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9/23/2024 182. Let Go of Fear: Whiteness, Emotionality, and Education with Dr. Cheryl E. MatiasRead Now
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This transformative episode is with Dr. Cheryl E. Matias, a passionate professor, motherscholar, race consultant, and academic coach. In this interview, she emphasizes the importance of overcoming fear and shifting mindsets to truly address white supremacy in educational practices.
Dr. Matias advocates for educators to engage deeply with systemic issues beyond superficial checklists, integrating their professional efforts with personal life, and ensuring open, humane discussions about racial issues. A committed educator, activist, and researcher, Dr. Matias is deeply motivated by both her passion for racial justice and, more significantly, being a motherscholar of three and giving her own children the education they deserve. The Big Dream Dr. Cheryl Matias's big dream for education is to let go of our fears—fearing what we do not know, fearing conversations, and fearing being labeled. In letting go of these things that hold us back, Dr. Matias envisions an educational system where we’re no longer guided by fear. Instead, we can reclaim education by fostering courageous conversations that challenge white supremacy and cultivate a deeper understanding of racial justice. Mindset Shifts Required In Dr. Matias’ view, changing our mindsets is the key way to overcome fears. To move beyond our fears, it’s important to shift the mindset and rethink how we talk about race in the education system by addressing embedded white supremacy. As part of this mindset shift, Dr. Matias calls for a move away from viewing racism as merely intentional malicious acts and discourse to recognizing the "unintended consequences" and the collective force of white supremacy in our education system and society. Action Steps Step 1: Stop relying on checklists and thinking there is one right path to “getting it.” Instead, it's important to rely on educating yourself by diving deeper into the issue at hand. If you haven’t studied whiteness or the emotionalities of whiteness in education, that’s a place for educators to start. Educate yourself—don’t just wait to check the boxes someone else offers you. Step 2: Advocate for scholarly experts to come into the schools and share their research. It’s important to be judicious about who you bring in, as there are many experts doing diversity work now. Dr. Matias advises advocating for those who have some practical in-school experience so they know the dynamics and wrestle of ideological liberation, but working within the constraints of school mandates. Step 3: Teach others what you’ve learned. If educators truly believe education is transformational, then we should be ready to teach the most racist of all students. That means beginning the conversation in your own home and having those hard conversations, with boundaries and humanizing it—if you’re not ready to do that, you’re not ready to teach others. Challenges? One of the main challenges in this work is the fact that there isn’t a checklist on how to approach these things. There’s no set path with your students, your partner, your family—you have to have trust and boundaries, learning healthy communication practices. There’s an emotional journey here, and we all have some barriers, fears, and discomfort associated with addressing racial issues. Dr. Matias encourages us to stop looking for a utopia that does not exist but embrace the full range of human emotions that will come up in doing this work. One Step to Get Started To jumpstart your journey in racial justice advocacy, Dr. Matias recommends a simple yet powerful action: Read a book! If you need a place to start, she suggests her own book, Feeling White, to understand how racialized emotions impact racial justice work. And don’t do it on your own—engage in communal learning by reading together with a colleague or friend, fostering deeper conversations and shared growth. Stay Connected You can stay connected with Dr. Matias on her website, on Facebook, or by email To help you implement today’s takeaways, Dr. Matias shared her video presentation on critical whiteness studies with you for free. And, if you’re looking for more details on the ideas in this blog post, listen to episode 182 of the Time for Teachership podcast. If you’re unable to listen or you prefer to read the full episode, you can find the transcript below. Quotes:
TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03 - Lindsay Lyons Dr Cheryl E Matias, how are you? Welcome to the podcast. 0:00:08 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Thank you so much for having me. I'm doing great. I hope you're doing well as well. 0:00:13 - Lindsay Lyons Yes, thank you. I am so thrilled to talk to you today. There is just so much of your work that is brilliant and amazing and listeners, if you don't know it, go get it immediately. 0:00:22 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias But you're going to learn today. 0:00:24 - Lindsay Lyons I'm going to learn today. Thank you for being with us. I think the first question is really you know what is important for folks to know about you, or just to keep in mind in general as we have this conversation today. 0:00:35 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Oh, thanks, you know what. It's funny. I was kind of confused about the question at the beginning. But you know, I think people know me as a racial justice scholar doing work as a professor in education. But I think people forget some of the important things that I was a classroom teacher both in LA Unified in South Central Los Angeles and in the New York Department of Education in Bed-Stuy, brooklyn. So I've taught in both of the biggest counties or the biggest school districts in the nation. That's important. But I think the more important thing about me is people ask like, why would you do this? Of course I'm passionate. I grew up in LA and I, you know, I was a teacher and I saw so many black and brown students not giving their props. And so I, you know, I think the biggest thing that motivates me is I'm a mother scholar of three. I have twins who are now going into their senior year in high school and I have a little one I call my post-tenure baby. So as much as I am so committed as an activist, as an educator, as a researcher, my deepest motivations have always been to give my own children the education they so deserve. 0:01:47 - Lindsay Lyons That is such a beautiful grounding for our conversation and just for our work in the space. I think it's so deeply personal and I thank you for sharing that with folks. I'm curious to know what the kind of big dream you alluded to it, but what kind of the big dream for the grand scheme of education is. I always love grounding this in Dr Bettina Love's work how she discusses freedom. Dreaming, I think, is really inspiring and also grounds us in that justice work right Dreams grounded in the critique of injustice. So what is that big dream that you hold for the field? 0:02:22 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Thank you for asking. First, I'm very pleased to hear that you're grounding the work and how Bettina frames everything. I think she is such an inspiration in how we conceptualize the work and I like to even draw further from her with her ideas of like Black joy and Black love. So I think one of the biggest dreams I have for education is to reclaim that by particularly letting go of fear Fearing that which we do not know, fearing conversations, fearing being labeled something fearing. We need to let go of fear because fear shouldn't be deciding the type of avenues that we have in our lives personally, nor should it be what we are guiding our decision-making and policies for education. 0:03:16 - Lindsay Lyons That is so good. I, literally an hour ago, I was just with facilitators who are talking about, we're talking about and planning events for thinking about history, education, and one of the values that we landed on was courage, and we need to have courage to do this well and just to be human beings in community with one another, and so I love this idea of letting go of fear. So many times I think there are things that come out of that fear that are so disruptive and we don't identify fear as the root. So I really appreciate you naming this, thank you. I think a lot of this work around racial justice is really sometimes the biggest shift for me has been a shift in mindset that gets me to the point of like, okay, now I see things differently, this is a new lens, this is a whatever. I'm just in a different headspace and now I can proceed. I can like be better in this space, I can be a better community member, I can be a more courageous. You know that it just comes easier when we have that like mindset shift, and I'm curious if you know of folks who a mindset shift, where you've seen folks really kind of move forward with more thoughtfulness, purpose, whatever it is after having made it, if that question makes sense. 0:04:32 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Yeah, it does. I mean, I think that's the most important aspect moving beyond fear right Is changing your mind shift. Let's take, for example, something that you're fearful in personal life. For me, at one point I was super afraid of dogs and I couldn't be around them. But I had to shift my mind, my mind frame, and say and put myself amidst dogs my sister's dogs, actually dogs got a whole weekend before my kids and just really said no, I am going, I'm not afraid, I am going to enjoy this, I'm going to embrace this as a part of my journey of becoming a better person. In the same vein, we really need to think about mind shifts as a way of rethinking how we think about race. Now, we know we all grew up whether you're a person of color, whether you're white, we all grew up with the same Kumbaya story of Dr Martin Luther King, that we all bleed the same blood. It doesn't matter about race. And then you know, post Michael Brown and Breonna Taylor, of course the world saw what they like to coin a global racial awakening, right. But you know, the truth is we're not post-racial, we're not seeing race. We need to rethink how we see race and racism Because if we really think about it. Racism is not the problem in education. Racial bias is not the problem tripped out. What the biggest problem is is how white supremacy gets instituted in the fabric and the everyday of our practices, and it does so by the ideologies of whiteness. We need to tackle the actual disease and not the symptom, and that's what I've always said. In patriarchy, right, we talk. It's absolutely important that we understand how glass ceilings, rape culture and sexism impact women In this. At the same token, we also need to understand how male privilege, toxic masculinity and all of that, you know, impacts how women are, how women engage and navigate this society. So, in the same vein, we need to also think about how white supremacy held up by individual acts of whiteness, your ideas of whiteness, emotions even of whiteness, which I've written extensively about. We need to understand how those individual acts become a collective force to uphold white supremacist ideology. And so I think that shift needs to happen and we need to move away from American history X, you know, and Edward Norton's great display of a neo-Nazi. We need to shift what we understand about being culpable of racist acts and racist discourse and racist behavior. It's not a person who's obviously always trying to be malicious, but it could be. These quote-unquote unintended consequences right. So remove intention and let's move ourselves through our fear and start to understand a new way of understanding race, white supremacy and whiteness in society. 0:07:49 - Lindsay Lyons Oh my gosh, that's just so well said, thank you. Thank you so much for that. I really appreciated how, in the introduction to the other elephant in the classroom, you and Paul Gorski talk about how it's both the systemic structure pieces and the individual acts, right, and that sometimes talking about the structural pieces removes the individual like. That was just a really big moment for me to be like right, that's exactly what is happening in discourse now, particularly amongst white liberals, right, and that idea of white liberalism coming into discourse. And so I just am so amazed by all of your work and I think it is truly helpful for the mindset shifts just in the way that you talk and write about it. 0:08:34 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias So thank you for that grounding, really thankful that you pointed that out, because that's what we're seeing a lot, and I remember writing that because I am so thankful that there's more people interested in racial justice. Whether you are a black indigenous person of color or white racially identified, you know, the thing is we need to always keep in mind that when we talk about these larger isms, we still have to honor that we are still part and parcel of different systems and so you don't want the situation that Eduardo Bonilla Silva wrote, where it's like there's racism without racist. We have to be culpable of certain actions that we hold. So when we talk about larger system things and I know we've been pushing that with the critical race theory, to understand race in a larger systemic, and that's wonderful, I'm glad people are grasping but then they moved away from taking their own onus and agency like, well, I'm not, or they start to put these factions on white people themselves and I'm like, hey, hold up now. So in the same token, with any other ism for men, for heteroaggressivism, we need to still take onus of that privilege that might unintentionally harm others. So thank you for pointing that out, lindsay. 0:09:49 - Lindsay Lyons Absolutely, and I think, for maybe a school leader who is listening to this conversation and thinking about their own thoughts, mindsets and those of their staff, I'm curious to know what your thoughts are in terms of the brave know the brave actions required, as folks are in these instructional spaces, in these school communities and responsible for both themselves and leading and working in community with you know staff. I don't know if you want to speak to either the teacher lens of that or the leader lens or both, but I'm curious to know what those actions look like as we engage in this meaningful work or labor for justice. 0:10:28 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Absolutely, and everyone plays a role, whether they're in the academia, you know, doing the scholarship and the research, whether they're the K-12 teachers on the ground doing, you know, working with our babes, or they're the, or they're administrators, you know, trying to, you know, balance this fine line of wanting to do justice work but still having to, you know, you know, cater to the needs of the district. So I think some of the greatest advice I would take is it's so important one to stop looking for checklists, because when we rely too, too surface-like, on checklists, then we think, oh, I got it, I'm done, you know. But I think the More important thing is we really need to investigate more deeply the real issue here. If we're talking about racism, that's one aspect, but I told you that that was the symptom of white supremacist thought. So if they have not studied whiteness or even the emotionalities of whiteness in education, they need to delve deeper, because once we have a thorough understanding of the problem can we engage in different types of policies, actions that will change and pedagogies that will really change the context. So stop relying on checklists, start relying on hey, we're educators, rely on educating yourself, you know. So that would be a number one action. Number two is advocate as you're starting to read and learn yourself as a student, because we're lifelong learners. We always say that, so believe in it. I think it's important that we think of, we advocate for these people who are doing the research to come into the schools, and we should be judicious, because I know there's a lot of people doing diversity work, but maybe, if we're talking about K-12 teachers or administrators, we might want to actually have people who've been in that role. You get wonderful scholars who do this work and their work is amazing. Don't get me wrong, I honor it. At the same time, if you want advocacy about getting some stuff done and getting some like you were saying, book clubs earlier, or getting scholars to come, you want to make sure that they too have been k-12 teachers or they too have been school principals, so they understand the dynamics and having to wrestle with the dynamics of ideological liberation to the, the constraining. I mean I taught during open court, you know. So you know having to balance that with school mandated stuff. So that's another thing. And I think the third thing that is so important so you did the individual, you did the advocacy for your community is, you know, to start teaching others. Right. We're great, we're educators. Guess what we truly believe? Education is transformational. Then we should be ready to teach the most racist of all students. And it starts at home. I always ask my students why is it that you don't talk about race and whiteness at the dinner table when Uncle Joe comes over? And I said if you can't have that conversation with Uncle Joe and make boundaries and still make it humanizing, then you're not ready to teach that to others. And so I think those three let me stop at that because if it gets overwhelming, because we have so much to do as teachers but I think those are three one, educate yourself. Two, it's a matter of advocating now for the knowledge that needs to be brought in. And three, doing what we do best teach others those are so good. 0:14:16 - Lindsay Lyons and I also love how you really brought it to the personal family dinner example, because I think sometimes we block off. This is my work at school and this is who I am at home, and this is about being a full human in all of the spaces and doing the work in all of the spaces. And I think it's very easy for white liberalism to like come to the table, come to the dinner table, right, and be be part of that there in that silence and avoidance. So I just appreciate that specificity because I think that probably hits home for a lot of folks. So thank you. 0:14:49 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Absolutely. I actually had a student once. Oh no, she was a professor and she wanted to learn. She had asked me to help her, coach her, in becoming a better professor on racial justice. But it turned out for the whole year she was doing a lot more work on cultivating a more humanizing relationship with her father and her family members in the Midwest. And I said that is the most important thing, because it's not about us versus them, because if you literally start to think like that, you're adopting ism, ism type of men, binary thinking, and that's what racism, that's what white supremacy, that's what heterosexism, that's what I know. Uh, all of that does it creates us in binaries. So it's about how you can continue to have humanizing relationships with people with boundaries and with love. So it's not a matter of shutting Uncle Joe's out, it's a matter of saying no. I hear you when I study this and I need you to honor my perspective in this. 0:15:53 - Lindsay Lyons And what a great space if there's already love present, right? As opposed to creating love from scratch in a brand new group of students every year, right? What a great place to practice that. 0:16:02 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Exactly exactly, and education goes not only to our K-12 students or our college students. You're an educator. You educate the people around you. Absolutely, I am imagining folks who are listening, might be thinking about. You know, oh, this moment that I tried this thing, or I, you know, I invited Uncle Joe in and it didn't go well. Or you know, whatever, what are the challenges that you see come up for folks. And then how do like in any relationship with K-12 students? No checklist, right? You don't have a checklist to deal with your spouse or partner. You don't have a checklist to deal with your parents. You don't have a checklist to deal with your cousins, your aunties and uncles, and so you have to trust on human behavior and boundaries and healthy communicate. That's it right. So you can expect and I always tell this, I do this, but you'd like a little pedagogical tool on K-12 teachers or school leaders who want to do this exercise. I would say okay, and I tell them to write it out because I don't want them taking a picture after I write it on the board. I say okay, tell me why you don't talk to Uncle Joe at the dinner table about race. Tell me why and have him list all the reasons. They'll tell you everything like oh, he's going to say that was yesteryear. He'll get angry. He'll start screaming at me. Everything. He'll dismiss everything I said. He'll make me start crying, he'll make me, you know. Just write it all down. And I think it's really important to say okay, now when I'm learning anew and I'm discomforted and I feel fearful and I feel I'm being attacked or whatever, say, don't act like Uncle Joe and just know that those are the actual emotional mechanisms and hence why I study white emotionalities in my book, feeling White. But these are the actual things and emotional journey you will go through and it's not to say it's bad. You know people always think they just want sunshine and rainbows and unicorns, but you know, part of human life is feeling the yin and the yang of it all. So when you actually stick at the table and you, you may not come out perfect on the first time, but it's a matter like. Any parent would know this, any teacher would know this, any person who has always been a good friend, daughter, spouse. It's about the longevity. You know. It's about the ride, not the end goal. And so at this point, as you engage in this type of work, stop looking for utopia that does not exist. In fact, critical race theory. I know I'm going to bust your bubble. Derrick Bell straight up said there's gonna be a permanence of racism. It will mutate in the most awfully grotesque way, right, but it's an amazing awfully and grow like how did it turn to that now? But, um, at the same time, it's about the longevity. It's about how we continue to fight as humanity, how we continue to advocate for a more humane society, because that's what this is. It's not partisan politics, it is literally a human rights issue. So when we engage in these conversations, be ready to feel the full range of human emotions and how beautiful welcome that. Embrace it and say, yeah, this still makes me passionate that I get really anxious or mad and then pull yourself back and say, but I'm not giving up. 0:19:35 - Lindsay Lyons That's so beautiful and I I think about the folks who are even working with you know, like preschoolers my kid is two and a half at this moment but, like you know, thinking about how we nurture emotions and allow kids. You know, I've heard many people say at all age levels oh, kids aren't ready for this conversation. Okay, kids are ready for the conversation. Number one I think we could agree. And then two, like the nurturing of being able to have conversations and feel emotions can be normalized at any age and that's so much of just our daily work as humans and as educators that I love that you brought it there, because I think that's part of it. Right, we need to be emotionally healthy people and like that is a like building that will constantly happen in conjunction with our anti-racist advocacy and humanity and all the things. Is that? Am I on the point there? 0:20:29 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Yes, absolutely. People think this is about hatred and cancellation. It's not. No, don't get it twisted. We started most racial justice. People have done this because they wanted a greater understanding of love. And those of you that are really interested in doing like critical race parenting, which is another work that I do I actually published a popular press. Anyone can act to say it, um, but it's called um and you can google my name, cheryl matias, and mommy is being brown bad and it's on my own children and, um, it's an article that you can download and just kind of understand how to you do these conversations with children, because by 18 months they've already internalized dominant messages about race, gender. I mean, I have boy, girl, twins and at 18 months everyone gave me pink and blue and I would put the sippy cups on the table and my son would take the blue and give the pink one to his sister and vice versa. So if we're acting as if, oh, our kids are too young to study race, they already know, just like we have to talk about sex drugs to our kids. What messages do you want your child to have about a certain topic? So talk to them about race. 0:21:48 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you. I think there's kind of a lifelong work to this, to all of this right. This is lifelong, as you said, and so I'm curious to know what's a good, like momentum builder, what's a good one next step that someone could take if they're listening to this on the drive into work, for example, and they're about to start the school day, or they're listening to it on the way home and about to like go be with family, like what's that one first step that you would encourage someone to do to kind of keep it going or kind of jumpstart some action? 0:22:21 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Well, you know what? Read a book. Read a book, right, we're a bunch of nerds. So how about that? How about you read a book with someone? Pick up, pick up my book feeling white. How's that? You know, if you want to understand how racialized emotions really impact, how we do racial justice work, because you're feeling so anxious, let's find out where that comes from, feeling white. If you want to know how whiteness impacts people of color in the education, from k all the way to 20 to college, you know, like, like, oh, I'm a good person. You can pick up my book Surviving Beckys and that's just all stories. There's no citations on that book and there's even discussion questions. You've got all genres, from horror, sci-fi it's all just stories. And then you can see the messages behind each story. It's all just stories, and then you can see the messages behind each story. So pick up a book. Come on, guys, we're educators. Start there and don't do this journey on your own. Say you know what cousin, you know what? Uncle Joe, you know what? Maybe a former student who has become your mentor? 0:23:28 - Lindsay Lyons Let's read this together. That is a great call to action. Yes, let's do this together. I love it, and so I will link to. For anyone listening, driving, doing dishes, whatever, I will link to those books in the blog post, so no need to pause what you're doing and write them down. I'll link them. As a close, I think I love that we've been talking about lifelong learning, and so I'm curious. This question is purely for fun. It can relate to what we talked about or something different. What is something that you personally have been learning about lately? 0:23:57 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Oh, gosh One. I think I constantly learn. Those of you that don't know me I'm a salsa and bachata dancer. I am constantly learning. I have been to Cuba, puerto Rico, I've been to the Dominican Republic to perfect my bachata, my moves, my salsa. That's one thing I'm always perfecting too. On being a mother, for goodness sakes, I think I got it down and then I'm like my kids just school me and call me sus, you know. So you know, no cap right. So I'm literally trying all the time to be a better mother, because, as the work that I've done mother, scholar work, to be a better mother it makes you a better scholar, and make a scholar makes you a better mother. So that's another aspect I'm always trying to learn. And the third is I'm actually coming back to my faith, which I've had, I think, a lot of justice workers. We pushed away from our faith, thinking, oh, it's too rigid. But if we push away from our faith, we're never in the spaces to make change. We're never in the spaces to make change. And so I'm just learning how to come back into my faith, be a service to God and, you know, just not make it seem like those people who are these type of Catholic Christians or whatever the case may be. They're the enemy, but showing them nope. You know what Jesus was, the first social justice worker. So I think it's a lifelong learning. I can list thousands. And does it make me overwhelmed and anxious at times? Absolutely. But I'm going to do an epistemological shift that I just told you, a mindset reframe. How exciting that I don't know it all and I'm still ready to learn. 0:25:56 - Lindsay Lyons That is so good. Okay, we're gonna quote that. That's great. That is so good. I think people are gonna want to grab your book, get in touch with you, follow you wherever you exist, in the online spaces or in-person spaces. Where should folks connect with you, if that's okay? 0:26:12 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias I do have a website at CherylMatiascom, but I don't check that email as much. I'm sorry, guys, it's just too much, it's too many hats. But you can always connect with me on Facebook. I have a professional Facebook. I know people try to connect with me on Insta, but that's personal family, so don't take it personally. But Facebook I'm old, I'll do Facebook. You can Google me and I'm at the University of San Diego now. I'm no longer at University of Colorado, no longer at University of Kentucky for those 15 years, but I'm back home in California University of San Diego. But I'm back home in California University of San Diego. You can email me anytime and I definitely appreciate the calls. I think I just met with someone who read my book just about a couple months ago and we just, you know, sat and drank tea and talk shop for a little bit, you know. So I really appreciate the feedback. I even had someone who reached out from South Africa saying it feels like, after reading Feeling White, I had coffee with you, like you're my girlfriend and I'm like, well, I am now. So I think it's important, just like, google me, email me at my university, email at San Diego and follow me on Facebook. Amazing, dr Martinez. Thank you so, so much for being on Facebook Amazing, Dr Martinez. 0:27:31 - Lindsay Lyons Thank you so, so much for being on the podcast today. I appreciate your time. 0:27:35 - Dr. Cheryl E. Matias Oh, absolutely. Thank you for having me here and hopefully it reaches the ears that needs to be heard or be encouraged or supported.
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AuthorLindsay Lyons (she/her) is an educational justice coach who works with teachers and school leaders to inspire educational innovation for racial and gender justice, design curricula grounded in student voice, and build capacity for shared leadership. Lindsay taught in NYC public schools, holds a PhD in Leadership and Change, and is the founder of the educational blog and podcast, Time for Teachership. Archives
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