When my students and I found out about the shooting of nine black people in Charleston, South Carolina, our breath was pulled from our lungs, our minds spun with disillusionment, and our hearts filled with rage and despair. We wanted to escape.

My students are black and brown, living in communities that have been subjected to generations of underinvestment and discrimination. As a teaching artist in Boston public schools and a former high school English teacher just outside Washington DC, I’ve seen how the violence against people of color in the past year has left many in fear that their lives are in perpetual danger.

As it happened, we did escape. The news came on the eve of a long-planned school trip to France. Hours later, when we met at the airport, we hugged one another and exchanged words – a reminder that we mattered, if not to the rest of the world, then at least to each other.

When we arrived in Paris, I was reminded of the American writer James Baldwin. His departure from Harlem in 1948, aged 24, with only $40 (£25) in his pocket was an attempt to escape the pernicious racism of the US. This decision, he claims, saved his life. “It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France – it was a matter of getting out of America,” he said in a 1984 interview with the Paris Review. “My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail; I was going to kill somebody or be killed.”

For my entire life, I have watched the realities of racism slowly kill those around me. I have watched food insecurity and unequal access to healthy meals saturate black communities with diabetes and heart disease at disproportionate rates. I have watched the residue of federally-sanctioned redlining create small apartheids in cities for decades, generating breeding grounds for crime and poverty. In Baltimore, for example, local policies have existed since 1910 to isolate the city’s black population. To the present day federal housing subsidy policies still result in low-income black families being segregated from richer neighbourhoods.

With all of that said, a part of me struggles to accept that Baldwin, a literary hero of mine, felt the only thing he could do was leave. When I discuss Baldwin with my students, the questions surrounding his departure inevitably arise. It is a difficult yet necessary conversation. I tell them it is a choice he made, one he had the right to – one they have the right to as well. In the midst of these conversations, however, I do not want to suggest to my students that the only way to be successful, or to have value, is to escape.

This is a message already deeply embedded in the social fabric of schools in poor communities. Teachers, administrators and others propagate a “do well so you can leave this place” narrative. I have witnessed this in the schools where I have taught and been on the receiving end of it growing up. As someone not currently living in my own hometown of New Orleans, I even wonder to what extent I internalised such a message as a child.

Education, at its best, gives students the option to make a life however and wherever they choose. That is different, however, to defining one’s ambition or dreams by how far removed they are from the places of their childhood. A child in Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, or any other city across the country, should not have to dream of escaping their neighborhood to make a meaningful life for him or herself. How will our communities ever grow into their true potential if we continue to tell our most successful students to leave?

And still, I am not sure anyone can be faulted for desiring to escape a paradigm in which your humanity, and your body, are both questioned and assaulted. It is not as simple as telling our students to stay. No. We, as educators, must directly address the realities that cause them to want to leave in the first place. That, in part, means we must discuss racism candidly – both the interpersonal and the systemic.

This does not mean adding a perfunctory Martin Luther King Jr speech to be skimmed over during Black History Month. It does not mean reading the only writer of color in the curriculum and analyzing their work devoid of any historical context. This means holistically broadening the range of texts we expose our students to and having them interrogate why certain voices have been, and continue to be, left out of the literary and historical canons.

We cannot discuss what led Dylann Roof to take the lives of nine innocent black people as they prayed inside their church with students unless we also discuss our country’s history of racial violence. We cannot discuss what the confederate flag represents without also wrestling with what it means that many of our founding fathers owned slaves. These are not loosely tied phenomena; they are intrinsically linked realities and shape the country we live in.

Americans often define racism singularly as direct verbal or physical abuse. This, however, is only one way it manifests itself. As teachers, we have a responsibility to our students to provide a more holistic and honest definition of what racism is in this country, so that we might better push back against it as we move forward.

While systemic injustice is suffocating and can often seem immutable, things can change. But we must engage our students honestly, and remind them that we are the architects of the world we live in. That is what I would have wanted my teachers to tell me. That is what I try to tell my students. Perhaps then we can collectively re-create our reality so that one day no one is forced to “escape”.

Clint Smith is a teacher, poet, and doctoral candidate in education at Harvard University with a concentration in Culture, Institutions, and Society (CIS).

Follow us on Twitter via @GuardianTeach. Join the Guardian Teacher Network for lesson resources, comment and job opportunities, direct to your inbox.