General rule: Don’t assume you’re not racist.
Wanna know why there are so many white women teachers and not nearly enough people of color teachers?
Well, there are a lot of reasons, but one of the Qweens is telling us about some shit that is definitely one significant factor. We’ll call this Qween “X.”
X, a brilliant artist and history teaching Black woman, is teaching at a big, public high school in a part of the Bay Area known for being so progressive omg.
For this, her first year teaching, her woke white department head (WWDH) assigned her US history because even though that’s the class said WWDH has been teaching for years, this year’s junior class has a reputation for being wild and WWDH didn’t want to deal with them. (The WWDH, on the other hand, has a reputation for being so progressive omg.)
First of all, a whole year’s batch of kids turned out bad? I’m suspicious. I’ve heard this kind of thing before, though, teachers talking about a whole class of kids (as in class of 20##) being unmanageable. The researcher in me is fascinated. How does that reputation emerge? Do particular events or kids become so salient in teachers’ minds as to come to represent all the kids born that year in that place? Or did all the kids born that year experience some formative, mass-scale trauma together? Whose voices are authoritative sources on the matter? Whose voices aren’t valued in the general discourse about those kids?
Regardless of what’s a true or fair assessment of them, these kids have been told repeatedly that they’re out of control, and WWDH decided to dump them on a first year teacher. X is killing it, working her ass off to design engaging and effective curriculum, but that’s not the point.
Would you believe this WWDH has the nerve to take back US history next year to avoid getting those kids when they move up to the senior classes he took this year? It’s “for [his] mental health,” he says.
It means X has the same kids again next year and she’ll be designing all-new curriculum from scratch all over again. To protect the WWDH’s mental health. For fuck’s sake.
BTW, the school does have a course request process, and each teacher gets to request to teach whichever courses they want, but those requests go through the WWDH. And the weeks before those requests were due, other teachers in the department checked with X, “Oh, I heard you’re taking the seniors next year.” Passive-aggressive, strategic-ass.
Now, I reject the underlying premise that these particular kids are somehow leeches on teachers’ mental health — at least not any more or less than any other batch of kids. Actually, having been put on mental health disability leave from teaching myself, I’d like to suggest that the leeches are not the kids but the various dehumanizing mechanisms of public schooling as it’s currently set up.
Nevertheless, WWDH believes that these kids are detrimental to their teacher’s mental health and has decided two years in a row to foist them off on a new teacher who doesn’t yet have her curricular resources built-up to the point where she can navigate course changes without doing hellllla extra work.
And here’s the thing: Black teachers get “problem kids” pushed onto their caseloads all the time. I think it’s part of that Black superhuman thing that makes white cops think their lives are in danger when they see a Black kid with a cell phone in his hand. Or when white medical students believe that Black people don’t feel pain the way white people do. It’s bullshit, and we do it in schools all the time.
But even when a WWDH or other dope isn’t actively pushing extra work onto Black teachers, Black teachers still do the additional labor of loving on, hand-holding, and scolding kids of color because that’s what our white supremacist system makes necessary if students of color are going to survive it.
X is looking for a new job. I’m wondering what the chances are that she’ll get to a school where the same thing doesn’t happen.
White teachers: Do better. Listen up for this kind of shit, and interrupt it.
