I'm Not Your Girlfriend

“Being black is too emotionally taxing; therefore I will be black only on weekends and holidays.”
-George C. Wolfe, "The Colored Museum"

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A few weeks ago I was in the nail salon with Chloe and my mother after work.  As I waited with my fingers wrapped in acetone, cotton, and tin foil I watched the muted, endless loop of stories on NYI:  Black man attacks someone with a hammer, black men assaults a transgender person, black person contracts Ebola, and researchers at Columbia study the unique pathogens carried by Manhattan rats.

The message that was unconsciously being communicated is the that world is a violent, diseased place, largely the fault of black men who, like rats, occupy the dirty and dark places of our society but have the ability to jump out and threaten you when you least expect it.

So, that day I  decided that I was not going to be black anymore (at least not at work).

At my new school, in grades 6-8 there are two black students out of around 140.  One is a girl and the other is a boy.  I have the boy for advisory and the girl for an after school elective- but for the first time in my life I teach no black children.  In terms of the faculty, I am the only black person working in the middle school, except for the librarian who is a maternity leave sub.   During my interview for the job, the department head was concerned about how I would handle "the transition."  I had to inform him that I was the only black teacher in the middle school at The Storefront as well (I was also the only full time female, but that is another story).

I started the year worried that my new students wouldn't trust my abilities and that the parents would be disappointed that their kids were not placed in the other English class with the other English teacher.  Thankfully, that didn't happen.

In my experience there is a difference between integration and tokenism.  Sunday Brunch at Lido is integration; in my new job I am a (very effective) token.  It's not all bad; it is much easier to be accepted in an environment where one is a token.  There is no competition for resources and the power is clearly in the hand of the dominant group.  When you are a token, it is almost as if your race is invisible unless it can be used as an example of diversity.  That is the point of having a token, after all. In general people don't question your credentials because they assume that if you are there you have been sufficiently vetted.  (However, I have noticed that when there are more than three or four black people in an environment the dynamic changes.  People start to get nervous if your conversation goes on too long.  Or you laugh loudly at a joke that they don't hear.  And god forbid that you go out to lunch together.)

Photo: Tumblr

Anyway, I am secure enough to know that race was not the reason that I was hired (I'm going to make that statement without qualifying it. Boom!)

After the first couple of weeks I settled into the comfortable life of being a token.   It is kind of a relief not to have to think and talk about race all of the time. One of my 6th graders had already told me that I wasn't black, I was "tan."  If I hadn't been raised on a steady diet of blackness I might have even become one of those light-skinned black people claiming to be something other than the descendant of slaves.  And then this happened and snapped me right out of my post-racial foolishness fantasy world:

Here is the abridged version of what happened:
I was covering a high-school science class when a two students began using a laptop to watch the video of Charles Ramsey describing how he rescued Amanda Berry from Ariel Castro.  The two boys were laughing loudly at Ramsey and mocking his speech, repeating the catchphrase "Dead Giveaway" over and over again.  Clearly they didn't understand Ramsey's quote "I knew something was wrong when a pretty little white girl ran into a black man's arms" is an indictment of the racism that they were exhibiting.

As they mocked Mr. Ramsey I felt my body shrinking; I had to remind myself that I was the adult and they were the children. Racism works in mysterious ways, and I sat there getting angrier and angrier at everyone except the boys themselves.  I was mad at the reporter, the person who put the video on Youtube, and even Mr. Ramsey himself.  I angry at myself  wondering what had I done to cause this, and questioning if I was overreacting?  When the boys wanted to put on the video of Kimberly "Sweet Brown" Wilkins, the woman who coined the phrase "ain't nobody got time for that," I had had enough.  I put an end to the videos and called the students out on their insensitivity.  Needless to say, defensiveness and deflections ensued.

Since then I have experienced:

• Being called "girlfriend" in the midst of a conversation with a high-school student about The Walking Dead
• Having another high-school student tell me that they liked my hair using an affected Driving Miss Daisy/Snoop Dog accent
• A student rolling their neck at me during an lesson that was being observed by another teacher
• Being told by a parent that their child loves me because I am "sassy."

My expression after being called "sassy" like it was a compliment

In the rare instance when the comments were malicious, I was reminded of the feeling that there's nothing worse than working hard and being smacked in the face with assumptions of inferiority.  The sad thing is that in the majority of these instances the students like me, but are using this language in a sad attempt to relate to me (or the vision of me they have in their head).  

Luckily, as I was mulling all of this over,  Aídah Gil reminded me of something from Toni Morrison that I posted on Facebook a while ago:

“The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” 

So I continued to do my work.  I showed my students Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Ted Talk, "The Danger of the Single Story", and I taught the concept of irony using an episode of "Blackish" as an example.  

Can we talk about this read and purple? Photo: chimamanda.com

Let's hope that no one acts a fool and dresses as Ray Rice, Crazy Eyes, or their favorite rapper on Halloween.  Pray for me.