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Powerful Women Interview Series: Naomi Raquel Enright with 5 Pieces of Career Advice She Wishes She Knew Earlier
Naomi Raquel Enright is a writer, educator, and equity practitioner. She works part-time as a Bilingual Clinical Supervisor of Hunter College graduate students in dual language classrooms; she is also the author of Strength of Soul (2Leaf Press; University of Chicago Press, April 2019), and is a frequent consultant and speaker on matters of education, identity, language, inequity, and injustice.
Thank you so much for connecting with me and sharing your story. I’m so excited to get started!
Thank you, Natalie, for inviting me to participate in this series! I feel honored.
Tell me about yourself and what you do professionally:
I am an educator. I am the daughter of educators, the granddaughter of an educator, and teaching (and learning) are at the crux of all of my professional work. I was a 5th-8th grade Spanish teacher for eight years, where my curricula focused on the connection between language, culture, and identity. When it became clear that the identity and culture aspect fascinated me more than the Spanish teaching (and after becoming the mother of a son I communicate with nearly exclusively in Spanish), I became an equity practitioner at another school. I was there for 3 years, and it was during that time that I began to look closely at the language we use to discuss and challenge white supremacy, anti-blackness, and systemic racism. That led to my 2019 book, Strength of Soul, and I have been working part-time, consulting and speaking ever since. I have also published a number of essays and have been interviewed on several podcasts.
How did you get into this?
Examining the intersection of language, culture and identity has been a lifelong fascination of mine. I am certain it is born out of my being bilingual (I am a native English and Spanish speaker), the daughter of an Ecuadorian mother and a Jewish-American father, and a citizen of the United States, Ecuador, and Bolivia, where I was born and where I lived for the first ten months of my life. I am also the biological, brown-skinned mother of a son presumed to be white. The wish to delve deeply into how our society functions, who people are, and how to…
