Teaching Black Kids – The Uphill Battle

I just read a gripping (for me) article by a white teacher on the challenges of teaching black kids. I worked hard, emotionally, to get through the whole article (see link at the end of this post). My difficulty was two-fold. The author, speaking from his own experiences in the southeast US, largely failed to consider factors beyond the superficial. He spoke of behavior, not of what was underlying and driving it. However, I also realized that his job was to teach subject matter, not raise somebody else’s kids, or save a race. On the flip-side, so many of his words hit home, from my own classroom experiences and knowledge, that to stop reading would have denied the true depth and accuracy of the issues of the black classroom and community.

Last year I spent quite a bit of time in an all-black urban high school class, discussing current issues. In keeping with a nearly 60% drop-out rate for boys, my experiences were predominantly with junior/senior black girls. Like the author of the article, I found the students poor command of English grammar, spelling and structure as a big impediment to communicating and teaching them anything. Their conversation dynamic, loud and punctuated with interruption, precluded finding commonality. Simply stated, discussing high school-level/adult ideas through elementary-level dynamics results in elementary conclusions and learning.

Even more challenging is the simplistic and contorted view of racism and its contribution, where it has become the label for any idea, person, or event of which black kids wish to avoid – for whatever childish reason. Try to teach Newton’s laws of gravity and as soon as the kids find out that Isaac Newton was white, his contribution becomes racist and not worth their effort to learn. The kid who sees the value in separating race from subject matter runs the danger of getting Jones’d – verbally ridiculed – if not for ‘acting white’, at least for ‘accepting white’. These same kids, in fits of keepin’-it-real honesty, will tell you that without whites their world stops turning.

Oppositional culture has a headlock on a significant portion of black youth. The rap music industry, with the ghosts of rappers Biggie and Tupac (pictured), is the unofficial dissemination instrument and arbiter of this insidious unwavering dynamic. I take issue with a lot of what this teacher says on the surface (here), but I take almost no issue with the underlying vectors he opens onto black youth and oppositional culture. He suffers the superficial, but he is not blowing smoke. His fix as one person – to get out – is no fix for those kids he left behind, and I cannot fault him one bit. This is not what he signed up for, nor does there seem to be a plan for addressing it.

James C. Collier

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