A few years ago, I was teaching at an inner-city charter school, majority black, minority Hispanic. One Friday, over lunch at an all-day faculty diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training, teachers were given sheets with concentric circles and asked to fill them in with words about our identities, with identities more important to us closer to the center. I penciled in baseball and basketball player, traveler, teacher, musician, philosopher, explorer, writer, friend. During the sharing time that followed, a middle-aged math teacher next to me shared that he wrote “son” and “brother” in the center circle. He said he had a very close relationship with his Italian family, and that he had recently gone through many difficult months of helping his brother through cancer and chemotherapy, which had made them even closer.
