took me finally leaving to have resolution.

However, that one particular memory I have was in 3rd grade. Our teacher left the room to do something that was unclear - she needed to retrieve something or go to the restroom - I don’t know. While she was gone, a white student and a Black student started fighting with each other, and everyone was watching and encouraging the fight.  My thought, and I don’t know why I had the gall to do this, was a level of concern that this fight between two people who were my friends would either result in them or someone else in class getting hurt. So I stepped in between them to break it up.

Then the white classmate threw a punch at me!  And in what seemed like minutes later, the teacher returned to the room, I’m laying out on the ground, and everyone’s looking around like deer in headlights. Both students were reprimanded, and the teacher did not a single thing to check that  I was okay, or to thank me for trying to live up to the values the schools had for love and care. Instead, after sending the two students to the principal's office, she just proceeded to continue to teach the class like nothing happened.

For years I’ve blamed myself and laughed at myself (“Alvin, dude, c’mon what did you think was going to happen?”) for being utterly stupid in trying to break up this fight. But it’s only been this year that I’ve realized I actually did the right thing since that's what the school values espoused, and our teacher, the staff, the school, the institution are the ones who failed me and the class. There are so many questions I have:

1. Why did the teacher not ask the teacher of the class next door or another staff person to come in and check on us to make sure we were focused on our work?
2. Why didn’t the teacher next door or across the hall hear the commotion and run in to check what was wrong?
3. Why didn’t the teacher or any other teaching staff or administrators check on me to ensure I was okay?
4. Why didn’t the school take energy to acknowledge the bad behavior of the two students who fought (and also to correct the students in class who encouraged the fight) but not the good behavior of the student who correctly and on their own tried to stop them and others from harm?

Rather than this school system advancing the positive transformation it espoused, it advanced systemic/institutional failure - as evidenced by the day-to-day operationalization of an unaccountable and uncaring culture. It was 100% clear to me from that moment on (overlaid with the failure of its anti-bullying policy). The 1000s of little cuts to my own institutional trust then are partly why I am always subconsciously and hypervigilantly sensing in organizations and systems in the present to predict where there is misalignment between what they say they value versus what they actually do in practice (and how that impacts stakeholders), and I’ve been told by colleagues in almost each setting I’ve worked in that my connections are often right on and prescient. In fact, I think this trait can be frustrating to some because I tend to pick up on the institutional grime under the surface that may not be fun to discuss versus focusing on the things that are working well (it sucks sometimes to be right too early - hello neurodivergence!).

But I don't think about these things for intellectual sport, or as a sort of perpetual devil's advocate; I think about the impact of failing to live up to institutional values because of the almost decade of adolescent racialized trauma and abuse I experienced as a student at my school.

The above, overlaid with my cross-sector background and experience in operations, design, org change, and foresight are why I have been thinking about civic/institutional trust (and what this means for our society) so much in the past few months. 

In the coming weeks, I hope to spend more time writing about civic/institutional trust, examples at the local, state, and federal level of where we’ve seen lapses that have reduced public faith in institutions, and examples / bright spots of hope and encouragement that we can all learn from.