Your Move, America

At my school, every day feels like Martin Luther King Day.

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.

Teachers believe it, too. We believe unarmed truth is ignited like a flame by the education we preach. So we teach a history of oppression out of textbooks that don’t exist in classrooms without heat or pencils or a sense of safety and our students look at us with jaded eyes that know more about the lived brutality of a national folklore than we can ever tell them. They light up when we mention a brother –probably Toussaint L’Ouverture, the books have no other—we know secretly that he won’t be on the state tests and so we’re stealing their time from them when we teach them what our conscience suggests they should know.

There are some things we can’t teach them about, at all.

 

They can’t really feel Rosa Parks. They crowd onto their cold buses for an hour’s ride across our oddly-zoned district that amasses children of color into certain schools. Dark-skinned children and tanned-skinned children and golden-skinned children can ride in any part of the school bus; they are the only ones on the buses that come to our school. They are segregated so completely that some think they have never seen racism, except when they wander into stores and are followed and heckled by thieves of their dignity. And across town little Caucasian children are taught that they will never see racism, either. They will never see African-American children, neither.

My students are not Dorothy Counts, nor Ruby Bridges, not the Little Rock Nine. Sure, they can get salty when they think their dignity is threatened, but they can’t see what’s benign and what’s malign, what’s education and what’s predestination, what to mock and when to talk. Their education, both in and out of school, has obscured that for them. 

They walk into my classroom to see Lassana Bathily’s picture on the wall and one after another the classes ask, “Is that a mugshot?” Because, you see, he is a young black man, and not smiling, and they know that dark skin on a man’s face means he is a criminal. They are smart, and have learned everything that they have been taught with consistency, even if it is rubbish. They run with their crew, angrily tattooed with statistics that put them in jail or worse in the next five years, branding every action asked of them as “dead” because once a thing is said it’s not so scary.

Hero, not criminal. Spread the word.

But I teach history, you know. And psychology, and writing, and I can’t do that without seeing the oppressive cycle that revolves silently, secretly, beneath the crust of America, and feeling the pain that is felt silently, secretly, beneath the proud profanity and lack of humanity, and hearing the anger that courses silently, secretly, in the suddenly-literate essays that my students gift to me. The great crack that runs down the middle of America severs the truth in half, and we teachers run around desperately, fiercely, trying to patch it for one, or ten, or a hundred of our best students, so that the children can grow up a savage army of peace that will spread the unarmed truth.

My student writes:

The flaming youth has understood that inspiration is not all it takes, to render on the passionate truth but knowing that it merely depends on the phase, when lies are present, boundaries are lessened, because in that presence there is a lack of respect in, it, which makes the situations to choose, harder to go through, with this improbable fiction we wish that we could just fix it, but we consist of dereliction because our willingness is missing, I'm eagerly ardent but equally charted and dreamily starting to focus of course on what is important but also what’s extorted, I guess I'm in a world filled with people who will never make it, and people who never made it, telling every body they're real but the truth is, those people are the fakest.

He’s talented, and smart, and barely passing school, and statistics give him a 29% chance of prison and five times more of a chance of being killed by gunfire than a young white man. Your move, America.