[
Race, Class, And LiesRod Dreher
'White supremacy' and the excuses we make to hide the truth from ourselves:
The day after I finished Rob's book, I read
this jaw-dropping anonymous account on Wesley Yang's Substack, written by someone described by Yang as "a white male from a privileged background with a savior complex" who had done Teach For America in Baltimore back in 2008. It is extremely painful to read, but it tracks closely to the accounts I've heard from my idealistic white liberal friends who chose to teach in classrooms filled with the children of the black poor, and had their heads handed to them. The point of the stories Yang's anonymous correspondent tells is that the main reasons for the utter failure, from generation to generation, of poor black kids has to do with factors that have nothing to do with education policy, or law, or politics. Excerpts:
Quote:
There is a Teach For America version of this story in which the teacher is less spiritual leader, more technocrat par excellence, coaxing untapped human capital from its stores, closing disparities like a reverse Moses.
Neither of these templates apply to my story, which is one of unmitigated failure. My story might be told in one of two ways. The safer way to tell this story would make repeated reference to the matrix of oppression into which poor, disproportionately Black, children are born. This is a story of deprivation that centers on the culpability of all those who live outside the sacrifice zones into which these children are released and where they will remain entrapped for the rest of their lives under the watchful eye of agents of the carceral state. It is especially about history and the unbroken line that gets drawn from a failing city school to the racist crimes of the American past.
I happen to agree with this story. But this is not the story I want to tell. I lived a different story, whose terrifying immediacy held at bay the grand abstractions through which we are urged to interpret our lives. When a second-grader's grandmother sent him to school with a loaded gun because he was being bullied, I didn't see a vestige of white flight. I saw a second grader bringing a loaded gun to school at the direction of his primary caretaker. When Kenyon was transferred into my class mid-second year with an enormous file explaining how his gross-motor problems were in part the product of his mother holding a curling iron to his feet as a baby to stop him from crying, I did not experience that as a consequence of redlining, whiteness, or bourgeois complacency. And when I learned soon after that Kenyon could not read past kindergarten level, nor write his name properly, I did not process these things as the byproducts of America's system of funding schools through property taxes. I processed these things as horrors.
This is a story about horrors. I wish it weren't. No other way of telling it approaches the truth. Richmond Elementary was a horror. I was a horrible teacher. I am sure that some people will read my story as "victim blaming" or "poverty porn," as perpetuating an image of inner-city Black communities as defective or dangerous that is often used for nefarious political purposes. For just this reason, we were cautioned on several occasions by TFA higher-ups not to stress the negatives when sharing our experiences from the classroom. But I really don't buy that anymore. Yes, the layers of hierarchy, responsibility and power that surround the horror matter, but the horror itself matters more. We must talk about the horror.
It is also a story about me. And while I am a white man, I did not interpret the horrors around me as my privilege made animate. I interpreted them as my fault, but only narrowly so, in the sense that I was a bad teacher who was stupid and arrogant enough to have thought that I could be part of the solution. Ultimately, my greatest privilege was the ability to leave at the end of every school day and then for good at the end of my contract intact. But I didn't leave unscathed.
More:
Quote:
But even more than these horrors, the realization that many, if not most, of my students were illiterate and would likely always remain so, underlined my sense of futility. The achievement gap is a relative measurement, pertaining to comparisons between groups. Illiteracy is absolute and personal. If you can't read, what does it matter who can? If some new age of social utopia dawned tomorrow, you'd still be working at its gas station.
As children get older, it becomes increasingly difficult to develop reading skills and so with each year the urgency of imparting that crucial skill grows. If children are not reading at or near grade level by the fourth grade, it's a genuine emergency, one that necessitates the highest level of instruction and the highest level of classroom management to make that instruction possible. And somehow what the system had to offer my children was a 24-year-old first year teacher, fresh out of college, who was hardly able to walk his class to the bathroom without violence breaking out, let alone provide conditions to allow for the mandatory forty-five minutes of daily quiet reading time. The urgency was lost on the students, of course. They couldn't see their life prospects evaporating in front of them. But I could.
Read it all. The anecdotes are honest to God horrifying and I've heard similar ones from my friends. What they convey is children who come from a world of moral anarchy, of kids who have no idea how the world is supposed to work, because they've never seen it. This is more or less the world that young Rob Henderson came from.
We live in a society and culture that is addicted to lies. We lie to ourselves because it's easier than facing painful truths. You read that TFA story about Baltimore, and you wonder how those kids will be saved. Maybe theirs is a problem without a solution. Whatever the truth, liberal leaders black and otherwise and journalists who bang on about "white supremacy" and reparations, and about how dangerous Florida is, are lying to hide the ugly and frightening truth from themselves.]
