The recent anger and upset at McDougle Elementary started me wondering about the Pledge of Allegiance. The turmoil, which began over parents' requests that the school adopt a policy of reciting the Pledge every day, caught my attention because it seemed so hard for a school to face an additional conflict in a period of time when we're all trying to heal. I believe these parents meant well. Like most of us, they were searching for unity and reciting the Pledge seemed a perfect way to achieve it. I suspect they were looking for something to make the world seem whole again. All of us who feel powerless and torn apart are looking for comfort, connection, and a way to contribute.

Yet these actions tore the school apart, dividing staff and parents. Their desire to create school unity had the opposite effect. Their insistence that the school be "indivisible" denied the "liberty for all" to follow their own beliefs . It was then I realized that the Pledge has a twist hidden in its lofty words. It asks us to swear allegiance to our unity and our diversity in the same breath. Are we practicing what we preach? Is this possible? I mused on this theoretical bind unemotionally until I experienced the tension between diversity and acceptance firsthand in a teacher workshop I led.

During the workshops I teach, I read books aloud and welcome discussion. These readings have always created a bond among the participants, making us into a group as we listen and learn from each other. Every year, I share strong new books and three of my recent favorites center on the conflicts of segregation, each showing how young children deal with separation by race. On this particular day, I read Patricia McKissak's Goin' Someplace Special, based on the author's experience of venturing out alone for the first time in a 1950's Nashville, fractured by segregation. 'Tricia Ann, the young heroine, faces Jim Crow laws at every turn until she finally arrives at the public library whose facade bears the chiseled inscription, "All are welcome."

The writing in this story is strong and the situations poignant. When I read this book aloud, it polarized my workshop. Two participants were offended. They both said were sick of seeing the differences between people reflected in books for children. They wondered why books couldn't show people getting along. These two individuals were the only people of color in the workshop.

Everyone else was moved by the book. One woman began crying, and talked about how her autistic son's differences made her realize the importance of showing diversity in books. Others justified the book because of its historical setting. I found myself explaining the importance of conflict in literature and how the author's experience had affected the emotional tone of the story. Before long it became obvious to me that I was defending, rather than listening.

Ironically, not one of us had the courage and honesty to point out that the workshop was divided by race. I had expected the book to start a discussion which united the participants, instead, it separated us. We sat disunited in a numb and uncomfortable silence, all of us feeling the weighty presence of that unspoken truth. None of us knew how to hear each other's varied views and feel connected at the same time. In truth, the book had done its work. We felt the very discomfort the author had known in her youth, the divisions that run so deep in the United States of America.

Two days later, I tuned into C-Span and there was Patricia McKissak speaking about Goin' Someplace Special at the same Nashville Library where she'd once found emotional and intellectual refuge and escaped the exclusion she felt in all other public places. She spoke of how she had waited a long time to write this book, how she had to get over her anger and how she knows that "difference is not a synonym for wrong."

If we are to live by the principles to which we pledge allegiance, we have to accept the tension between difference and unity. The words of the Pledge describe an ideal to which we may aspire only if we have the courage to tell the truth about our uncomfortable feelings and face the difficult questions that will help us change and grow.