South Carolina high school English teacher Mary Wood was reprimanded last school year for teaching a lesson on race. She began teaching it again this year.
Mary Wood walked between the desks in her AP English Language and Composition classroom, handing out copies of the book she was already punished once for teaching.
Twenty-six students, all but two of them White, looked down at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a memoir that dissects what it means to be Black in America — and which drew calls for Wood’s firing when she tried to teach it last year in her mostly White, conservative town. Wood crossed to a lectern and placed her hands on either side of a turquoise notebook, open to two pages of bullet points explaining why she wanted to teach Coates’s work.
“That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand.”
Wood stared at her class. She tried to make eye contact with every teenager. Anyone, she reminded herself, might be secretly recording her — or planning to report her.
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Plus, both teachers believed the book, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, is superbly written: a master class in the deployment of rhetorical devices. There was no better way to teach children how to formulate their own arguments, they thought.
“It teaches kids a different perspective, [it] teaches kids how to write well,” Wood said in an interview. And “it’s the right thing to do.”
I love what she’s doing. That said-
I doubt they’re unfamiliar with racism, what with being raised by white conservative southerners. They probably heard the N-word a thousand times before they could say it themselves.
Of course, they’re very unfamiliar with being at the receiving end of racism, something that Ta-Nehisi Coates can teach them a lot about.
Hi, white southerner here. FYI, that’s really not how it works. Regardless of whatever behavior they’ve grown up with, they most likely don’t think it’s “racist;” they think it’s “normal.” Hell, they might even “have a black friend” who is “one of the good ones” and are perfectly polite to any well-dressed, middle-class, Carlton-from-Fresh-Prince-of-Bel-Air-esque black person they occasionally interact with. It’s just all those other “criminal” “hoodlums” from the “inner city” that they have a problem with, and they’ll swear up and down that the reason is anything but race (absolutely refusing to understand the concept of institutional racism, or indeed, cause-and-effect in general).
That was kind of what I was saying, I was just saying it more facetiously. They are familiar with racism because they’re steeped in it and it’s so pervasive that they don’t even know it. But what they’ve never done is experienced it.
But that’s not it, though. They are unfamiliar with racism by definition, because they define it as something only other people do.
I think we mean ‘familiar’ and ‘unfamiliar’ in two different ways. I understand what you’re saying and by that measure yes, they are unfamiliar with it. I just meant ‘familiar’ in the sense that it’s something they’ve done plenty of times themselves whether they are aware of it or not. By that measure, it is not unfamiliar to them, it is just unrecognized.
Either way, my real point is that they have most likely never been the object of racism and that’s what they will benefit from learning about by reading this book.
Looks like she thinks the kids might lack exposure because they’re rich:
I was being a little facetious. The teacher obviously meant that they had never been the object of racism. I was just saying that because they’re white, white and Southern, they probably have plenty of racist relatives. So they’ve experienced racism, they’ve just never been harmed by it like someone on the receiving end.
It’s all good. I figured that was what you were doing. I just wanted to encourage more people to read the full article (which I think is fantastic) by sharing relevant quotes from it.
A lot of them don’t even think that’s racism.
Which is exactly why they need to read this book.
Absolutely! However, the bigger obstacle is right there in the article; “Twenty-six students, all but two of them White”.
We need to forcibly re-desegragate schools and break up the white school districts that were created by the more modern intersections of race and class. As long as we have 24-to-2 classes we are never going to save enough white kids from growing up to be racist.