Me and White Supremacy Day #11: You and Anti-Blackness Against Black Children
I’ll be honest - I have been dreading this particular day of the challenge. I’m an educator, a school librarian, and I love my students. I certainly don’t want to think that I could ever behave in a discriminatory way towards any of them, or that I could hurt a child in my care.
But I had a moment, about two years ago, when I read that black children are routinely chastised or punished in school for transgressions that white children would not be disciplined for. My first thought on reading this was, That’s horrible! My second thought was, I’ve done that.
A few years ago, I had a young black student in second grade. He was funny and cheerful and I loved how he laughed out loud when I read aloud to his class. But he and his best (white) friend were rambunctious, and I found them a handful. I would come down on them sometimes, scolding them for their noise.
I came down harder on my black student much more severely, and much more often, than I did on his white friend.
Realizing this made me take a hard look at how I thought of and treated my black students. I work in a predominantly white, privileged private school with very few black kids. I realized that I had a subconscious expectation that the black boys would act up and be more disruptive than the white boys, and that when I had two black female students who were both quiet and reserved, I wondered why they weren’t louder. This realization was what kickstarted my anti-racist work, and what also made me realize that yes, I could indeed be racist even if I was a good person. I knew that I not only needed to do better, but needed practical strategies to do so. Good intentions weren’t enough.
I volunteered with my church’s youth group this year, and every single teen in the group was a child of colour, most of them black. The coordinator of the youth group, though white, has a lot of experience and training working with youth of colour, and she was really good with them. I was not good with them. I looked at their church experience attending a church with a largely black congregation run almost entirely by white clergy (whom I have come to believe severely lack understanding of the black community they’re serving) and wondered what I could possibly have to offer them. They are immigrants and refugees, and I have no clue the sorts of experiences they’ve had. I literally didn’t speak their language well and and struggled to contribute to the all-French discussions.
Over the last few days of doing this, I’ve come to realize how problematic it is, this ingrained assumption I have that I can’t relate to the black people in my neighbourhood in any meaningful way. I don’t feel this way about my black students at school. I can think of three possible reasons: 1) my black students and I are more similar in terms of socio-economic background than my black neighbours and I are, 2) maybe being part of a smaller, more close-knit school community gives us more to talk to each other about, and 3) being able to speak English with my black students makes it much easier.
I still need to figure out how to address these issues. This will take more work and reflection, not to mention just getting over myself. It’s not as simple as saying, “We’re all human underneath,” but at the same time, it cannot possibly be true that my black neighbours and I have no basis for a relationship.
In terms of how I treat my students, I have made conscious efforts to reject stereotypes about black children, to provide my students of colour with books featuring characters who look like them and who tell their stories, as well as providing my colleagues with anti-racist resources as part of the library’s professional development collection. So there is still a lot of work to do, but I am inching along.