Talk & Do: Mothers in Greater Minnesota Call for Anti-Racist Education and Accountability (Part 1)

In a recent Talk & Do conversation, we talked with six mothers and grandmothers who voiced a lack of accountability by school administrators to address racial bullying of their children. The experiences shared were from several areas of the state, and not isolated incidences.

The discussion was precipitated by a commentary we published by Victoria McWane-Creek in March 2026, who moderated the conversation. Mingyu Ma — the community engagement director for Minnesota Women’s Press — hosted the discussion; she has a background in policy work around women’s rights, particularly talking to gender-based violence survivors about how to design better systems to meet needs.

We offer this summary of what the women reviewed and approved for sharing.

Naming the Issues

Alicia (Morrison County) grew up in Chicago and attended a school that taught African American culture and the concept of being proud of who you are. “I never felt discriminated against in school.” 

Today, her daughter’s primary bully is the bus driver, which means the day starts “with somebody who doesn’t like her, and every day on the way home.”

Recently the school dean called to say her child was called the N word in the hallway — again. “Things aren’t changing.” She asked for something to be done, but neither the dean nor the principal have gotten back to her. “I almost feel like it’s a cover up so that they don’t have to acknowledge the bigger thing. They don’t have to look at themselves as perpetrators of violence, because that’s what it is.”

Her children’s school might celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but nothing else is taught, including during Black History month. “We have inventors, curators, scientists, doctors, all types of academic scholars that are not being demonstrated. You can put a book in the classroom, or give away a free book with a Black face on it during the book fair, but that’s not teaching them.”

She pointed out that we are not many years away from when Ruby Bridges stepped into a white school to showcase integration. One Black man from that time, around 1964, was also integrated into an all-white school and he recently reflected on how the trauma of that time interfered with getting an education. “Nobody cared about him in that school. As a community health worker, I wonder: What are we doing to our children when they’re placed in these situations even today and not given any care? It’s causing trauma and mental health issues that they can’t even describe. So what are some things we can do?”

Alyson (St. Louis County): “I would like my children to be able to show up as themselves in rural Minnesota. I love this place and struggle at the same time. I would like all children to feel as if they belong without having to fight for that belonging in ways that others don’t. … It is a lonely place, trying to figure out how to advocate. We’ve experienced things that are jaw-droppingly horrible, both from kids and adults. We’ve dealt with online stuff that the schools are not willing to touch. We need to empower both teachers and coaches, and anyone connected to school activities, to be adults and get involved. Kids are going to do dumb things with social media. They are going to push boundaries. That’s what kids do. But boy, we need adults to take a stand.”

Jennifer (Clay County) lives in an area that is nearly entirely white, which means her kids don’t have people of color in the school system. It requires a lot of small children to feel trusting of adults who might not understand or respond in an affirming way. “There are so many questions in those little heads and minds: Can I trust that you will do what you can to meet my needs? If I need to ask you questions in class, will you help me? Will you point me in the right direction, or will you tell me to be quiet and listen?”

Jeanine (Crow Wing County) said her daughter had a hair style for junior prom that she was proud of. Three senior boys decided to try to pull the hair extension off her head; it did not come off, but the force of their assault knocked her to the ground. They laughed and kept running. Her daughter had a lingering headache, was embarrassed and emotionally hurt, and did not want to return to school. When Jennifer talked to the assistant principal, he said, “Boys will be boys.” He also said he would look at cameras and get back to her, but he never did. She tried to meet with him a few weeks later and was told he was too busy. “We need accountability to happen. There was no accountability for those boys. There was no accountability for that assistant principal. No one checked to see if my kid still had headaches.”

Victoria McWane Creek (submitted photo)

Victoria (Otter Tail County) remembers as a child growing up in northern Minnesota a fourth-grade teacher reading offensive books — “Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn read out loud with N-word this and N-word that. … And if we’re going to teach history, it needs to be done in a way that is affirming of us, as well as truth-telling about the totality of the human experience.” She eventually homeschooled her children, and skipped lessons in history because she could not find accurate history texts that didn’t, for example, have misdirection about the civil war. She suggests we need an intergenerational awareness building of history — the positive and negative — that also affirms the joy, strength, and determination. “All of those things live on within us, and we have to figure out a way to pass that on intentionally by design to the young ones who are in public school.”

The Missing Ingredient: Accountability

The conversation lifted up accountability and transparency as a major lack.

Jennifer: “I would love for adults to be held accountable. I think too many times they are allowed to say ‘kids will be kids.’ Adults need to be held accountable for their children’s actions.

Victoria asked: “How do we get to a place where we know things are being addressed and the patterns I have been witness to for 40 years are disrupted and shifted? It is not just the children, but also teachers, bus drivers, administration — a systemwide issue. It doesn’t matter which district you go to. We need a curriculum transformation that is expansive if it’s going to affirm the whole humanity of children, with formal structures so that we can have resolution and results.”

She pointed out that yes, kids will be kids, “until you teach a child what they can and cannot do, and then they’re going to be a different kind of kid.” By humanizing school systems, kids can “show up as whole people, not scared, not timid, and not head on a swivel — learning is not taking place in those situations, when we’re just trying to get through a day.”

When Victoria was in school, she fought kids who were tormenting her younger brother. At 15, she learned that “it is the responder who is sanctioned. I was fighting almost every day in school because people would harass and no adults would engage.” Today’s children of color continue to experience that hands-off environment that allows the bullies to thrive. “Whether it is in a classroom, or at the gas station owned by the person who wants all Black people dead, or their neighbor across the street. There’s never an opportunity for the central nervous system to rest, and that means our children are not able to learn.”

Mingyu added that in her work related to gender-based violence, the term accountability has been central. “Something I’ve been trying to do over the years is to make sure that people understand that the term accountability doesn’t need to only show up as a response after an incident has happened. It shows up in prevention. It shows up as monitoring. It shows up as support. It shows up as engagement. It is such a fluid term.” 

Too often, she said, we think punishment is accountability. But if there is community engagement on the front end, people will know they are being held accountable for doing the right thing — knowing how to behave to another human being.

Another Need: Collective Support

Jennifer indicated parents in these situations feel helpless, because there is no one to help them navigate. “We end up making our children pay when we use our voice. There needs to be a place for parents who are carrying the load of their children. We need a space where we can talk and cry and laugh and support each other.”

Alicia suggested circle groups and community centers could host programs with mentors for children, to address fears. “Our ancestors fought for us to have a place in this society, and we have to stand on their shoulders so that we can have a place anywhere we choose to live.” It is not enough to claim that choosing to live in rural Minnesota comes with this price — because freedom comes with choice. “Our children deserve to have wholeness and peace and joy and culture and safety in these schools. Our ancestors were strong to get through the transatlantic slave trade, to get through 400 years of slavery, to get through Jim Crow redlining, and to create all these changes for us. We have to be strong and continue to battle because we deserve to have freedom wherever we choose to live.”

Jeanine noted: “We’re always reacting and responding instead of having conversations for preventative measures. It shouldn’t be my job to try to build a curriculum that can be introduced to the school system. But that is what is needed. I don’t want to be the one to teach students and educators how to treat other people, how to respond to differences, how to be respectful, how to not be overbearing to someone of a different culture. But it has to start, and at the preschool and kindergarten age. I want to be able to get in front of it so that we will have less need to respond and react. To be able to build a place where our children can tap into their greatness. Where they don’t have to think about the person who will be in my face today, but can be excited to learn, safely, without being shut down.”

Victoria indicated that a high school senior she knows opted to learn online for the last few months of the school year because the environment was so “atrocious. Safety, belonging, affirmation must be built into the entire architecture of schooling. Black identity, culture, brilliance must be reflected, respected, and uplifted. Validation: Black children’s experiences must be believed, documented, and addressed with seriousness. They cannot be minimized or dismissed because ‘kids will be kids,’ or ‘boys will be boys.’ We have to have safety by design.”

She added, “The reason this [bullying] has been able to persist and continue for decades, multiple generations, is that we have felt isolated. We have not had a place where we could show up and say, ‘This is going on. We need help to navigate.’ We have to be able to do that. And then redesign the entire statewide system that builds in the accountability and protective factors that are necessary so that our kids are protected, and not school systems.”

Other Solutions

Jennifer’s children have survived school in part thanks to an Indigenous liaison. She would like to see a community of adults working to take care of students of color, including elders.

Alicia suggested that if there were cultural navigators embedded into all schools, they could be advocates “so our children know there is a safe place they can talk about these issues.” She also said it would be helpful to have learning materials for home teaching — “making sure they’re getting a good, solid home-based learning on real history, real accomplishments and culture, so they can walk into those schools with their heads up high, regardless of what other people think about them.”

She also would like to see anti-racist curriculum taught in schools. Children are learning racial bullying from home. “The people who were shouting at Ruby Bridges are somebody’s grandparents right now. Those are the ones who are in our legislators. They’re in our government. They are running these schools. They probably have businesses in these areas. We can’t pretend like everybody is dead and gone. It’s still here, so we have to actually do some anti-racism curricula.”

Alyson, an educator, concurred that starting with the youngest grades first might be the best next-step approach. “I think there’s some genius in saying, ‘how can we create that at the little level? How does that morph as those littles move into bigger spaces? I think there’s some magic there.”

Victoria said, in concluding this first conversation: “I trust us to do some gritty and messy work in order to build what our kids need. I also don’t trust the system to respond in a way that will allow our children to get what they need easily. Both of those things are true to me. A system is always going to organize itself in a way to protect itself.”

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