Teaching a Mindset of Paradox: RPL Education Fellow Jonah Canner

Chloë-Arizona Fodor, MTS ‘25, CRPL in Journalism, and RPL’s Affiliate in Religion and Conflict with the Religion News Service, sat down to talk with  Jonah Canner. Jonah is an educator and consultant offering mentoring, training, and support for individuals and organizations at the nexus of racial equity, restorative justice, and experimental education. On the faculty of the Avodah Institute for Social Change, the Institute for Democratic Education in America, and the Foundation for Jewish Camp’s Cornerstone Fellowship, Jonah focuses on helping people learn how to work through conflict.

Chloë-Arizona Fodor: To begin, what are some of the key moments that have steered you towards this niche of education and anti-racism? And where does the study of religion come in for you in that journey?

Jonah Canner: In April of 1990 I was in the sixth grade, living in a town just outside of New York City. On the second night of Passover, a White police officer shot and killed a Black teenager at the local high school. The next morning, I went to school late—like I usually did—but this time, it was because there had been the Passover holiday the night before. I learned about what had happened the night before. I could hear the voices of students from my class arguing echoing down the hallway. I walked into class, and it was a microcosm of what you see in the world today—people very clearly on a side, very much not in civil conversation, mostly parroting things that they’d heard [from adults].

There were White Jewish kids who were sitting with the other White kids defending the police officer. I couldn’t understand it. Just the night before we had been having a ritual meal where we were talking about state violence and the core story of our people as being a response to state violence and oppression. The parallels were so stark to me.

This was in the 1990’s, so we did not yet have our current visibility of police officer shootings, but there was still the nonstop lineage of police brutality. Seeing that clearly as a sixth grader was the thing that activated my thinking about this work. I understood education to be the place where possibility can be imagined and where people were having these sorts of conversations, uninformed as we may have been. That’s how education, the anti-racism piece, and my religious perspective all came together.

CAF: It is so fascinating that this moment happened for you in school, in a space where people are interacting with each other in the most unfiltered way.

JC: Definitely. At the time, I had some version of this thought: What are these adults doing? Why are they not creating better spaces for us to talk about this?

Today, for me, so much of my work has become about the question, “How do I create spaces?” I definitely wasn’t thinking about this in the sixth grade, but today I understand that as a populace, we have a total lack of muscle for conversation. Even less for tense conversation, conversation around conflict, or conversation where there is nuance and multiple perspectives at hand. Those muscles aren’t cultivated in the conventional education system. They’re atrophied. So, when I think about anti-racism work, I think about it as the work of cultivating the muscle of navigating nuance, conflict, and the tension of figuring out how to be in the world together. In the societal structures we’ve inherited, it is not a valued skill set. So how can we rebuild structures—like education—that actually value that skill set and allow us to get the workout reps in to build our capacity?

CAF: You’ve worked as a classroom teacher, a summer camp director, and a consultant offering mentoring, training, and support for individuals and organizations. And, throughout the course of your career, you’ve focused on racial equity, restorative justice, experiential education, and working through conflict. One example is the “Learning and Unlearning” course you offer for White educators who are building their anti-racist practice.

Could you talk more about your approach to racial justice and having an oppression-informed lens? What does that lens look like on a day-to-day basis in the classroom?

JC: I describe my approach as taking into account the larger systems of oppression that are operating at the systemic and subconscious levels within all of us and in our institutions. On a meta level, this approach asks us to do two things at the same time. That is, while standing in a classroom you must see in one part of your mind’s eye all of the structural and institutional oppressions that are happening. In the other part of your mind’s eye, you gaze at the actual human beings in front of you. At first, this has to be a very conscious (perhaps overly cautious) effort, but over time you’ll become more attuned to balancing these two lenses. It will become easier to say, “I’m not going to let those systems stop me from seeing the whole humanity of this person, and I’m not going to let my desire to see the whole humanity of this person blind me from the way these racialized systems are operating on them.” This is being in the discomfort of paradox.

So, when I talk about paradox, I talk about resolutions to conflict that do not arise from things being cleanly and neatly set. These kinds of resolutions come from accepting that things will be messy and continuing to find forgiveness and forward movement. Harm is inevitably going to happen, and a mindset of paradox means developing the muscle to work through it.

CAF: That really resonates with me, especially when I think about how it relates to some of the core ideas in Jewish conceptions of peace. One of the central elements in Jewish peace is this idea of a ‘unity of opposites,’ meaning that relationship with the divine comes not through a unity of sameness or a total eradication of difference, but through a unity that is grounded in the very fact that we’re standing opposite each other. It's this idea that the truth exists in the space between our disagreement.

JC: Exactly. I subscribe very much to that perspective. One of the things that has been really valuable about being at Religion and Public Life is that it offers another lens into paradox. It has given me more language for, more perspective around, and more avenues toward this same core idea: that if we are going to be on this earth together, we have to move beyond the frameworks of pluralism and tolerance to something more active, nuanced, and engaging. Understanding the environment that we are in and then breaking out of the cycle of perpetuating racial harm—that’s some of the most interesting work that there is.