As a sixth grade teacher in 1993, I was caught off guard by one of my young black male students, Corey. He came in one morning, all excited, because he had made 10 dollars for a round-up. I had no idea what that meant and assumed this was a Bronx colloquialism that I did not know since I was new to New York. What Corey actually meant was a LINE-UP. He didn’t even know the terminology. He and his friends were playing streetball (the norm when there is no grass or safe playground nearby where parents can be in viewing range). The police came by and asked all of the boys who looked like Corey (dark-brown-skinned, skinny as a rail, and 5’4 tall) if they wanted to make an easy 10 dollars. All they had to do was come to the station and stand on a line. I. WAS. HORRIFIED. I think it took me a minute to even say anything. For starters, I couldn’t imagine any person feeling threatened and needing to file a criminal charge against someone as frail as Corey. All you had to do was sit on him and my man would be DONE. More importantly, he seemed to have no idea that this 10 dollars was not a gift (but DID have enough sense not to tell his mama). On the one hand, the naiveté of feeling safe with the precinct and police reminded me that Corey was just a child. However, I was terrified of what would and could happen to him if anyone pointed him out as their “perpetrator.” It was a tough conversation to have with sixth graders that morning, but I dived right in… and called Corey’s mother that night, a woman who worked two jobs, kept Corey locked inside the apartment with the exception of streetball downstairs. Her sniffles on the phone suggested both fear and anger, all at once.
Two years after meeting Corey, I started teaching high school: ninth graders. They were not as naive as Corey, suggesting to me that, in the 90s at least, these lessons about racial profiling, violence, and surveillance came a little later in Black and Latin@ youth’s lives. I have distinct memories of field trips where I always asked the one older white male in the building, an administrator, to join us. All you needed was one cop to get a call about a Black or Latino male or female in a dark goose-down coat! That was my WHOLE class. That was ME! And, at 24 years old, most people thought I was a high school student so I was never granted the status of TEACHER of the class. If the police yoked up me or one of my students, it was straight to the precinct; I could not even be an “alibi.” Like I have already said before on this blog, I was always criminalized alongside my students.
I was taken back to these memories today, with a mixture of rage and deep sadness, after hearing Denene Millner talk about Omari Grant, an 11-year old from Henry County, Georgia. Apparently, he and his friends were trying to build a tree house from sticks, mud, and bark in the woods behind his house. A woman in the NEXT subdivision saw them from her window and called 911. Two police officers came to the scene and approached the boys, one with gun drawn and forced the boys to lay down on the ground. Omari did as the officers asked him to, because, in his words: “”I was thinking that I don’t want to be shot today.”
In a strange and ironic twist of fate, Omari represents a kind of progress from Corey’s naiveté. Omari knew to be scared and knew the dangers ahead of him, unlike Corey. Today, an 11 year old knows he will be shot and demonized by police, law enforcement, and racial power. I will go to bed tonight imagining this as the “progress” America has made.
I once had to mediate a complaint against a teacher who failed a student’s paper because it was plagiarized. The student had lifted entire segments of each page from websites and the professor had a policy against this on his syllabus. The student insisted that the professor was actually implementing his policy only with her because he disagreed with her political beliefs. That’s a difficult thing to prove so she was out there on a limb with that one. Because she was contesting her final grade (she was insisting on an A and that a B+ was the lowest grade she could ever accept) and not the plagiarism, I had to read the plagiarized paper and her corpus of work (most often lifted from other sources). Her writing was stunningly weak, riddled with the most anti-black racism I have ever read from a college student, and strangely misinformed all at the same time. In one section of a paper, the student wrote a rather lengthy diatribe against affirmative action and used, as her evidence, that Columbia University’s undergraduate student population is 40% “black”…”Colored” is what she called them. She argued that Columbia had accepted all of these unqualified “Colored (i.e., black)” students over the white valedictorian of her class who was denied admission. I was confused, to say the least, and thought she meant a different Columbia than the ivy league institution housed in New York City. Columbia’s students are 40% black? When the hell did that happen and why ain’t I workin there? Thass that hotness right there. I did get excited for a minute when I read her words but then realized that I was being foolish for listening to such a foolish student. That just ain’t what Columbia has EVER looked like! She did have a (cut-and-pasted) section from Columbia’s website in her writing. The charts, graphs, and language did, in fact, show that Columbia was reporting 40% of its undergraduate student population to be OF COLOR (the majority population in that number is Asian). I was astounded that the student clearly did not understand and had never really seen the term “of color” before. She seemed to think it was referencing those old Colored Vs. White drinking fountains where “Colored” meant black. Her white male professor looks like the first person who actually confronted her ideas and writing ability and she saw him as a race traitor of the John Brown variety, insistent on lynching him! It would be funny if it weren’t so damn tragic. There are no surprises here though. This was a Christian, conservative white female at a Christian, conservative white-run college who had attended a Christian, conservative white high school. Imagine my surprise though to hear the exact same language from SOPHOMORE students of color at a “minority-serving” public college who attended predominantly Black and Latin@ public schools! They too had never heard the term “of color.” The same white political continuum operates in how they have been educated.
Like always, I had students say things like they don’t think they are or can ever be intellectuals because English is not their first language or because they have an accent. These are actual quotes from last week’s class. And, of course, I have students, young black women, who unpack a discussion after class rather than in class because they don’t think they have a voice that people will hear… they will just be cast as that loud black girl in the corner again. That’s a quote too. Despite my early onset of racial battle fatigue, I realize that I need to sharpen my critique on the privileging of decontextualized grammar instruction. I don’t centralize grammar instruction in my course so for many folk, this means that I do not teach it all. If I thought grammar would alleviate the social and educational injustices that my people face (or even impact the students of color who I have described here), I would do it all day long. But at what point in my people’s history did a grammar lesson ever resolve systemic oppression, institutional racism, and education inequality? I mean, really, who thinks this simplistically? If all black folk needed was a grammar lesson for equality and social mobility in education, don’t you think we woulda BIN done that? There is a real vile disrespect happening in this construct.
Like most black women who I know, I was really upset this weekend when I saw the news coverage of beautiful, 7-year old Tiana Parker, a straight A student, as she shed tears when her school officials castigated her hair/locs!! If you ever thought black hair could be politically neutral in our social world, then you may never truly understand these kinds of tears. After being continually harassed, Tiana’s father was forced to enroll her in a new school because her charter school banned all dreadlocks as inappropriate, calling Tiana’s locs a distraction from learning/thinking.