During his 14 years with the Anti-Defamation League [ADL] working as an educator and national professional development director, Tabari Coleman decided to dedicate himself to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion throughout the region.
“I’m trying to engage in courageous conversations that hopefully allow us to see how we show up in different communities and make life harder for certain people,” Coleman said.
Anti-Defamation League is an international non-governmental organization based in the United States specializing in civil rights law.
While presenting more than 500 workshops, Coleman has taught and engaged with people on deconstructing prejudice. He has visited young audiences in schools and local events, primarily in St. Louis. He has also shared his experiences on college campuses and with law enforcement departments throughout the nation and internationally.
By 2020, Coleman experienced an unprecedented number of requests for speaking engagements, empowering him to launch The Coleman Group, a DEI facilitating business.
He created a five-session package titled “Building a Culture of Inclusion.” Through its sessions, he engages people on subjects including unconscious bias, individual, and institutional racism.
Coleman helped support the Ritenour School District’s DEI learning and engaged in teaching programs to empower Black students to get involved in education.
Black men make up less than 2% of the nation’s teachers, according to a 2018 NCES survey.
“The district is now investing in getting students into teaching fields in high school and following them through so they can become Black educators,” Coleman said.
Coleman was “a military kid” raised primarily in the remote island of Guam, an unincorporated U.S. territory, about 6,000 miles away from California. While the territory is a part of the U.S., he went to school amongst an ethnic group unfamiliar to most Americans, the native Chamorro people.
Describing his childhood, Coleman said he felt like a minority amongst minorities.’ He said he was the only Black student at his high school.
“These are indigenous people, in all shades,” Coleman said. “During football practice, I got into it with a teammate who called me a n****r. We brawled, and the coach broke us up and told him, ‘when you go to the mainland, they will see you just like him,’ which was integral in my understanding of race being a social construct.”
Before university, Coleman spent only three years in the contiguous 48 states and desired to connect with his Black heritage. After high school, he set out for Baltimore’s HBCU, Morgan State University.
“When I arrived in Baltimore, it was a rude awakening; I was Black, but I had an accent,” Coleman said. “Culturally, I felt like an immigrant, like an outsider.”
“Most of my friends’ freshman year were from outside of the country,” Coleman said.
“From Jamaica and Nigeria, we were Black, but our sense of Blackness and peoples’ perception of our Blackness was different because of culture, and I learned a lot about myself.”
After transferring to Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Coleman connected with the city’s social justice community and made St. Louis home. After graduating, he worked at a charter school where the principal, who was involved in the ADL, saw his passion and suggested he get involved with the organization.
As the country becomes more diverse, hateful rhetoric has grown with politicians on the far right. Some point to Trump’s rise demonstrating the growing insecurity around the demographic shifts. According to the Brookings Institute, in 1980, white residents comprised almost 80% of the national population, with Black residents accounting for 11.5%, Latino residents at 6.5%, and Asian Americans at 2%.
By 2000, the Latino population grew to 12.6%, the Black population at 12%. The Asian American population grew to 4%, while the white population share dropped nearly 10 percentage points to 69%. As of 2019, the white population share declined nearly nine more percentage points to 60%.
“White people are going to be the minority by 2040,” Coleman said.
“The stage is being set for these demographic shifts. So, to ensure power is to assure the education material kids are exposed to aligns with a narrative. So even as the minority, there is a control of disseminating information.”
In combating fear-mongering, Coleman said the best anecdotes are exposure and not being afraid to admit ignorance. The latter simply, as he calls it, the ability to be open and transparent.
“Being vulnerable; vulnerability to the extent that you’re going to allow your world to be disrupted for someone else’s reality to become a part of your consciousness,” Coleman said. “To do that, we must be willing to listen more than we want to talk. We’re a community, how do I recognize that your happiness and success are linked to my happiness and success?”
