[Bret L]

What is it Like to Teach Black Students?

by Christopher Jackson

"Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern
state.

The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black
schools,
but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like "chaotic"; or "poor
learning
environment" or "lack of discipline" do not capture what really
happens. There
is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children
and that is
what I will try to convey.

Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large
numbers,
and the first encounter can be a shock.

One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that
they
were loud. They had little conception of ordinary decorum. It was not
unusual
for five blacks to be screaming at me at once. Instead of calming down
and
waiting for a lull in the din to make their point—something that
occurs to even
the dimmest white students—blacks just tried to yell over each other.

It did no good to try to quiet them, and white women were particularly
inept at
trying. I sat in on one woman’s class as she begged the children to
pipe down.
They just yelled louder so their voices would carry over hers.

Many of my black students would repeat themselves over and over again—
just louder. It was as if they suffered from Tourette syndrome. They
seemed
to have no conception of waiting for an appropriate time to say
something.
They would get ideas in their heads and simply had to shout them out.
I might be
leading a discussion on government and suddenly be interrupted: "We
gotta get
more Democrats! Clinton, she good!" The student may seem content with
that
outburst but two minutes later, he would suddenly start yelling again:
"Clinton
good!"

Anyone who is around young blacks will probably get a constant diet of
rap music.
Blacks often make up their own jingles, and it was not uncommon for 15
black
boys to swagger into a classroom, bouncing their shoulders and jiving
back.

They were yelling back and forth, rapping 15 different sets of words
in the same harsh, rasping dialect. The words were almost invariably a
childish form of boasting: "Who got
dem shine rim, who got dem shine shoe, who got dem shine grill (gold
and silver
dental caps)?" The amateur rapper usually ends with a claim—in the
crudest
terms imaginable—that all womankind is sexually devoted to him. For
whatever
reason, my students would often groan instead of saying a particular
word, as in,
"She suck dat aaahhhh (think of a long grinding groan), she f**k dat
aaaahhhh,
she lick dat aaaahhh."

So many black girls dance in the hall, in the classroom, on the
chairs, next to the chairs, under
the chairs, everywhere. Once I took a call on my cell phone and had to
step
outside of class. I was away about two minutes but when I got back the
black
girls had lined up at the front of the classroom and were convulsing
to the
delight of the boys.

Many black people, especially black women, are enormously fat. Some
are
so fat I had to arrange special seating to accommodate their bulk. I
am not saying
there are no fat white students—there are—but it is a matter of
numbers and
attitudes. Many black girls simply do not care that they are fat.
There are plenty
of white anorexics, but I have never met or heard of a black anorexic.

"Black women be big Mr. Jackson," my students would explain.

"Is it okay in the black community to be a little overweight?" I ask.
Two obese black girls in front of my desk begin to dance, "You know
dem boys lak juicy fruit, Mr. Jackson." "Juicy" is a colorful black
expression
for the buttocks.

Blacks, on average, are the most directly critical people I have ever
met: "Dat shirt stupid.
Yo’ kid a *******. Yo’ lips big." Unlike whites, who tread gingerly
around the
subject of race, they can be brutally to the point. Once I needed to
send a student
to the office to deliver a message. I asked for volunteers, and
suddenly you
would think my classroom was a bastion of civic engagement. Thirty
dark hands
shot into the air. My students loved to leave the classroom and slack
off, even
if just for a few minutes, away from the eye of white authority. I
picked a light-skinned
boy to deliver the message. One very black student was indignant: "You
pick da half-breed." And immediately other blacks take up the cry, and
half
a dozen mouths are screaming, "He half-breed."
For decades, the country has been lamenting the poor academic
performance
of blacks and there is much to lament. There is no question, however,
that many blacks come to school with a serious handicap that is not
their fault.
At home they have learned a dialect that is almost a different
language. Blacks
not only mispronounce words; their grammar is often wrong. When a
black
wants to ask, "Where is the bathroom?" he may actually say "Whar da
badroom
be?" Grammatically, this is the equivalent of "Where the bathroom is?"
And
this is the way they speak in high school. Students write the way they
speak, so
this is the language that shows up in written assignments.

It is true that some whites face a similar handicap. They speak with
what I would call a "country"; accent that is hard to reproduce but
results in
sentences such as "I’m gonna gemme a Coke." Some of these country
whites
had to learn correct pronunciation and usage. The difference is that
most whites
overcome this handicap and learn to speak correctly; many blacks do
not.

Most of the blacks I taught simply had no interest in academic
subjects. I
taught history, and students would often say they didn’t want to do an
assignment
or they didn’t like history because it was all about white people. Of
course, this
was "diversity" history, in which every cowboy’s black cook got a
special page
on how he contributed to winning the West, but black children still
found it
inadequate. So I would throw up my hands and assign them a project on
a
real, historical black person. My favorite was Marcus Garvey. They had
never
heard of him, and I would tell them to research him, but they never
did. They
didn’t care and they didn’t want to do any work.

Anyone who teaches blacks soon learns that they have a completely
different
view of government from whites. Once I decided to fill 25 minutes by
having students write about one thing the government should do to
improve
America. I gave this question to three classes totaling about 100
students,
approximately 80 of whom were black. My few white students came back
with
generally "conservative& ideas. "We need to cut off people who don’t
work,"
was the most common suggestion. Nearly every black gave a variation on
the theme of "We need more government services."

My students had only the vaguest notion of who pays for government
services. For them, it was like a magical piggy bank that never goes
empty. One
black girl was exhorting the class on the need for more social
services and I
kept trying to explain that people, real live people, are taxed for
the money to
pay for those services. "Yeah, it come from whites," she finally said.
"They
stingy anyway."

"Many black people make over $50,000 dollars a year and you would
also be taking away from your own people," I said.

She had an answer to that: "Dey half breed." The class agreed. I let
the
subject drop.

Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens. On career
day, one
girl explained to the class that she was going to have lots of
children and get fat
checks from the government. No one in the class seemed to have any
objection
to this career choice.

Surprising attitudes can come out in class discussion. We were talking
about
the crimes committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I
brought up the
rape of a young girl in the bathroom of the Superdome. A majority of
my students
believed this was a horrible crime but a few took it lightly. One
black boy
spoke up without raising his hand: "Dat no big deal. They thought they
is gonna
die so they figured they have some fun. Dey jus’ wanna have a fun
time; you
know what I’m sayin’?" A few black heads nodded in agreement.

My department head once asked all the teachers to get a response from
all
students to the following question: "Do you think it is okay to break
the law if it
will benefit you greatly?" By then, I had been teaching for a while
and was not
surprised by answers that left a young, liberal, white woman colleague
aghast.
"Yeah" was the favorite answer. As one student explained, "Get dat
green."

There is a level of conformity among blacks that whites would find
hard to
believe. They like one kind of music: rap. They will
vote for one political party: Democrat. They dance
one way, speak one way, are loud the same way,
and fail their exams in the same way. Of course, there
are exceptions but they are rare.

Whites are different. Some like country music,
others heavy metal, some prefer pop, and still others,
God forbid, enjoy rap music. They have different associations, groups,
almost
ideologies. There are jocks, nerds, preppies, and hunters. Blacks are
all—
well—black, and they are quick to let other blacks know when they
deviate
from the norm.
One might object that there are important group differences among
blacks that a white man simply cannot detect. I have done my best to
find them, but so
far as I can tell, they dress the same, talk the same, think the same.
Certainly, they
form rival groups, but the groups are not different in any discernible
way. There
simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from
each other
as white "nerds," "hunters," or "Goths," for example.

How the world looks to blacks One point on which all blacks agree
is that everything is "racis’." This is one message of liberalism they
have
absorbed completely. Did you do your homework? "Na, homework racis’."
Why did you get an F on the test? "Test racis’."

I was trying to teach a unit on British philosophers and the first
thing the students
noticed about Bentham, Hobbes, and Locke was "Dey all white! Where da
black philosopher a’?" I tried to explain there were no blacks in
eighteenth century
Britain. You can probably guess what they said to that: "Dat racis’!"
One student accused me of deliberately failing him on a test because I
didn’t like black people.

"Do you think I really hate black people?"
"Yeah."
"Have I done anything to make you
feel this way? How do you know?"
"You just do."
"Why do you say that?"

He just smirked, looked out the window, and sucked air through his
teeth.
Perhaps this was a regional thing, but the blacks often sucked air
through their
teeth as a wordless expression of disdain or hostility.

My students were sometimes unable to see the world except through the
lens
of their own blackness. I had a class that was host to a German
exchange
student. One day he put on a Power Point presentation with famous
German landmarks
as well as his school and family.

From time to time during the presentation, blacks would scream, "Where
da
black folk?!" The exasperated German tried several times to explain
that there
were no black people where he lived in Germany. The students did not
believe
him. I told them Germany is in Europe, where white people are from,
and Africa
is where black people are from. They insisted that the German student
was
racist, and deliberately refused to associate with blacks.

Blacks are keenly interested in their own racial characteristics. I
have
learned, for example, that some blacks have "good hair." Good hair is
black
parlance for black-white hybrid hair. Apparently, it is less kinky,
easier to
style, and considered more attractive. Blacks are also proud of light
skin.
Imagine two black students shouting insults across the room. One is
dark
but slim; the other light and obese. The dark one begins the exchange:
"You
fat, Ridario!" Ridario smiles, doesn’t deign to look at his detractor,
shakes his head like a
wobbling top, and says, "You wish you light skinned."

They could go on like this, repeating the same insults over and over.

My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanic immigrants.
They
would vent their feelings so crudely that our department strongly
advised us
never to talk about immigration in class in case the principal or some
outsider
might overhear.

Whites were "racis’," of course, but they thought of us at least as
Americans.
Not the Mexicans. Blacks have a certain, not necessarily hostile
understanding of
white people. They know how whites act, and it is clear they believe
whites
are smart and are good at organizing things. At the same time, they
probably
suspect whites are just putting on an act when they talk about
equality, as if
it is all a sham that makes it easier for whites to control blacks.
Blacks want a
bigger piece of the American pie. I’m convinced that if it were up to
them
they would give whites a considerably smaller piece than whites get
now, but
they would give us something. They wouldn’t give Mexicans anything.

What about black boys and white girls? No one is supposed to
notice this or talk about it but it is glaringly obvious: Black
boys are obsessed with white girls. I’ve witnessed the following
drama countless times. A black boy saunters up to a white
girl. The cocky black dances around her, not really in a menacing
way. It’s more a shuffle than a threat. As he bobs and
shuffles he asks, "When you gonna go wit’ me?"

There are two kinds of reply. The more confident white
girl gets annoyed, looks away from the black and shouts, "I don’t
wanna
go out with you!" The more demure girl will look at her feet and
mumble
a polite excuse but ultimately say no.

There is only one response from the black boy: "You racis’." Many girls
—all
too many—actually feel guilty because they do not want to date blacks.
Most
white girls at my school stayed away from blacks, but a few,
particularly the
ones who were addicted to drugs, fell in with them.
There is something else that is striking about blacks. They seem to
have
no sense of romance, of falling in love. What brings men and women
together is
sex, pure and simple, and there is a crude openness about this. There
are many degenerate
whites, of course, but some of my white students were capable of real
devotion and tenderness, emotions that seemed absent from blacks—
especially
the boys.

Black schools are violent and the few whites who are too poor to
escape
are caught in the storm. The violence is astonishing, not so much that
it happens,
but the atmosphere in which it happens. Blacks can be smiling,
seemingly perfectly
content with what they are doing, having a good time, and then,
suddenly
start fighting. It’s uncanny. Not long ago, I was walking through the
halls
and a group of black boys were walking in front of me. All of a sudden
they started fighting with another group in the hallway.

Blacks are extraordinarily quick to take offense. Once I accidentally
scuffed
a black boy’s white sneaker with my shoe. He immediately rubbed his
body
up against mine and threatened to attack me. I stepped outside the
class and had
a security guard escort the student to the office. It was unusual for
students
to threaten teachers physically this way, but among themselves, they
were quick to fight for similar reasons.

The real victims are the unfortunate whites caught in this. They are
always
in danger and their educations suffer. White weaklings are
particularly susceptible,
but mostly to petty violence. They may be slapped or get a couple of
kicks
when they are trying to open a bottom locker. Typically, blacks save
the hard, serious violence for each other.

There was a lot of promiscuous sex among my students and this led to
violence. Black girls were constantly fighting over black boys. It was
not uncommon
to see two girls literally ripping each other’s hair out with a police
officer in the middle trying to break up the fight. The black boy they
were fighting over would be standing by with a smile,
enjoying the show he had created. For reasons I cannot explain, boys
seldom
fought over girls.

Pregnancy was common among the blacks, though many black girls were
so fat I could not tell the difference. I don’t know how many girls
got abortions,
but when they had the baby they usually stayed in school and had their
own parents look after the child. The school did not offer daycare.

Security guards are everywhere in black schools—we had one on every
hall. They also sat in on unruly classes and escorted students to the
office. They
were unarmed, but worked closely with the three city police officers
who were
constantly on duty.

There was a lot of drug-dealing at my school. This was a good way to
make a fair amount of money but it also gave boys power over girls who
wanted drugs. An addicted girl—black or white—became the plaything of
anyone
who could get her drugs.

One of my students was a notorious drug dealer. Everyone knew it. He
was
19 years old and in eleventh grade. Once he got a score of three out
of 100 on a
test. He had been locked up four times since he was 13.

One day, I asked him, "Why do you come to school?"

He wouldn’t answer. He just looked out the window, smiled, and sucked
air
through his teeth. His friend Yidarius ventured an explanation: "He
get dat
green and get dem females."

"What is the green?" I asked. "Money or dope?" "Both," said Yidarius
with a smile.

A very fat black interrupted from across the room: "We get dat lunch,"
Mr.
Jackson. "We gotta get dat lunch and brickfuss."; He means the free
breakfast
and lunch poor students get every day. "****, we know’d you be lovin’
brickfuss!"; shouts another student.

Some readers may believe that I have drawn a cruel caricature of black
students. After all, according to official figures some 85 percent of
them graduate.
It would be instructive to know how many of those scraped by with
barely a
C- record. They go from grade to grade and they finally get their
diplomas
because there is so much pressure on teachers to push them through. It
saves
money to move them along, the school looks good, and the teachers look
good.

Many of these children should have been failed, but the system would
crack under
their weight if they were all held back.

How did my experiences make me feel about blacks? Ultimately, I lost
sympathy for them. In so many ways they seem to make their own beds.
There they were in an integrationist’s fantasy—in the same classroom
with
white students, eating the same lunch, using the same bathrooms,
listening to
the same teachers—and yet the blacks fail while the whites pass.
One tragic outcome among whites who have been teaching for too long
is that it can engender something close to hatred. One teacher I knew
gave up
fast food—not for health reasons but because where he lived most fast-
food
workers were black. He had enough of blacks on the job. This was an
extreme
example but years of frustration can take their toll. Many of my white
colleagues
with any experience were well on their way to that state of mind.

There is an unutterable secret among teachers: Almost all realize that
blacks
do not respond to traditional white instruction. Does that put the lie
to environmentalism?
Not at all. It is what brings about endless, pointless innovation
that is supposed to bring blacks up to the white level. The solution
is more diversity—or put
more generally, the solution is change. Change is an almost holy word
in education,
and you can fail a million times as long as you keep changing. That is
why
liberals keep revamping the curriculum and the way it is taught. For
example,
teachers are told that blacks need hands-on instruction and more group
work.

Teachers are told that blacks are more vocal and do not learn through
reading
and lectures. The implication is that they have certain traits that
lend themselves
to a different kind of teaching.

Whites have learned a certain way for centuries but it just doesn’t
work with
blacks. Of course, this implies racial differences but if pressed,
most liberal
teachers would say different racial learning styles come from some
indefinable
cultural characteristic unique to blacks. Therefore, schools must
change,
America must change. But into what? How do you turn quantum physics
into
hands-on instruction or group work? No one knows, but we must keep
changing
until we find something that works.

Public school has certainly changed since anyone reading this was a
student.
I have a friend who teaches elementary school, and she tells me that
every week
the students get a new diversity lesson, shipped in fresh from some
bureaucrat’s
office in Washington or the state capital. She showed me the materials
for one week: a large poster, about the size of a forty-two inch
flat-screen television. It shows an utterly diverse group—I mean
diverse: handicapped, Muslim, Jewish, effeminate, poor, rich,
brown, slightly brown, yellow, etc.—sitting at a table, smiling
gaily, accomplishing some undefined task. The poster comes with
a sheet of questions the teacher is supposed to ask. One might be:
"These
kids sure look different, but they look happy. Can you tell me which
one in
the picture is an American?"

Some eight-year-old, mired in ignorance, will point to a white child
like
himself. "That one."

The teacher reads from the answer, conveniently printed along with the
question. "No, Billy, all these children are Americans. They are just
as American
as you."

The children get a snack, and the poster goes up on the wall until
another
one comes a week later. This is what happens at predominately white,
middle-class, elementary schools everywhere. Elementary school
teachers love All
of the Colors of the Race, by award-winning children’s poet Arnold
Adoff.

These are some of the lines they read to the children: "Mama is
chocolate …
Daddy is vanilla … Me (sic) is better … It is a new color. It is a new
flavor. For
love. Sometimes blackness seems too black for me, and whiteness is too
sickly
pale; and I wish every one were golden. Remember: long ago before
people
moved and migrated, and mixed and matched … there was one people: one
color, one race. The colors are flowing from what was before me to
what will
be after. All the colors."

Teaching as a career
It may come as a surprise after what I have written, but my
experiences have
given me a deep appreciation for teaching as a career. It offers a
stable, middle-class
life but comes with the capacity to make real differences in the lives
of
children. In our modern, atomized world children often have very
little communication
with adults—especially, or even, with their parents—so there is
potential
for a real transaction between pupil and teacher, disciple and master.
A rewarding relationship can grow up between an exceptional,
interested
student and his teacher. I have stayed in my classroom with a group of
students
discussing ideas and playing chess until the janitor kicked us out. I
was the
old gentleman, imparting my history, culture, personal loves and
triumphs,
defeats and failures to young kinsman. Sometimes I fancied myself
Tyrtaeus,
the Spartan poet, who counseled the youth to honor and loyalty. I
never had
this kind intimacy with a black student, and I know of no other white
teacher
who did.

Teaching can be fun. For a certain kind of person it is exhilarating
to map
out battles on chalkboards, and teach heroism. It is rewarding to
challenge
liberal prejudices, to leave my mark on these children, but what I
aimed for with
my white students I could never achieve with the blacks.

There is a kind of child whose look can melt your heart: some working-
class
castaway, in and out of foster homes, often abused, who is
nevertheless almost
an angel. Your heart melts for these children, this refuse of the
modern world.

Many white students possess a certain innocence; their cheeks still
blush.
Try as I might, I could not get the blacks to care one bit about
Beethoven
or Sherman’s march to the sea, or Tyrtaeus, or Oswald Spengler, or
even
liberals like John Rawls, or their own history. They cared about
nothing I
tried to teach them. When this goes on year after year it chokes the
soul out
of a teacher, destroys his pathos, and sends him guiltily searching
for The Bell
Curve on the Internet.

Blacks break down the intimacy that can be achieved in the classroom,
and
leave you convinced that that intimacy is really a form of kinship.
Without
intending to, they destroy what is most beautiful—whether it be your
belief in
human equality, your daughter’s innocence, or even the state of the
hallway.

Just last year I read on the bathroom stall the words "F**k
Whitey." Not two feet away, on the same stall, was a small swastika.

The National Council for the Social Studies, the leading authority on
social
science education in the United States, urges teachers to inculcate
such values
as equality of opportunity, individual property rights, and a
democratic form
of government. Even if teachers could inculcate this milquetoast
ideology into
whites, liberalism is doomed because so many non-whites are not
receptive to
education of any kind beyond the merest basics.

It is impossible to get them to care about such abstractions
as property rights or democratic citizenship. They do not see much
further than
the fact that you live in a big house and "we in da pro-jek." Of
course, there are a
few loutish whites who will never think past their next meal and a few
sensitive
blacks for whom anything is possible, but no society takes on the
characteristics
of its exceptions.

Once I asked my students, "What do you think of the Constitution?"
"It white," one slouching black rang out. The class began to laugh.
And I
caught myself laughing along with them, laughing while Pompeii’s
volcano simmers,
while the barbarians swell around the Palatine, while the country I
love,
and the job I love, and the community I love become dimmer by the day.

I read a book by an expatriate Rhodesian who visited Zimbabwe not
too many years ago. Traveling with a companion, she stopped at a store
along
the highway. A black man materialized next to her car window. "Job,
boss, (I)
work good, boss," he pleaded. "You give job."

"What happened to your old job?" the expatriate white asked. The black
man replied in the straightforward manner of his race: "We drove out
the whites. No more jobs. You give
job."

At some level, my students understand the same thing. One day I asked
the bored, black faces staring back at me. "What would happen if all
the
white people in America disappeared tomorrow?"

"We screwed," a young, pitch-black boy screamed back. The rest of the
blacks laughed.

I have had children tell me to my face as they struggled with an
assignment. "I
cain’t do dis," Mr. Jackson. "I black."

The point is that human beings are not always rational. It is in the
black man’s
interest to have whites in Zimbabwe but he drives them out and
starves. Most
whites do not think black Americans could ever do anything so
irrational.
They see blacks on television smiling, fighting evil whites, embodying
white values. But the real black is not on television, and you pull
your purse
closer when you see him, and you lock the car doors when he swaggers
by
with his pants hanging down almost to his knees.

For those of you with children, better a smaller house in a white
district than
a fancy one near a black school."