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A Story of Struggle and Hope in Compton
GUEST: Sarah Sentilles, author of “Taught by America: A Story of Struggle and Hope in Compton”

We spend the hour today speaking with Sarah Sentilles, who wrote down her memoirs of two years in Compton, Southern California. She was teaching elementary school there. After graduating from Yale University, Sarah joined a program called Teach for America and was sent to Compton. Far from the life of privilege and the protected environment she was raised in, she found herself in charge of thirty-six first graders in a classroom without books. There she experienced her own education. I spoke with Sarah Sentilles recently and asked her to begin by reading an excerpt of her book, “Taught by America: A Story of Struggle and Hope in Compton.”

Sonali’s Subversive Thought for the Day:

Anti-racist writer and activist, Tim Wise one said, “Few whites have ever thought of our position as resulting from racial preferences. Indeed, we pride ourselves on our hard work and ambition, as if somehow we invented the concepts…We strike the pose of self-sufficiency while ignoring the advantages we have been afforded in every realm of activity: housing, education, employment, criminal justice, politics, banking and business. We ignore the fact that at almost every turn, our hard work has been met with access to an opportunity structure denied to millions of others. Privilege, to us, is like water to the fish: invisible precisely because we cannot imagine life without it.”