Autobiography Pt. 6: Education

I recently have been asked by a few people about how I became interested in antiracism.  In helping myself move forward, I realize that I need to look back.  Also, I hope to convey the sense that I too am on a journey; I am a work in progress.  This is part of my story.

One day at the end of my first year as a graduate assistant, I found myself herding a group of Black four year-olds across the campus of a local university.  Preschool was one of those things on my “never going to…” list, yet here I was, talking about shapes and handing out juice cups and cookies.  It was one of the more adventurous tasks I had done so far in my volunteer work as a graduate student.  Since this local university partners with an urban elementary school, our team was responsible to host the annual “College for a Day” field trip for the Pre-K and Kindergarten classes.

The main emphasis of the field trip, as written in the objectives, seemed to revolve around identification of shapes.  I had sorted shapes for the shape scavenger hunt, compiled a shapes book with a song to the tune of “Farmer in the Dell,” and grouped the students by class with corresponding color-coded shape name tags.  However, as evidenced by the title, the overarching goal of the field trip was to familiarize children and their parents to the university.  This was not included in the written objectives, however.  I only became aware of the connection between the title of the field trip and the location of the scavenger hunt when the team leader commented as much.  

As I drove to university that morning, I had been thinking about the elementary school.  I had heard about the partnership all year, but I only visited the elementary school at the end of the year when I was asked to help with a parent night.  They needed another pair of hands to scoop ice cream for the banana splits given out at the end of a night of literacy activities.  I showed up with my team T-shirt and an ice scream scoop I had been instructed to bring.  As I walked in the door, I found my way to the cafeteria, where the university students were congregating.  Most of my night was spent splitting bananas, so I really didn’t have time to think about the parent night until the parents and the students made their way back to the cafeteria.  

All the university students also gathered around the ice cream to help with distribution.  It was at this moment that the whole scene hit me in Black and White:  all the people standing in line were Black, and all the people behind the counter handing out melting ice and browning bananas were White.  I suddenly had a feeling similar to when I had participated in mission trips to Mexico, except then we were a bunch of White people handing out plates of rice and beans with a donut on top to a large crowd of Brown people. I looked around at the other university students and wondered if they noticed what I did, but the ice cream was melting fast so I couldn’t ponder for long.  

The morning of the field trip as I waited in my car, I wondered how White education students were prepared to work in an all-Black school. Did they find it shocking that there was an all-Black school, as I did?  I knew I had only seen a few Black university students on campus, so I was pretty sure most of the students were White and from all-White schools and communities. Did they think about the fact that their schools had been all-White?  I knew that I hadn’t.  In fact, I would later find out that schools in our nation are almost as segregated now as they were in the "Jim Crow" era (Kozol, 2006).

Later in the day, as I helped guide the preschoolers and their parents across the university’s campus in search of shapes, I was keenly aware of “race” as we passed students, faculty and staff.  I started counting Black people that I saw, feeling almost embarrassed in front of the Black parents and children at the lack of people of color in the crowds.  The parents asked questions about the different buildings on campus, obviously more interested in the “College for a Day” emphasis than finding elusive shapes in the architecture.  The volunteer student who was acting as the group leader was indefatigable, however, keeping the group at a clipping pace in search of shapes.

Eventually, the group passively instituted a scenic break, which was facilitated by three Marines, two White and one Black, who were set up with a booth and a sit-up bar stationed in the center of campus.  The Marines were meant to recruit college students, but the Black Marine started chatting with the parents, as the White Marines stood back awkwardly. One parent attempted a few sit ups, and then the children wanted to try.  The Black Marine patiently hoisted four year-olds one by one up to the sit-up bar for the next twenty minutes, while the White Marines handed out the water bottles.  I wondered at myself internally at being so focused on “race” suddenly.

We made our way back to regroup as a team, where I finally relaxed from a long morning.  As we debriefed, we found out that one of the parents was mad because we hadn’t talked about going to college with the children.  One team member suggested that it wasn’t really age appropriate anyway. Now, I have a limited understanding of early childhood development and I don’t like to look foolish.  However, I thought about my own small child and what I might say to him about college.  I ventured, “I don’t know… could you say something about the ‘big kids’ school or something?  Like, ‘This is college and one day you can go here’?” Another person responded, “The children already know that!  The parents just don’t understand what we’re doing in our partnership with this school.”

I fell silent, feeling out of my league.  I didn’t have experience teaching kids.  I had always said I didn’t want to teach kids.  Something about being a parent of a toddler gave me new confidence, though.  I was pretty sure someone could tell the children about attending a university one day in an age appropriate way.  Also, I sensed that the parent had a legitimate complaint.  I walked myself through the field trip again, remembering how most of the Black faces I had seen on campus had been maintenance workers.  Intuitively, I understood that if I were Black I would not receive an implicit message that “one day you can go to college here.”  If the children received any implicit message that day it was, “This is where the White people go to college, but maybe someday you can be a janitor or a cafeteria worker here.”  

I decided to try again, “I wonder if the parent would have liked to hear that message, that ‘one day you can go here.’ Otherwise, do the kids realize they could go here someday?”  Another team member responded, “Well, I do wonder if it isn’t a little bit cruel to have them here.  I mean, most of them won’t end up here.  And if they do, they will probably be athletes.”  

Again, I had no response, although I felt there was definitely some stereotyping going on.  Was it cruel to bring the families?  I thought about the parents I had met that day.  They seemed pleased to be on campus.  They spoke of how happy they were that their children were at this elementary school, and how happy they were with the teacher this year.   From what I could tell, they had high aspirations for their children’s education.  It is not a stretch to say that they may have perceived the field trip to be the equivalent of a campus tour put on by the university's recruitment office.  What had been communicated to them, I wondered?  Which goals and objectives had they heard?  Did the shape scavenger hunt seem patronizing, while the university students failed to include information about the campus and the university?  There did not seem to be satisfactory answers, but I suddenly knew my research focus had to change.  I had to answer these questions.  

Autobiography Pt. 7: Anti-racism

References

• Kozol, J. (2006). The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (Reprint.). Broadway.

Autobiography Pt. 3: English as a Second Language

I recently have been asked by a few people about how I became interested in antiracism.  In helping myself move forward, I realize that I need to look back.  Also, I hope to convey the sense that I too am on a journey; I am a work in progress.  This is part of my story. 

Eight o’clock in the morning is early on a Saturday and even more so if you are a college student.  And if on top of that, you are getting ready for a day of yard work, it can seem daunting.  I know from experience.  I had dragged myself out of bed on many a Saturday morning to go on volunteer work days over the years.  Now an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher, I was making sure my students from mainland China spent a morning raking leaves and cleaning gutters. 

I came onto the ESL scene at a time when “service-learning” was all the rage in higher education.  It was working its way down to K-12, and had only made a dent in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages).  However, I had taken an elective in my master’s degree courses that required me to design a course syllabus.  One of the options was to design a service-learning course, and through a series of events, that course design launched me into a full-time teaching position.   The problem came when none of the literature prepared me to teach disgruntled teenagers from China.   

As I have said before, my interest has always been Mexico.  I speak Spanish.  I found myself repeating that mantra internally through the rocky first, second, and third semesters I spent teaching classes comprised primarily of mainland Chinese young adults.  They resisted me at every turn, and I pushed right back.  I often said that it was like I was teaching English as Foreign Language in China, except I had skipped the “honeymoon stage” of culture shock, and skipped right to “disorientation” and “aggression.”  I was annoyed by a group of people I didn’t understand and who I felt didn’t understand me.  We had different goals and different worldviews.  This discord was only compounded in teacher workshops as we sat around “student bashing,” commiserating about our shared “problem children.”  I watched myself move from a progressive stance on language learning I had acquired in graduate school, to a more conservative, “Speak English!” approach. It wasn’t always that way, though. 

The glorious moments with the Chinese students came as I continued to teach my class on social justice with the service-learning component.  I was invigorated as I planned lessons about issues of social inequality.  In fact, I was getting an education right alongside my students, as we learned about stereotypes, racism, global warming, and urban development.  I even invited my old friends from non-profit organizations to give lectures about refugees, "White flight," and racial inequality.  They had been the ones to first teach me about the history of St. Louis in a different way than I had grown up with.  I learned how racism had left an indelible mark on the landscape and people.  My friends introduced me to authors who wrote about racial inequality, which led me to other books that I read in my free time, including Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? (Tatum, 2003)  and The Souls of Black Folks (Du Bois, 1973).  It really came home to me that I had to move in the opposite direction of history trends of White segregation, and I taught this to my students with a passion. 

Again, the practical application of this knowledge came slowly.  I remember one semester I had a very honest discussion with my students after we had reached a moment of impasse.  They were consistently failing to meet my expectations.  Many of them didn’t do the homework I assigned, they tended to not participate in class, or they didn’t show up at all.  At this point in my teaching career, I didn’t think to ask them about their perception of the class or the ESL program.  I was frustrated and I could tell they were, too. 

“Don’t you want to pass ESL and go to academic classes?” I asked in a bewildered tone. Silence. Finally, someone ventured a response.  “We don’t care about ESL.  We just care about business classes.” I retorted, “But you have to pass ESL if you want to go to business classes!”  Silence.  Again, someone bravely attempted a reply, “You are angry.  Do you hate Chinese students?”  Now I was dumbfounded.  “Of course not.  I don’t hate you. I guess I’m just frustrated because I thought Chinese students would be good students.  We have a stereotype here in the U.S. that Chinese students always work really hard, come to class every day, and get good grades.  And they are good at math.”  Now the students grinned broadly and a few chuckled.  “Well, of course we are not all good at math!” one student responded.  “We are very lazy,” another added.  “Well, I guess there are lazy people in every country,” I said.  “Right,” they agreed and smiled knowingly.  They seemed relieved that they were not the only ones who experiences discomfort as they encountered the “other,” especially if it was their teacher who was supposed to “know it all.” 

Interestingly, at this very same time we were learning in the class about the dangers of “positive” stereotypes.  Specifically, there is a view held by many Americans that Asians are the “model minority.” This is similar to belief that Asians (i.e. Chinese, Japanese, and Asian Indians) are “almost White” (Bonilla-Silva, 2003), which akin to saying they are “inferior, but better than the other people who are more inferior.” This monolithic view of Asians is just as damaging as negative stereotypes, since it reduces individuals to a caricature (Lee, 1994).  Also, the students who don’t fit the mold are treated as deviants, which is what I had unintentionally done to my students.  Further, it ignores extreme diversity within the group we label “Asian.”  My students had been born in mainland China, which is very different from being of Asian descent born in the United States.  Further, certain groups of immigrants from Asia tend to have high levels of education.  Other groups, especially refugees from Laos and Cambodia, who do not have very high levels of education and tend to have dark skin,  experience more intense levels of discrimination when they come to this country.  

My biases against speakers of other languages besides English, against Chinese people, and even against Asians were thrown into sharp relief at this time in my life. I was a trained ESL teacher, who was supposed to value all languages, but I didn't value anything I couldn't understand. For the first time in my life, I was in a situation where I could not speak the language of dominance.  Although I had been to other countries, I had been fluent in Spanish for a long time, and so I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t know what was going on.  I thought of myself as very multicultural, but I really only liked Spanish and Mexico.  I was generally uninterested in Chinese culture, and what I did know, I evaluated on the basis of my own cultural norms and values.  I slowly learned to see my Chinese students’ culture and language as beautiful and complex. While I mostly wince in pain as I recall the damage I must have done to those poor students, I am grateful for the lessons that they taught me.  

Autobiography Pt. 4: Sociolinguistics

References

• Bonilla-Silva, E. (2003). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield. 
• Du Bois, W. E. B. (1973). The souls of Black folk. Millwood, N.Y: Kraus-Thomson Organization Ltd. 
• Lee, S. J. (1994). Behind the model-minority stereotype: Voices of high- and low-achieving Asian American students. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 25, 413–429. 
• Tatum, B. D. (2003). “Why are all the Black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?”: And other conversations about race. New York, NY: Basic Books.