What is Root Work?
A Commitment to Dig to the Root
Over the past sixty-plus years in the world of higher education, we have witnessed the emergence of new departments and fields of study: Women’s and Gender Studies, Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies. SLA’s curricular expansions reflect this trend.
We celebrate the movements that give these fields life; look no further than the ongoing, decades-long battle for Ethnic Studies in L.A.’s colleges and universities. But we also have to note that, as our institutions react to these movements and work to incorporate (and regulate) the marginalized and dispossessed, they tend to reinforce, multiply, and police certain divisions and power disparities.
Among many of the people’s movements and traditions that animate these fields, there is something of an opposite impulse: to combine and share, to blur and smudge rather than divide—to dig toward and contend with the common root issues that shape the most pressing concerns of global society.
We cannot grapple with climate catastrophe, for example, without understanding Indigenous societies and land stewardship, or without studying feminist movements and their frameworks of ecology. We cannot contend with the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty without contending with the ongoing legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, the political economy of displacement, and anti-Black racism as a global ordering principle. We cannot hope to understand racism without recognizing that the practice of race has always been gendered.
In all these endeavors, the metaphor of “digging to the root” is useful. Knowledge production becomes dangerous when it attempts to function as if in a void, as if without history, or when it strays too far from the lived realities of people. The old tropes of the “ivory tower” of academia and the independent school “bubble” are in fact real, and we have every reason to work against that grain. We have every reason to, as Amílcar Cabral phrased it, “return to the source.”
Root Work is our commitment to deep, grounded study. It is a commitment to draw connections, think historically, and address root issues. It reflects our understanding that culture and knowledge come from the bottom, not the top.
A Commitment to Collective Wellness
More recently, over the past couple of decades, independent secondary schools have been forced to contend with their own contradictions and histories. It’s no coincidence, for example, that independent school enrollment increased dramatically in L.A. during a time when the city was attempting to desegregate its school system through busing programs.
The independent school has always functioned through a principle of exclusion, and it has always reproduced societal inequality. These hard realities contradict our stated ideals, and grappling with those contradictions has to be a core element of our pedagogy.
In line with our Episcopal ethos, we believe that every child has inherent value, every child is a blessing. But we live in a world that insists otherwise. What would it mean, then, to bring this ideal into practice? After many decades of innovation and reform, the basic function of schools in our society remains, in effect, to individuate, assess, rank, and accredit students—which has profound and sometimes dire material and psychological consequences on their lives. Again, there is a contradiction here—a contradiction that goes much deeper than the level of policy—and if we truly want to focus on the wellness of our students, we have to face it directly.
Root Work is our commitment to reflect critically on our own institution and practices. We do this in the service of our collective wellness, which requires centering the wellness of the most marginalized among us. Root Work insists that every child is a blessing, and it compels us to ask: What would be required to make this ideal a reality?