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In “Every Traveler Has One Vermont Poem,” Audre Lorde succinctly illustrates the pervasiveness of racism in the United States. A peace found in the wonders of nature, where the flowers don’t care that the speaker is “a stranger/making a living choice,” is broken by a young boy shouting the N-word from the seat of his father’s tractor.

For T. Elijah Hawkes, principal at Randolph Union High School in Randolph, Vermont, Lorde’s poem is a lesson in how to recognize his state’s beauty and its troubled history all at once. 

“We must dive deeply into an understanding of racism in Vermont, as in every state of the union,” Hawkes says, “because it ruins lives and twists reality and sense of self – of everyone involved. … We can’t know who we are if we live in denial of who we are and who we’ve been.”

The question of “who we are and who we’ve been” runs deep in Randolph, both at the high school and within the local community. Sounds Like Hate – a new podcast from our colleagues in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project – dedicates two episodes to that question and to a series of events and controversies that broke the façade of the community’s peaceful setting.

Back in the early months of 2020, before schools closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, hosts Jamila Paksima and Geraldine Moriba visited Randolph Union High School. In 2018, an increase in racist and xenophobic incidents at the school, which has a 95% white student body, had inspired the creation of a class on racial justice. Student activists decided to push for meaningful change, including symbolic change. As those students advocated for the raising of a Black Lives Matter flag and the removal of a mural they said echoed KKK iconography, others in the community (and beyond it) pushed back.

The story Paksima and Moriba tell offers listeners many important lessons for confronting racism in schools, supporting student activism and facilitating critical conversations that reckon with the past. Next, we focus on three of those lessons and how schools can benefit from them.

Read more here.

The SPLC was thrilled to welcome Hawkes to our second Sounds Like Hate podcast panel discussion. To learn more about Randolph Union’s journey and Hawkes’ perspective on combating hate in school, you can watch the recorded panel here.

In solidarity,

The Southern Poverty Law Center