Me and My White TeachersWhat Do You Do When Someone Makes a Racist Remark?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/22/us/me-and-my-white-teachers.html

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Her name was Ms. Harris, and I was in the third grade. Of all the teachers I had coming up in school after I emigrated to the States from Trinidad and Tobago at age 6, she stood out.

She was stern, she was fair. She would give you Lucky Bucks at the start of the week. When you behaved badly, she would take one away. If you had the most Lucky Bucks by the end of the week, you would get to participate in some sort of fun activity. If you did not, there would be punishment.

Ms. Harris was the only teacher I remembered having in America who was, like me, black.

It is difficult to say what impact it had on me that nearly all of my teachers in primary and high school were white. I was among the fortunate people who grew up with parents who would not settle for anything but the best from me when it came to academic performance. As such, my grades were high, I got into a great university and, thankfully, landed a great job.

But as my colleague Claire Cain Miller from the Upshot reported recently a large body of research suggests that students, especially nonwhite ones, benefit from having teachers who look like them.

Why is that?

There does not seem to be a clear answer, but in the research, some of the usual suspects pop up: unconscious bias, the role-model effect, cultural sensitivity.

Here, some of my colleagues reflect on their experiences.

I was born in Ghana and moved to the States when I was 4. The first time I had a white teacher I was 12 years old.

I had just transferred from my local public school to Riverdale, a bucolic private day school in the Bronx. The experience of being surrounded by students and educators who did not look like me was a shock to the system.

At P.S. 106 and M.S. 127, the two schools in Parkchester that I had previously attended, my teachers were mostly black and brown women from in and around the Bronx. I remember Ms. Seabrooks, my African-American homeroom teacher, with her tight braids and encouraging smile, who activated my love of literature. And Ms. Durant, my Jamaican math teacher, who firmly believed that girls, just like boys, could excel in her class.

While I loved these women, I did not fully appreciate their impact on my education until I no longer had access to them.

At Riverdale, most experiences felt charged. Oftentimes a simple classroom discussion could easily be cloaked in thick racial tension. In 8th grade, while reading “Black Boy,” Richard Wright’s memoir about growing up in rural Mississippi in a Jim Crow South, my white female teacher abruptly turned to me. “Lovia,” she said. “Do you have anything you want to add?”

The question took me by surprise. Why, I thought at the time, would I have anything to add? No one else had been asked so directly about their opinion.

I often think about this moment and whether or not the burden of publicly stating my views on this book would have fallen on me if I were not black. In a class filled with a teacher and students who did not look like me, her question felt like less of an invitation to share my thoughts, than a demand to explain what it means to be black.

— Lovia Gyarkye, editorial staff member of the Book Review

I’m Latina, my experience is a Latinx experience. I am light-skinned, but I am still a person of color. White skin and whiteness are not the same thing.

I was born in the U.S. My dad was born and raised in the Dominican Republic. My mom was born and raised in Colombia. I was raised in both of their native countries, and went to private American schools, where most of my teachers were white Americans. Even the local Latino teachers that I had were either light-skinned or trigueño — a mix between indigenous and European. They were never black.

Having Latino teachers was important because they taught me about belonging to la raza. I looked like most of my Latino teachers, and seeing myself in them was valuable. In class, we talked about Latin American history and the consequences of American foreign policy. This helped prepare me for my eventual move to the States for college, and the racism that I would encounter in the U.S. as a Latina.

But never once in high school was I told that I was a “person of color.” We were just Latino. And that’s a problem.

Our curriculum ignored black history in Colombia, the Dominican Republic and the U.S. La raza is supposed to welcome all Latinos — white, brown, black — but our teachers never taught us to think of ourselves as people of color because it would have led to conversations about racism and colorism within la raza, and therefore challenge us to think more critically about our identity and our community.

— Isabella Grullón Paz, news assistant, Politics

I’m the parent of two black boys, a group cited specifically in the Upshot report laying out the benefits of having role models, such as teachers, who look like you.

My husband and I are not black. I am South Asian. Never once, from nursery school through my undergraduate years, did I have a teacher of South Asian descent. My parents provided me with the finest education that they could, and I’m sure that it never occurred to them to fret over the fact that the majority of my teachers were white.

When it came time to choose a school for our boys, the diversity of its faculty was a factor, but one that I deemed less important than the quality of the school itself — the academic rigor, the approach to discipline, the community values. This is a luxury, I know. Our sons are not disadvantaged; my husband and I have the benefit of our own education and resources.

I have made peace with the fact that I did not have teachers who looked like me, in part because my parents served as my examples of what success as a brown person might look like. Both my husband and I want to be sure that our sons have the same thing — black adults who they can turn to for inspiration, motivation, and support.

Our pediatrician and dentist are both black; we have black friends who can show them what their adulthood might look like. There’s a wider circle of my sons’ friends’ parents, and our neighbors — both those we know and those who we don’t.

But I have little doubt that every student’s experience in the classroom would be enriched if we had a corps of teachers as diverse as this country. If we start paying teachers better salaries, that may yet happen.

— Rumaan Alam, special projects editor, Books

Janis Middleton thought she had insulated herself from hate in her adoptive city of Atlanta. She surrounded herself with urbane, college-educated friends and colleagues who embraced progressive politics.

Her friends became the cornerstones in an invisible wall that she built to protect herself. She wasn’t naïve. An advertising manager, she is an African-American who had grown up in the South. But she thought she had done all she could to keep racism at bay.

Which is why she didn’t see it coming.

She was visiting a white friend last year on the Fourth of July when it happened. After the hot dogs and burgers, chips and conversation, her friend’s mother used the N-word during a discussion about race in the living room. Ms. Middleton froze.

Her good friend looked away, and said nothing.

Ms. Middleton, 38, still replays that moment over and over and over again. What could she have said? What should she have said? Why did her white friend stay silent?

“You tell yourself, ‘I’m going to be prepared for it, the next time,’” Ms. Middleton said. “But you never are.”

As a black woman, I know what she means. Maybe you do, too. You think you’ve steeled yourself, braced yourself, prepared yourself. You think you’ve picked a city that is safe and nurtured a social circle where you won’t have to worry. Then you’re confronted with a racist remark. At your son’s soccer practice. At the local coffee shop. At your friend’s wedding, or your office.

Each situation presents an opportunity to speak out against racism, but not all of us do. Why not?

Recently, we asked readers to share their reactions in those moments. We wondered: Did you say something? Were you stunned into silence? Dozens of people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds responded, describing fraught encounters with strangers, friends, co-workers and relatives.

[Read the full article]

We continued the conversation about how to react to a racist comment during our weekly chat. We went live with Janis Middleton, an African-American advertising manager in Atlanta, and Will Walker, a white college student in Santa Barbara, Calif. They both responded to our recent callout asking readers what they do in these situations. Be sure to join our live conversations every Wednesday at 9 p.m. Eastern on topics related to race and culture on our Facebook page.

If you have experienced, witnessed or read about a hate crime or incident of bias or harassment, you can use this form to send information about the incident to Race/Related and our partners in the Documenting Hate project.

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