The Power of Not Standing By
We’ve heard this story before, in one shape or another: the bullying victim who found their strength, or the bully who saw the damage they’d done and turned their life around. What we almost never hear from is the third character in every bullying story, the one who, like most of us, was standing a few feet away, watching it happen, and doing nothing. That’s the story Zendaya tells.
She was in the fifth grade in Oakland when a classmate was bullied in front of her. Zendaya neither joined in nor step in. Her parents – both public school teachers – found out, and the fallout was immediate.
“They pulled me out of the classroom, and I got a little bit cussed out,” she recalled in her 2016 Glamour Women of the Year profile. Her instinct was that she hadn’t actually done anything – which was exactly her parents’ point. Standing by while someone else was hurt, they told her, was its own kind of choice. It’s a lesson she’s carried into adulthood, telling Glamour it comes down to a simple test: seeing something wrong and staying silent is “basically like doing it” yourself.
That lesson traces back to a household built by two former teachers. Her mother, Claire Stoermer, spent nearly two decades teaching at underfunded schools in Oakland while also working nights as house manager at the California Shakespeare Theater, the job that first put young Zendaya backstage among actors and scripts.
Zendaya said watching her mother work shaped her own sense of purpose, telling Teen Vogue that Claire went “above and beyond” to open her students’ eyes to a wider world. Her father, Kazembe Ajamu Coleman – who changed his name to honor his Nigerian roots – was a teacher too, until he quit to become her full-time manager, ferrying her to auditions while Claire covered the bills with two jobs. They managed to instill confidence and sense of self in Zendaya, who is the youngest of six children, starting with allowing her to pick her own outfits since childhood.
That grounding came in handy when she was teased at school over her height but that it barely registered. Growing up biracial in a mostly white Oakland arts scene, and later as one of Disney’s few young Black leads, also gave her an early, personal stake in questions of race and representation.
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