Things I Didn't Do

Rarely but regularly, growing up in the U.S.’s K-12 system, I encountered teachers that said openly racist things in the classroom. In every case I remember, this was unusual. These teachers didn’t say racist things on a daily basis; often only once in the year I had them. For instance, in rural Nebraska, when someone brought up a protest the Lakota Sioux were conducting on the nearby Pine Ridge Reservation, a teacher responded with a racist rant. I don’t recall this teacher saying anything racially charged before or after that incident, but her vitriolic racism lay there under the surface, waiting to bubble up.

Here’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t demand that my teachers apologize for their racist comments in my classes. I didn’t report them to their supervisors and demand that they be fired, because any teacher who doesn’t think ALL children are equally worthwhile needs to get the FUCK out of education. I didn’t walk out of the classrooms and ask my peers to join me

I spent a lot of time at the library as a teenager, and I got a job there over the summer to assist in the children’s library. There were only two of us down there, one librarian and me. Early on, the children’s librarian told me that if any of the Native American children attempted to check out library books, I should tell them they could only check out two at most. White kids regularly checked out a dozen books at once.

Here’s what I didn’t do. I didn’t call her out on the spot and say, “That’s a racist policy; how dare you say such a thing? Every child here needs to be treated equally and we should be doing everything we can to encourage ALL kids to read and engage with books more.” I didn’t report her to her supervisor. I didn’t attempt to publish information about this incident in the school paper (I probably could have gotten at least one issue out before the authorities noticed; they didn’t pay much attention to what we did with the paper).

I didn’t quit the job. I resolved to myself I’d pretend I never heard this statement, and check out all the books to all the kids, but it never came up. Although Lakota Sioux children were in the library often, they never once attempted to check out a book while I was there. I’m confident they could palpably feel in the air how unwelcome they were everywhere in that small town bordering the reservation.

When I worked as a high school teacher in the Bronx, one of our students was murdered while buying an orange juice at a bodega. After we learned about this, sitting in the teacher’s lounge with maybe a dozen other teachers, a white female teacher walked in the room and said, outraged, “You know that kid that was killed? I had him in my class. He never did any work. He was a dirtbag. I'm sorry for saying it, but it's true." A male teacher replied, "Don't say you're sorry. Now there's one less dirtbag in the world. We should be happy about the elimination of dirtbags." They didn’t mention race, but I’m confident that they even if they felt the same way about a student who had died at a majority white school, they would never have felt like it was ok to speak that way. They would have shown him enough respect to at least say nothing. And quite frankly, I don’t think they would have had the same emotional response. I do not believe these same people would assume that white students who were not great at school didn’t deserve to LIVE, which is what they were saying about our black male student who was killed.

What I didn't do. I didn’t confront them on the spot. I didn’t go to their supervisors about it and demand that they be removed from teaching. I didn’t discuss it with my colleagues who were in the room and could have verified the incident.

These incidents stuck with me even though nearly all my other encounters with these teachers, colleagues, and supervisors blurred over by time. They stuck with me because they bothered me. I knew it was awful. I complained to my family and friends, but I never confronted them directly. I didn’t make a fuss, shout, call attention, complain. And I should have.

I encourage everyone today to do what I didn’t do, what I plan to do in future: to confront racist comments in schools, whether you encounter them as a student, a teacher, or a parent. Walk out of the classroom, complain to principals and to the press – and even more, do the one thing I didn’t have the option to do in the 90’s and the ‘00s, and that is to record and share it all using our phones and the internet. Let the light shine on these hate-filled incidents, so that we can confront and abolish racism in public servants – in schools, in libraries, in the police, everywhere.

I could have made those racist people’s lives uncomfortable in a small way, and I wish I had. But something that gives me hope today is the power every person has to record racism as it is happening live in front of them, and to share it with a wider audience. I’m so glad a generation of activists have taught us to record racist incidents as they happen so they can be put on the internet and never again denied or shut down. Maybe that will finally lead to change. But it requires all of us, everywhere, refusing to tolerate it, refusing to listen to it, refusing to let public servants abuse their positions.