What is it like to teach black students?

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.

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 students to be screaming at
me at once.

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.

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
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
girls had lined up at the front of the
classroom and were convulsing to the
delight of the boys.

Many black people, especially
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 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 bastard. 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 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 philosophers’?” 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.

Aside from the police officers constantly on campus, 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 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 student 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.”

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 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.

I have been in parent-teacher conferences
that broke my heart: the child
pleading with his parents to take him
out of school; the parents convinced
their child’s fears are groundless. If you
love your child, show her you care—
not by giving her fancy vacations or a
car, but making her innocent years safe
and happy. Give her the gift of a not-heavily black
school.

Mr. Jackson now teaches at a majority-
white school.