Educating, Protecting, and Loving: My Journey as a Black Radical Teacher
“How did you become a Muslim?” is a question that I always get from my Muslim sisters and brothers. It surprises some to hear that I was raised Muslim and brought up in the Nation of Islam by my father. For me, who I am spiritually is intricately entangled with who I am politically. I can’t separate being Muslim and being African American; practicing Islam and striving for social justice.
I’ve always identified with the Black radical tradition. I trace my personal history to my paternal grandmother, who was a righteous, brilliant, caring woman. She raised my father in the Christian church, and the values of goodness, righteousness, and justice that he learned from her are my most beloved family legacy.
My father was introduced to the Nation of Islam by his older sister and became deeply immersed in the Nation when he and my mother lived in Oakland, California, the birthplace of the Black Panther movement. Because the ideology of the Nation necessitates abstaining from mainstream white institutions, my parents strived for economic self-sufficiency. My father sold bean pies, newspapers, chicken and fish. In his free time, he taught community classes on Black history. Although he doesn’t have a college degree, he’s always been a natural orator who is extensively self-educated.
Because of the education that I received from my father, I always felt privileged to come from Africa before my ancestors were brought to the United States in enslavement. Learning about our ancient and modern history—from the Mali Empire and the Songhai Empire to Black Wall Street, from the University of Timbuktu to Frederick Douglass—instilled so much Black pride in me from an early age. “We come from kings and queens, Nafeesah,” my father would tell me. As a fourth grader, when my teacher was treating the Black students worse than the white students, I wrote on my nametag that he was racist. Even then, I knew that I needed to speak up when I observed white supremacy in action.
My father taught me to value learning and studying, and my determination to pursue education was reinforced by my lived experiences as a teenager. My parents had divorced, and my siblings and I had moved around between California, Minnesota, and Georgia. When I was in eighth grade, my mother, my two sisters, and I returned to California, where we spent several years without stable housing. My mother had a series of temporary jobs without benefits, which made it almost impossible to afford an apartment in a state where the cost of living is so high. We would stay with family members, spend nights at shelters, or sleep in our car. As a teenager who wanted stability and safety more than anything, I became convinced that I needed to go to college and put myself on a path toward a stable career.
In the shelters where my mother and sisters and I stayed, I was surprised by the high proportion of Black people affected by poverty, substance use disorders, and domestic violence. I would ask myself, how did we get here? I knew about our history, and I believed in our limitless potential as a people. For the first time, I began to understand structural racism and oppression. I realized that there are societal barriers put in place to restrict us—and yet, we have always overcome and overachieved.
My father taught me to believe that the only real chains are in our minds, and when I went to college at San Francisco State University, I pursued child psychology because I wanted to help break these chains. I took all my general education courses in Black studies, which meant that whether I was studying economics or public health or literature, the curriculum centered the Black community in the U.S. These classes reaffirmed all the lessons that my father had imparted and reinforced my understanding, empathy, and love for my people.
Then I started to ask myself, if this is who we are in spite of white supremacy, who would we be outside of an oppressive system? Who could we become?
My epiphany came in a psychology class called “Problem Behaviors in Children.” I realized that there are no bad children—that what we see as “problem behaviors” are symptoms of pain and trauma. If we can get past their pain, if we can heal them, if we can care for them through our classrooms and our community spaces, there’s no telling who our children will become. The light bulb went off in my head. I decided that I would become a teacher.
After graduating college, I moved back to Minnesota to pursue my master’s degree in education at St. Catherine University with a license in Communications Arts/Literature for Grades 5-12. Coming from Black studies at San Francisco State, it was a shock to find myself in a classroom where all my peers and my educators were white. They talked about Black students like they were a different species. Meanwhile, I was determined to take the literature that we were studying—Shakespeare, Marlowe, Chaucer—and make it Black for my future students.
My student teaching position at Central High School was another lesson in racial dynamics in Minneapolis. Although the school had a diverse student body, the classes were starkly segregated. I had white students in one class, BIPOC students in another—and just like I had learned in my psychology degree, the BIPOC students had been treated differently and therefore behaved differently. Meanwhile, I was being treated differently myself, even as a teacher—white students refused to respect me because I’m Black; parents assumed that I was an immigrant who couldn’t speak English because I wore hijab.
One day, I heard on the news that North High School was on the verge of being closed—a move that would have harmful ripple effects throughout the North Minneapolis community. I told myself that if the school stayed open, that’s where I would go teach. A few months later, I was getting ready to start my first teaching job at North High. The white English teachers were telling me that my students didn’t know how to learn and weren’t easy to teach. On one hand, I was scared because I was still new to teaching—but on the other hand, their comments lit a fire under me to prove these white teachers wrong. To demonstrate that Black students are smart, interested in learning, and more than capable of leading our communities one day.
The first book that I taught my class was The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. My students were so into it. They would ask questions like, “How come we never knew that a book like this exists?” They started to see the other Black women teachers and I as more than their educators—we became their role models, their counselors, their aunties. We poured so much love into them, and we got so much love back.
Very soon I learned that teaching is the easy part. But working within an education system that was founded on white supremacy is enraging and exhausting. My fellow Black women teachers and I came to be seen as a threat because of our work around racial equity, and we triggered white fragility amongst the other teachers, who created a toxic work environment. The administration, the teacher’s union, and the Office of Civil Rights all refused to intervene. Unfortunately, one of my fellow Black women teachers left in the middle of the school year, and I was asked to take over her classes. My class size grew, my new students directed some of their anger at me, I was overwhelmed and overworked without any additional compensation.
I remember it was Mother’s Day that year when my anger, despair, and exhaustion suddenly caught up to me. I walked to the ponds by my apartment complex, and I cried and cried. Then I prayed to Allah for help, and He answered. He said: make it better.
So I returned to school, and I made it better. I became the equity leader, I became the STEM lead, I became the onboarding lead so that new teachers didn’t have to go through what I experienced. I created professional development programs that developed my fellow teachers and me as leaders. I earned a $10,000 grant to take my students to tour Google, YouTube, and Facebook, where they met Black professionals and creatives in user design, computer science, and data analysis. And the best reward was that the students who were moved into my class that year chose to continue taking classes with me until they graduated, and even today many of them come to me for support. Just the other day one of my former students, who is now studying education, asked me to review her college essay.
Allah tells us that after hardship comes ease. The school system never changed, but I did. I learned how to navigate it, find my power, and become the teacher that I was destined to be.
The systemic racism that I experienced at North convinced me to get involved in labor organizing. Especially for BIPOC teachers, our working conditions must be addressed. We need to establish mechanisms that will mediate and mitigate microaggressions, isolation, lack of support, and other symptoms of white supremacy in our schools. Educators as well as Education Support Professionals (ESPs) and support staff deserve economic justice. But because of what I saw my mother experience when I was a child and because of what I experienced myself as an educator, I believe that pay is not enough. We also need safety and stability.
In Islam, we’re not taught to turn the other cheek—we’re taught to stand up to our oppressors. I cannot see injustice and not act to change it. Whether I’m organizing a labor strike or speaking at a press conference or just teaching in my classroom, I do what I do for the sake of righteousness and for the sake of truth. That is what brings me solace and peace within my soul.
In 2019, I was recruited to join a new project-based learning academy at Patrick Henry High School. My heart broke to leave my students at North, but I was excited about the school community’s focus on social justice and innovation, and I was ready for a new challenge. One of the biggest adjustments for me has been teaching a culturally and ethnically diverse student body who are not only Black but also Asian American, Latino, white, and more. Learning how to make my classroom culturally sustaining for all of them has made me a more responsive, more humble teacher.
Over my years as an educator, I have come to teach my students the way that my father taught me. I tell them the truth about being young people of color in this country. But I cushion those lessons in radical care and love. Just like my dad educated, protected, and loved me, I educate, protect, and love my students.
I also carry on my family’s legacy by teaching my own children about Black history. I want them to have love for their people more than anything. Just like when I was in fourth grade, my children speak up when their classroom teachers fail to treat Black students with respect or fail to teach accurately or comprehensively about Black history. Both my daughter who is 15 and my son who is nine have attended North Minneapolis schools, and I see them both hone and own their Blackness.
For me, Black History Month is another opportunity to do what I practice all year round—honor our ancestors and change our history. In addition to paying homage to the past, I encourage my students and my own children to think about the legacy that they want to leave when they become ancestors. We are the future that our ancestors dreamt of, and we are creating another future for the generations that will follow us.
For the past nine years Nafeesah Muhammad has served Minneapolis Public Schools in North Minneapolis as a high school English teacher and healing justice practitioner. Healing justice practitioners are aware of the ways in which stress, lack of resources, violence, and prolonged exposure to trauma all present tremendous challenges in creating community and/or social change. This has been her foundational approach to education, professional development, and community engagement. While teaching at North High School (2014- 2019) and the high school formerly known as Patrick Henry High School (2019-2022), Nafeesah prepared scholars for their future college and careers. Nafeesah taught English in a variety of project-based academies at both schools.
Nafeesah currently teaches in the Education Pathway program at Camden High School, formerly known as Patrick Henry High School. The program has four college level courses that include Intro to Urban Education, Special Education, Multicultural Approaches to Education, and Tech For Educators. Students are awarded college credit and high school elective credit through concurrent enrollment. It is apparent in her curriculum how reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and collaboration skills are necessary for college and career, but also essential to navigating and dismantling institutional racism and economic oppression. She also serves as a union steward for her local teachers' union, Minneapolis Federation of Teachers- MFT 59.
Through her connection with the North Minneapolis community, Nafeesah was able to lead summer school programming that includes providing North Minneapolis educators (teachers, paraprofessionals, administrators, support staff, and student interns) the paid opportunity to create learning experiences that cultivate learners’ language and literacy development, while keeping identity, joy, critical thinking, and cultural affirmation at the center. In her spare time she volunteers with We Win Institute and The Racial Justice Network.
Nafeesah received her Bachelors of Arts from San Francisco State University and Masters of Arts in Education from Saint Catherine University.