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A White Teacher Speaks Out

What is it like to teach black students?

by Christopher Jackson

I recall a bad joke that explains, in crude terms, the relationship between
blacks and whites in America today:

“What do you call a white man surrounded by 20 blacks?”

“Coach.”

“What do you call a white man surrounded by 1,000 blacks?”

“Warden.”

I might add another line to this joke: “What do you call a white man
surrounded by 30 blacks?”

“Teacher.”

Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a
southeastern state. I took the job because I wasn’t knowledgeable about race
at the time, and black schools aren’t picky. The school offered me a job and
suddenly I was in darkest Africa. Except, I wasn’t in Africa; I was in
America.

Blacks outnumbered whites about five to one at this school and there were
hardly any Hispanics. Some of my classes were all-black, or nearly so,
because the gifted and advanced classes siphoned off most of the white
students and I taught regular classes. There were some black teachers but
the majority were white.

Most of the blacks I taught were from the area. They did not tend to travel
very much, and I am sure there are regional differences in the ways in which
blacks speak and act. However, I suspect my experiences were generally
typical, certainly for Southern blacks.

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.

Noise

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 white 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.

Blacks are loud. It was not unusual for five students to be screaming at
once.
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 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
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.”

Many rap lyrics are crude but some are simply incomprehensible. Not so long
ago, there was a popular rap called “Tat it up.” I heard the words from
hundreds of black mouths for weeks. Some of the lyrics are:

Tat tat tat it up.

ATL tat it up.

New York tat it up.

Tat tat tat it up.

Rap is one of the most degenerate things to have come out of our country,
and it is tragic that it has infected whites to the extent it has.

These are their heroes.

Black women love to dance — in a way white people might call gyrating. They
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 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 totalling 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.”