Race & Teaching

I knew teaching US History as a white man to a 99% black population would be interesting this year. I am one of 4 white teachers at the school and none of my students have met any Jews from Vermont so there's been an interesting cultural exchange. Although I don't know really how much of it is an "exchange" as it's hard to get a sense of what impact my presence and identity has on them. Sometimes students will accuse me of being racist because I give them a bad grade and they really do play the race card all the time in ridiculous ways. I get the sense that they think the "White man" is out to get them. Sometimes it's funny and it creates opportunities for learning and sometimes I see a lot of truth (and sadness) in their perspective. Students are curious about my viewpoints and what I think about race and I am also interested to learn from them.

With Michael Brown and the other events of the year I have not shied away from race either. Some students have expressed boredom with slavery and are sick of talking about. I don't think I've taught them about slavery anymore than another US History teacher, after all it's a huge part of the story...and a shameful part and I don't shy away from this dark chapter of our history either.

Yesterday I did a lesson on Martin Luther King as this week we are talking about the civil rights movement. One student commented that she had never read MLK's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and expressed a lot of amazement to me about it. This was touching. But then I had a real downer later in the afternoon when another student complained about having to read his "I have a dream speech" yet again one more time. And I'm sure they have read it before, although many of them would probably get questions about MLK on a standardized test wrong or forget other important details despite this being Atlanta. And I'm not going to skip arguably one of the most influential people ever in US History whether or not they've learned about MLK before or not.

I was telling this student that we should all appreciate what he did and how he impacted other movements and helped created a more fair society. She told me that I wasn't the one that should be appreciative because I'm white. I actually found this offensive but looking back on it maybe I was being naive. This is a very tough thing to think about. I have no idea what she's learned from her grandmother and the stories she's been told about racism and discrimination from her own family. I can't really understand that, and no, I'm not going to play the Jewish card. Jews have had it very good in America for a long time now. How can I possibly understand her perspective? Eventually I showed her the lyrics to Macklemore's "Same Love" which talks about oppression to one group being oppression to all groups and that discrimination to one group is the same as any discrimination so we should all care about it. But perhaps this was not the right approach...

That's what teaching is though - you get lots of different problems where you have to think of solutions very quickly and later on you wish you had spoken differently or taken a different approach. This day will stick with me.