Jean Lewandowski is a retired special needs teacher. She lives in Nashua.

I was moved by the quote from Dr. Martin Luther King in Michael L. Fischler’s My Turn in last month’s Monitor. It started with, “I am convinced that men hate each other because they fear each other” and ended with “…they fear each other because they are separated from each other.” I’m reminded of an enlightening encounter.

In the winter of 1972, I was a 23-year-old attending night classes at the University of Cincinnati to earn my Ohio teaching certification. I was known to friends as the “little hippie from California,” since that’s where I grew up and married my husband in 1970. Cincinnati is just across the Ohio River from Covington, Kentucky, and there was a lot about the culture I didn’t understand.

Driving home on snowy roads after class one night, it didn’t seem unusual that our sardine can of a car was acting strange, but someone behind me honked his horn, helpfully shouted that I had a flat tire, and drove on. I was in what’s commonly called a “bad part of town.” There were no cell phones, of course, so I walked up to the nearest porch and rang the doorbell.

A small brown-skinned child opened the door as far as the chain allowed. She looked at me as if I had horns. I asked if her mom or dad was home, and she shut the door and got her mom, who cracked it open again. I asked to use their phone to call a gas station. She wouldn’t let me in, but pointed me in the right direction. I have a vague memory of having the tire fixed and driving home, but the moments on that front porch are clear, because they sparked an insight: to that child and mother, I was the outsider, the suspicious nighttime intruder, the danger.

How could this be? I looked so harmless. I did some digging and found the answer is both simple and profound: their story was very different from mine. Many enslaved people took their first steps into freedom in Cincinnati, and its population has always been roughly half Black and half white. This could have meant equality, but in an industrial city, a rigid racial hierarchy was easy to establish and maintain. Business owners, professionals, and executives were white, and servers and laborers were Black. Neighborhoods and schools were legally segregated until 1964. “Knowing your place” was essential for the Black community. The KKK was enjoying a resurgence in Ohio, as desegregation fueled anxiety about “race-mixing” and being “replaced.” Threats to the Black community were real, and they looked like me.

Sometimes knowledge stings a little, but it is power, and this insight helped me teach hundreds of kids from dozens of cultures — “ag boys” to “motor heads,” “East Side kids” to “rez kids”— and every kind of ability. It helped me build relationships with their parents, many of whom had good reason to mistrust the system, so we could be effective partners in helping their children.

Fifty years after my enlightening front porch encounter, Florida’s right wing is at war with a multicultural understanding of America. They’re actively preventing students from exploring the stories of Indigenous and enslaved people, fights for racial and gender equality, the trials and victories of all marginalized groups, as if those histories aren’t just as American as straight white males’. As Mr. Fischler pointed out, New Hampshire is a little more subtle, but our “divisive concepts” law is driven by the same motivation: to slam the door on “wokeness.”

The history of the term “woke” is, as is all history, interesting. It has its roots in 1930s Harlem. After racially motivated attacks there, as well as other cities around the country, it became widely used by Black Americans as a plea for vigilance, as well as appreciation for their own rich history and accomplishments. By the 1960s, to “stay woke” had taken on the cross-cultural sense of being open-minded and well-informed.

The phrase “woke mob” has been flung around extra hard by right-wing propagandists since the State of the Union address. Do they really think it’s better to be ill-informed, incurious, and unappreciative of America’s struggles, challenges, and failures, as well as successes? Is it really better to barricade ourselves behind walls of assumptions, beliefs, and dogma, only believing what “our” people tell us? Of course not. Knowledge is dangerous, of course, but only to established hierarchies and those who benefit most from them. For us as individuals, it’s freeing.

My life experiences and teaching career taught me that concepts don’t divide, ignorance does. Children don’t fear ideas, knowledge, diverse stories, and insights unless someone tells them to. Honoring diversity brings us together in mutual respect. It awakens us to the fact that everyone has a valuable story to tell, that stories very different from mine don’t cancel mine. That, in fact, learning about others’ experiences enriches our understanding of our own.

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