Black Teacher, White School: It's Always About Race
by BAR contributing editor Margaret O'Connor
"The students very much mirrored the biased racial attitudes of the community."
Okay, so I never started out to be a teacher. Still, education, opening the mind and learning to see fascinated me. I'd hung around the outskirts of teaching, wary of schools and schooling. Afraid of lending any support to what had been a lackluster, disempowering experience for me, growing up black, in a white suburb of Boston. A quiet girl who got B's in school, had few friends and zero social life, I left high school gladly and never went back to visit. Visit who? Sentimental memories of graduation, proms, school spirit, etc. were not available to me.
Oddly, science was my favorite subject in high school. Literature and history, which later became my mainstay interests, were so racially invalidating as taught in my high school, that I got my B's while in a state of perpetual suspended animation, enforced by emotional dread. Science seemed to me the only "race neutral" class. It gave me hope for discovering "truth and beauty" in the world. And very privately, I wrote poems.
"Science seemed to me the only ‘race neutral' class."
College represented a chance to finally seek out "truth and beauty" for myself and accordingly I ranged through courses in sociology, psychology, studio art, art history, world history, unconsciously trying to put together a world view that included me. Then came in rapid succession, Black Power, Women's Liberation and the Vietnam War Protest, mixed in with my underlying affinity to the "peace, love and flowers" philosophy of Hippyhood.
Amazingly, when I graduated from college, there were actually jobs for people of my ilk with good writing skills. Urban redevelopment, the War On Poverty and school desegregation were supported by a strong non-profit advocacy sector and I found work in Boston, San Francisco and Philadelphia. I found myself working on issues of equity and equality in schools. We "school reformers" wanted a new inclusive agenda in public schooling with real learning for kids of all colors, abilities and incomes.
Then came the Republicans and the non-profit world grew thin and cautious. "School reform" became code words for something mean and corporate and technocratic. I took a long break from working to have a family.
"We ‘school reformers' wanted a new inclusive agenda."
When I returned to the work world, the niche for people of my ilk had shrunk to almost nothing. But families need income, so I converted my MEd. and writing skills into a Massachusetts Teaching Certificate and began the teaching career I had avoided for twenty years.
After too many turndowns from suburban school systems very like the one I had graduated from, Springfield alone seemed eager to have me. I had major doubts about whether I could survive in that urban, gritty, often dangerous, black, white and Hispanic district. I was interviewed by the principal of a little alternative school within the system for returning drop-outs. As it turned out, he had taught at the same non-profit experimental "street academy" that I had worked at during my graduate school days. It seemed we shared similar views on the kind of school kids like ours needed. I was hooked.
Springfield was tough and resources for our little alternative were miniscule, but the district was supportive of new teachers and its neglect of the alternative programs was at least, benign neglect. My students were tough kids, difficult kids, some were gang, court and drug involved kids, but they were mostly kids looking to make good on what they knew was their last shot at a real high school diploma. Most of them actually appreciated what their teachers were trying to do for them. My colleagues formed a tight, mutually supportive cadre. We were all in it together.
"My students were tough kids, difficult kids, some were gang, court and drug involved kids."
As I passed the three year "new teacher" benchmark, the state began to take an active and unhelpful interest in Springfield. The Governor's infamous Control Board and the state Department of Education's embrace of NCLB's "stick and stick" approach to "underperforming" schools made what was a difficult and stressful job, a thankless and underpaid job.
I moved on after five years in the Springfield Schools. After so many years in western Massachusetts., hearing about the racial attitudes in the "hill towns," I was surprised to be offered a teaching job in one. I should have wondered more about the biased assumptions, naïve expectations and backpocket politics that underlay this seeming serendipity. Teaching in a basically white school in a very non-progressive community, a community that is all about long standing personal connections, presents special difficulties for an outsider who is also a black. Maybe the principal had hoped that hiring a black teacher would rescue the students from their ethnocentrism and insular world view. Perhaps "racist" seemed to him too harsh a word to be applied to children.
It was soon evident to me that the students very much mirrored the biased racial attitudes of the community. Racism was alive and well in school, if diffuse and cloaked in "good natured" jokes, jibes and youth culture. ("That's just a nickname;" "That's just how we talk;" "We don't mean anything by it.") So, somewhat reluctantly, I conceded that a teacher's job is to correct ignorance and misguided ideas. I struggled with where to begin.
"Somewhat reluctantly, I conceded that a teacher's job is to correct ignorance and misguided ideas."
First I offered a "Students of Color" support group for the smattering of black, mixed-race and Asian students. Not surprisingly, no one wanted to be identified with such a group. The way to survive being minority in a white adolescent world is to be as much like them as possible.
In frustration, I sought out faculty allies. I banded together with the art teacher and a politically progressive history teacher to propose a school wide anti-racism effort. The principal quickly organized us into "the racism committee" and assigned administrative representatives to it and rejected any suggestions that made it out of committee. After the death of the "racism committee," the principal approved his own preferred approach; an assembly presentation to the Freshman class on Black Inventors.
So we were thrown back on the "curricular approach" advocated by a veteran faculty member. I elected to teach Huckleberry Finn in my Junior English class, among other offerings. I have been intrigued with Mark Twain's controversial novel, but had been ambivalent about teaching it in this atmosphere. The book, however, was on the shelves in my classroom, and had evidently been taught by at least one of my predecessors. So I enlisted the aid of my mentor teacher (the proponent of the curricular approach) and of the history teacher for support with the background on the times, and I plunged in.
I ran the gamut of literature that year, from black themes, to the Japanese internment experience, to Native American autobiography, to Shakespeare. What I heard from my students was, "Why does everything have to be about race with you?" or "This is supposed to be English. Why do we have to know all this history?" or "I just don't like talking about race. It's not my thing!"
"What I heard from my students was, why does everything had to be about race with you?"
Meanwhile, cutouts of Aunt Jemima and black athletes with nooses around their necks were left for me or black students to find. Jokes were common with "dirty Mexicans" as the butt. Any literary figure with Pablo for a first name (Neruda, for example) was hysterically funny. When asked to identify a novel's setting, the "funniest" response was most frequently, the "hood" or the "ghetto."
The principal's response to two years of expecting more racial harmony and the reality of two years of increasingly visible and persistent racism was to not renew my contract for a third year (which would have given me "professional standing", or tenure.) Maybe he felt that I was just not fitting in, or maybe he was responding to pressure from somewhere in the community. I was not given an explanation, so I will probably never know.
What I do know is that teaching is not a good job. Whether it comes down to the macro politics of a Governor's Control Board and a Federal NCLB, or the micro politics of rural "hill town" school systems, teachers are increasingly at risk and under fire. You are not invited to teach in a way that challenges anyone's comfort zone or that attempts to get students to examine assumptions of "truth and beauty" through literature and the history that runs through it. My world view as a black person comes with the package as a black teacher. Teaching can't be done without using yourself as an anchor. At least, I can't teach that way. So, I'm giving up on teaching and keeping myself whole.
Margaret O'Connor, MeD can be contacted at nonametribe@earthlink.net.
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