Are You White?

Are YOU White?

When you are white and you go to teach in South Central Los Angeles in 1983 in a neighborhood that is mostly black (with some few Hispanic students) it might be better and certainly easier to not talk about their race, or your race, or gangs or really many things.
Seems hard to say something so that another within their context can take it at least in the way you mean it. At least be upset for what you intended.

Certainly I cringed as a family friend at Christmas that year gave me a global talk on genetic material I never expected in response to my talking about how school was going for me back in South Central. I wanted to talk about the disparity in where I was working and back home in West Virginia and a very big dichotomy that was hitting me round his Christmas tree. Perhaps I was picturing the Christmases of the children I met in LA, many of whom in my husband’s room raised a hand when asked if a family member was in jail. Our family friend Will, who is older than my mom and whose deceased wife was a community activist my daughter is named for, wanted to talk about it in this gene based way. In the guise of understanding through accepting the premise that some “can”, some “cannot”. I thought then he just wanted to be certain that he was not collectively called upon to assume any responsibility or fault. (I was young and not in his context, I heard it that way.) If he could rest assured of the premise there are different racially inherent genetic capacities then one could be far more comfortable with it somehow. I interpreted. To be fairer maybe I can’t just understand his point well enough to present it. Still it shocks me to argue that groups of people have capacity in their genes. I hadn’t intended to solicit anything like this, but I was testifying to what I saw.

I just felt I was a witness. And I still am trying to testify to the truths I learned then.

I thought if I just told people then maybe we could get some guys and go fix this world. The kind of response he gave to me is the river underground that rides through the consciousness of many I encounter in different realities when discussing what a fair public education needs to mean. I always want to talk about that. Try it, you are immediately confronted with a difficulty of another kind. As a white girl teaching in my school in South Central I had a lot to learn. And still it is a very difficult issue to “talk about” for it hits every nerve every person has in every reality I encounter. It has many contexts. Then too there is a world of emotion involved when some “have” and some “have not”. Just by how I look I convey “meanings”, often those not intended. You can mean well and offend just about everyone.And you can never write well enough to create a place where we can allcome together and find commonality, or so it seems.

From my field notes at the time, writen by a 27 year old....... "Working in my room one day......long ago in 1983....waiting for Phyllis to get back from RSP, a pullout program, a teen entered my room yelling gang things and talking in Lavon’s face in a language I could not understand. (Phyllis had evidentially left the locked door a bit ajar so she could come back in when she went to her class. She went with my never knowing really where it was held or her teacher for it.) It was a fast, loud, guttural and threatening rant from our huge intruder. I knew what a knife meant and he was lunging out at my student. The rooms did not have phones and cell phones were not yet so universal, no walkie-talkies, and the lousy intercom was a button by the door he was blocking. I told the kids to get behind me and go in Mr. U.’s room through the connecting door at the back of the room. Some did. No one managed to get the other teacher who could have been a real help or tell him the problem. Kids were running back and forth rather gleefully. Most gathered in a circle to watch. And I was completely irrelevant. For a few seconds, and it was only seconds, I discerned this had connection to Lavon’s older brothers, he continued to furiously rant at Lavon down right in his face. Suddenly Phyllis flew the door open, pushed by the teen literally moving him over, greeted him with some response using a name like “Peewee”, which was again inaudible to me, and sort of scolding him took her seat. Miraculously he left. Using the back doors I told the several of us teachers on the floor, called on the intercom to the office and hoped, expected, they’d use their ability to get to a phone and call the police. We fled to my husband’s room down the hall via the back of the room connecting doors. Somehow I learned he’d also been to their room prior to my event. Lavon was supposed to be in Jack’s room, so I suppose he looked there first for him. My husband said Chris, a student, probably answered the door and sent him our way. No one ever sent the police, Mrs. W. the AP played her usual intercom games, “What?”, “Where?” ,”Who is this?” and so forth and kept asking me if he was still on the campus. Locked up in my room I certainly could not know where the teen was at now. I kept asking her to go look outside if she wanted that answered and to call the police. I made the error of saying a “gang kid” when she asked what he looked like due to his dress, language, knife, flashing hand signs and so on. She did come through loud and clear to tell me there were, “No gangs in the area or at the school”. I really needed at that particular frighteningly real moment to be lectured in her take on her own parasitical relationship with the neighborhood. No gangs there my behind. To care so little you cannot follow through on a knife stands for me for how little she really thought about what these kids deserved from school. At times kids need to know where adults stand exactly. They had reached something like equilibrium working here. It depended on not taking any action or stand on anything. It wasn’t going to work for me not to tell the kids plainly gangs equal death or jail. Period. I still can’t shake that mantra. Even if it does cause “cognitive dissonance” with the neighborhood, get real. To be reminded that if I were laying on the ground right now wounded there was a pretty good chance she wouldn’t mind taking her sweet old time bothering to get any medical help was more than I can process, still."

"But that is how it was. For essentially it was years of poor, ineffective leadership combined with outrageous socital decay that neither educated nor helped children in a situation so dangerous any moment in a classroom could and did escalate into a murderous act. We weren’t just at this place in times where the danger was only from white racists who held you in contempt. These two leaders had the skin color but not the will and focus to change the climate of that school. And they didn’t exist in a vacuum. They got by. To talk about Los Angeles Unified in 1983 one has to understand that entity gave rise to the degredated public ed. situation too by employing and maintaining leadership that was parasitical in some schools. LA Unified was many things; it’s huge, including a place whereby some existed as feeders on the system. You can’t blame these particular women really, it evolved, and they evolved. Or perhaps it devolved. The kind of fixative leadership to try to change this school has come much later after our leaving, through reform movements, monetary investment, political will and additionally two women leaving their kingdom. And one fine teacher within the school currently becoming their leader. You can wish it away but fundamentally when you can hear bullets, all hell really is breaking loose."


Back to field notes..."Daily terror for some is not acceptable to me as an American standard. Someone stepping up to the plate to deal with it requires a good deal, all they are goes on the line too. Not an easy job to accept doing. To do it well requires a force of will of mountainous proportion. South Central was a place that demanded greatness. Mrs. W. liked to say to me, “See no evil, hear no evil, say no evil.” On that point she was always consistent. Always referring to gangs she said, “Those white kids up in the valley were the ones doing that kind of thing. “ Coincidentally I got in the middle of a student fight on the recess yard and had been slightly hurt. How was I to know we were not suppose to separate them, they’d punch you down driven by their fury and not pull back because you were a teacher? Jack’s eye had a pencil plunged into it in a similar incident and he had been lucky it just hit the white part. Mrs.W. had visited my room for a screaming reminder I was not to say anything about the gangs that didn’t “exist” anyway. She wasn’t going to “hear tell” of anymore of it. One of my kids, Tiandra with Sickle-cell, ratted me out for a particularly impassioned death or jail talk I gave in response to gang signals flashing during the knife visit in my students. It had been a month of more than a few safety issues, after the Spring Break return of Mrs. S.the Principal and the return of a very awesome sub to another part of the District. And Mrs. W. her right hand woman was riding high again.
My husband decided to raise the issue of school safety at the staff meeting. What a mistake. Our tables for the meeting were arranged in a kind of rectangle with open middle with Dr. S, once she returned and her Sargent, on one end and the faculty sitting around the other three sides. We were as far from her as possible. He asked if there could not be more done to protect teachers and children given several safety incidents we both had experienced in the months we were there. He suggested the possibility of a security guard or system to be able to keep the campus safer. After all, we had thought at home, why not ask for some safety as his predecessor was supposedly stabbed. But his tone that day was calm asking if we couldn’t seek a more secure campus. He didn’t talk about race, gangs, competence of administrators, or anything else. But he might as well have for what blew back to us at the far end of the table. What erupted was amazing. It was instantaneous, loud, and angry. In a few seconds a group of teachers called us “racists”, talked about the lousy parenting and kids in the valley. I’d never really even seen “the valley”. Jack tried to contextualize his comments but there was no point. He wasn’t attacking. We were under siege. I was shocked, shocked because the deepest need I saw in that room was the need these many black women had to insist there was no gang culture there. Perhaps they saw us as two young liberal interlopers butting in to tell them their business. Certainly they dealt there everyday and had long careers in the school. Maybe we were talking out of turn to them. They thought clearly that we had not earned a right to comment. Not the last time I’ve seen that organizationally in teaching. I cannot entirely represent what was happening in their mind, certainly Dr. S.'s response gave the go ahead to let a poltergeist out of the bag our way. And her good soldiers voiced the collective “shut up”. This denial in a neighborhood where I heard bullets. This in a place coated in graffiti. I couldn’t get it really then. I didn’t yell back, I restrained myself from talking. Clearly it was out of context for us. Dr. S. called my husband in the next morning to her office to inform us we two could leave and she’d, “help us go. “ That was not good. He knew that we’d end up in different schools probably widely separated with our one car and I was sick as a dog with a virus that eventually put me out of school in May and June. And we’d be “red tagged”. It was quite the moment. He held his ground. I knew by then oddly they thought we had some kind of connection to the “central office”. They did think we had a little power. He said he wasn’t being reassigned anywhere. And he wasn’t. She backed off. Later, privately one of the worst screamers, completely unseen by her peers apologized and told my husband she knew he wasn’t really “a racist”. What was let loose that day I do not know exactly. Rage I think."

And now reflecting a bit more.....

I had an experience that might further encapsulate this, how I felt being called “white” in South Central. The girls in my class loved to come up to me as I sat at my desk in front of them and touch my hair. Then they liked to comb my hair. And as I didn’t react too much to that, other than perhaps try a few times to work on spelling “hair”, they liked to try and do something to fix up my hair and give me a better combing out. Conversely I rather liked to look at their elaborate braiding too. They liked to be close to you. My hair was so close to my head it was probably like combing out a crew cut. I was very thin then, emaciated at 100 pounds, now so fat I wallow, but then looking rather sticklike. Extremely white, blond, sallow with the cytomeglia virus. One day Shawn H. a new student, who eventually I sent to my husband’s room, because he was so hard to work with, asked me if he could ask me a question. I remember looking up and he said, “Are you white?” Every child in a fairly chatty social room fell silent. He liked to do that, to hold court. I answered something like, “ Well Shawn, if I’m not white I just don’t know who is.” And the sound that came back to me was an exhale across the room of such real heartfelt disappointment. Shawn sensing this went on to say, “Because my dad says you eat your babies.” That was quite a mouthful. Shawn’s dad was, to my understanding, a pastor and actually I think Shawn was just being provoking. He would do that. But it erupted through the room and the kids came up to feel my skin and give me a pretty careful going over. And this after months together. That I suppose is what really said it all to me. They had to ask where I fit, what color I was. They had to have an adult give them the bottom line. My husband, they said, was definitely “not white”, they told me that. He is actually Italian. They felt he was black, but not Mexican, then they said he was “Rambo”. I said to them that I’d like to know what “whiteness” meant to them. And the answer was quite clear. They were all very sad for me and it was a time in my life when at least thirty-five nine-year-olds held me in their greatest pity. That was quite a moment.

In time I’ve taught since then in many different situations. California exposes you to a wide variety of people, in many situations I have felt pitiable because I was not a member of a culture or community. Or rather I have felt an onus of responsibility to earn the respect of a community to become an educator there that was respected. It has been invaluable and difficult. It has made me see advantage, money, effort, and situational dynamics for what they are. We are born here, unto this earth, with great differences of circumstance. It is just that we so often fail to see that for what it is. An advantage, a disadvantage, a great house, a little couch in a room with ten kids. It is beyond our shaping when we arrive, we arrive. Maybe even into a stable. But we are born all of us with our capacity. And this I know, our capacity to become human, to learn, to love, and to be able to rise above and beyond circumstance to find our meaning. And we are born needing to look out for each other, needing to be looked out for. We are born with the potential to do great harm as well. We are all pitiable for that alone. We are all both “accepted” and “unaccepted”. Two selves united. We have only our shifts in perception to consider when we consider what we do in education. At least that’s what a group of children taught me in South Central when they learned and accepted that sadly I was white.