This Is What White Supremacy Looks Like in Our High Schools
As a public school teacher, I saw how a culture of fear is holding back anti-racist education in our classrooms
In the spring of 2017, I took a part-time job teaching English at a high school in a small agrarian and prison town just far enough outside of Seattle that people fly Confederate flags with impunity. It was just after President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech, in which he invoked the idea of “American carnage.” The kids at this school would notoriously lead a “build the wall” chant during lunch as a group of Latinx students entered the cafeteria — an incident of racial terror highlighted in the revised edition of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria by Beverly Daniel Tatum, PhD. Some of those same students later protested my poetry class by complaining to a school security guard that I was being “racist against white people” by highlighting artists of color in my class. (Why they went to the security guard and not school administrators is telling — these students trusted those they viewed as the “police” more than the principal.)
When the administration approached me about the student complaints, I was told my teaching “wasn’t inappropriate, per se,” but as a new resident to the area, I didn’t yet understand…
