“The thing we are not supposed to talk about!”

Joy Proctor

My drive to work is the most peaceful time of day. I leave just at the break of dawn, when the number of school buses on the road is almost equal to commuter cars. I drive through four towns on my way to school, in a rural district just south of a mountain range in New England. As I crest the highest point of the town, a hill that offers a spectacular view of these mountains, I know I have almost arrived and the tranquility of the morning will soon dissolve into the sounds of middle schoolers bustling about, slamming lockers, and urgently waiting for my classroom door to be unlocked. Soon they will rush in, metaphorically knocking me down in their eagerness for their structured day to begin.

My school’s student population is divided. The fourteen lakes and ponds in the district that boast log cabins and spacious lakefront beaches contrast with the trailer park communities. Our school population is representative of this contrast of social classes. The school is small, just over 100 students, only 4 of whom represent ethnicities other than Caucasian. As a new teacher in the community this year, I have 80 students to get to know; learning needs to address and individual conversations to listen to. I get to hear what is important to twelve and thirteen year olds growing up in this rural community:

“I am going to miss four days this week because my Dad got a license in the lottery for the moose hunt.” (I hadn’t realized that moose could be hunted, let alone that there is one significant event singled out with “the”).

“I went ice-fishing with my Dad and his friends this weekend.”

“My Dad hunts and makes us eat everything he catches - one time my sister and I had to eat squirrel!” (I tried not to gag when showing my reaction).

The students are proud of the rural traditions of their community. As a cultural being, I had to try not to show my shock just because I do not accept squirrel as a delectable delight, but I had to act in such a way that would not offend students accustomed to eating squirrel.

I am interested in the experience and perceptions of three of the non-white students I taught that fall. Amanda, Marie and Lance are biracial, Caucasian and African American. I am going to share some snapshots of days in my school for these three students in particular.

I taught a genetics lesson about a black mouse and a white mouse that had 5 black baby mice and 2 white baby mice. Were my three biracial students thinking of themselves, were they wondering why their heredity was not similar to the mice? Should I have singled out these students as not fitting this pattern of inheritance? I had in fact talked exhaustively about Cecilia’s red hair as a recessive trait. I was aware of how I was attempting to avoid racial tensions by choosing not to talk about race. I decided in a split decision that it was best “not to talk about it.”

I recalled another teacher’s response to events in our school. The Civil Rights team had put up a sign around the school, “No way, Jose!” The sign was meant to stimulate conversations of tolerance around the school. Two copies of the sign were hanging up, one next to the principal’s office and one next to the bathrooms. They were up for about two months until one day I saw students taking them down with urgency. They came into my room asking, “Do you have any No way Jose signs? We need to take them down because they are racist! Another teacher told us that we shouldn’t have hung them up in the first place!”

I felt more confident than I had been during my genetics lesson. Maybe I felt more confident pointing out the silliness of such an act because we had no Latino students in our school so that made it “okay” to talk about; maybe it was just more obvious than the science lesson that this removal of the signs was indeed offensive and discriminatory. I politely challenged the students, “Would that sign be racist if it said No way, Joe?” They agreed that it would not be racist. I ended the conversation with a question that I wanted the students to reflect upon, “Is speaking in another language racist?” I sent them to the Spanish teacher to continue the discussion.

With this event in the school it was easy for me act purposefully to address the issue of race, but it was also challenging because it meant I had a colleague in my school that did believe the sign was racist. We teachers need to be a unified front and if schools need to be agents of change and encouraging the students to be stewards of equity, we need to move the staff in a school to speak of “what we are not supposed to talk about.”

I think of a conversation I had with the social studies teacher, who was addressing race in a discussion on current events. The event had brought up a tension in the room; Lance had told the teacher, “Well we are talking about Blacks and I am black.” It was decided not to talk about racial tensions in the class. The teacher said that whenever the issue turned back to the racial perspectives, everybody chimed in: “That’s the thing we are not supposed to talk about!”

Meet Brian: A Caucasian student known for being a supremacist. You might be thinking, “That is a heavy label for someone so young; how can a child by the age of 13 have such a reputation of deep-seeded intolerance?” At election time, he had made it clear that he would not have a Black president leading his country. When I played an Obama address to the schoolchildren this past Fall, he asked for a pass to leave the room. He has shown other signs of intolerance. He will take the paper out of my recycling bin and put it in the trash saying, “The hippies don’t know what they’re talking about!” He will call male students with long hair “Gay.” When a teacher talks to Brian to address his behavior he will say he is only joking and the students he is talking to know that. Amanda, Marie and Lance seem to find Brian’s behavior mostly benign.

Me: “Lance, why is he calling you Kanye West?”

Lance: “He thinks I look like him.”

A recent occurrence in the cafeteria wasn’t so benign. As I sat at the teacher table, I saw two girls who are friends of Amanda walk up to Brian. The body language was confrontational so I went over to the scene as the two girls walked away.

“Brian, what happened?”

His tone was defensive and accusatory: “Those girls always get mad at me ‘cause I call their friend Black Amanda. But I can’t keep the Amandas apart so I was just trying to explain which one I was talking about.”

I went to the girls across the cafeteria and they were sitting with Amanda. They were upset, even more than Amanda appeared to be. “He knows her last name, but he was singling out the fact that she is black on purpose!” “He is racist!”

Our dilemma as a school is that we are not talking about what needs to be talked about. Schools need to make issues of social justice explicit and central to the curriculum. We need to go out of our way to teach cultural awareness, tolerance, and equity. We need to deliberately facilitate a worldview that moves away from “every man for himself” to one that considers issues of inequity in the greater society and to understand that all need to work together for equity.

Schools are representative of the communities around them in every way. The children attending are dependents in either a poor, middle class or wealthy family. The students bring attitudes of their parents into the school because it is what they know. The school’s role should be to help students see that there are these socioeconomic representations present and to help them understand their own attitudes and thinking that either help their peers, making them feel equal, or hurt them and make them feel inferior or singled out because of their differences.

Not addressing race stems from a place of not wanting to be controversial, to step on toes, or elicit feelings of superiority or inferiority. But in my school district, we need to talk about it. The students are bringing it to the forefront.

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