“Snapshots Of A Racist Teacher”: What A Principal’s Bigoted Rant Shows Us About American Education
Over the weekend, Nancy Gordeuk, the founder and director of TNT Academy, a small private school in the Atlanta area, made racially offensive remarks at the school’s graduation ceremony.
After some confusion in the program, many in attendance thought the graduation had concluded, when it became clear that Gordeuk had neglected to let the valedictorian give his speech. Gordeuk tried to corral the audience back into the hall to finish the ceremony, but when that didn’t work, she yelled, “Look who’s leaving. All the Black people.” Immediately, all of the Black graduates got up and marched in a single file line out of the ceremony, while the white valedictorian cringed in embarrassment.
The utter outrageousness of Gordeuk’s outburst is only the most obvious of things to say about her remarks. I am also struck by the swiftness with which she moved to shame a whole demographic of people because she could not get them to respond to her requests. Though racial unity remains elusive for Black people — as well it perhaps should — a sense of linked fate does inhere in much of our political analysis. How we feel about this sense of shared destiny varies from person to person. But one of the quickest ways to raise the ire of Black people is to suggest that “all the Blacks” should or shouldn’t do any particular thing.
Still, that desire to shame Black people into submission is at the heart of so much public discourse about unruly Black people who cannot seem to follow simple instructions. Because Gordeuk said such inappropriate remarks in a roomful of children clad in graduation attire, among their doting family members, it is clear to see just how out of line her remarks are. But these malicious sentiments about unruly Black people who need to be shamed into doing the right thing have been pervasive in social discourse of late, particularly in light of continuing Black Lives Matter protests throughout the country.
Koritha Mitchell, associate professor of English at Ohio State, has written that Black people should respond to these long histories of white shaming tactics with what she terms a “critical demeanor of shamelessness.” Such a demeanor allows us to “recognize not only the power of dominant assumptions but also how little they have to do with you and the communities to which you belong.”
This principal had hoped to make Black attendees stay. Instead, after her remarks they left, and they did so shamelessly. We need to walk out on racist acts far more often.
This act of walking out, which the students did in community with family and friends who probably played a critical role in their educational success, also points to all the times that they perhaps could not walk out while learning in a school environment run by a woman with such antagonistic racial views. No child should have to learn in a racist environment. But far too many Black and Latino children do learn in such environments.
On the one hand, TNT Academy seems to be a kind of school of last resort for children who struggle in traditional academic environments. So for many students, graduating from this school culminates a challenging, but ultimately successful academic history. Starting such a school is to Gordeuk’s credit. But the nobility of that effort is deeply undercut by the fact that she is a rabid racist, who insulted her students and their families at their graduation. Many Black people can attest that we owe much of our educational histories and successes to racist educators.
This has certainly been true for me.
The sixth grade was the second time that a fellow student called me a nigger. This time it was over a scuffle at the water fountain. I may, in fact, have been in the wrong in the scuffle, over who was first in line at the fountain. That did not, of course, make me a nigger.
The mother of the child who called me that term taught at my school. Perhaps that was why our Black principal opted not to take more severe disciplinary action against that student, my classmate, her son. Years later, I ran into that teacher and her husband, my classmate’s parents, while I was out on a date. It was apparent when I met them that the father deeply despised Black people. When you grow up in the South, you learn very quickly how to assess these matters. Racist sentiments inhere in subtle gestures, the way that people avert their eyes, refusing to look at you, or conversely, stare at you with a steely disregard and a refusal to speak, that makes you begin to wonder whether there is something on your face or your body that shouldn’t be there.
Your skin is the thing of course –the source of their discomfort, the thing they hope will become the source of your discomfort.
I knew then that my initial impression of my classmate had been right — the N-word rolled off his tongue, because it was most probably in frequent use in his home.
Gordeuk’s son took to social media to defend his mother, and could not resist dropping a few N-words in her defense. It seems, given his clear lack of compunction about the public use of that term, that he uses this term readily and with ease. For Gordeuk’s part, she blamed the devil, who was “in the house and came out from [her] mouth.” If the devil exists, he is assuredly a white supremacist. But Gordeuk cannot get away with blaming her racism – and she did admit to her own racism — on the devil.
We must stop accepting an education system where an exceptional few Black students excel because of the grace of God, and the others are left to the devilish schemes of racist madwomen. That’s far too fine of a point to put on a more complicated, structural problem. Racism is never just a problem of individual attitudes — for this woman also created a school environment that helped these children to successfully graduate, after they didn’t fare well in traditional school environments. But given the virulence of her racism, it is easy to surmise that the school also has a racially hostile climate.
And herein lies the challenge. Many of my best teachers growing up were veritable racists. My sixth grade math teacher — I hated sixth grade — also owned a small clothing store in town. And Black people generally never shopped there because she watched Black customers like a hawk and was as unpleasant as possible when they came into the store to shop. In class, she mocked me each day, until I was reduced to tears. I never told my mother, for fear that I must be doing something wrong, or, conversely, fear that my mother would go and wreck shop.
From the fifth grade forward, there was never a year when my mother did not have to talk to a teacher or school administrator about racially charged remarks. Not one year. But I also remember that in almost every case, save fifth, sixth and eighth grade, I had positive interactions with the very same teachers who made inappropriate comments to me.
Sitting all these years later with the complicated reality that I’m educationally indebted to both benign and malignant racists alike, what is clear is that no child should have to navigate this kind of educational world. The incessant mocking from my teacher did not kill my spirit. But it was designed to do so — designed to extinguish the fire of a precocious Black girl, who always knew the answers and got them right.
I was one of the lucky ones. But the entire point of a good education is that your life chances should no longer be left up to luck.
It would be easy to dismiss Nancy Gordeuk as an especial and enduring breed of Southern racist, but what should we make of her son, who certainly is in a different generation than she? And what does it mean that her antics, while over-the-top, don’t seem drastically different from my own experiences more than 20 years ago?
Our children do not just need good textbooks and comfortable buildings in which to learn. They also need culturally competent, anti-racist educators who do not shame them and their families. We must also stop looking at Gordeuk as a relic of a racist past, since American racism is still very much present, and since many Black children will tell you about the range of racist aggressions and micro-aggressions they experience from educators each day.
I am glad the students of TNT Academy walked out on their graduation day. In doing so, they rejected the implicit lie of their own inferiority that Gordeuk’s comments tried to shame them into believing. They recognized the lie, and instead embraced the truth of their own value and capacity for achievement.
Down South, we say: Tell the truth and shame the devil. The truth is, Gordeuk’s shaming tactics didn’t work. Her students, heads held high, have commenced indeed.
By: Brittney Cooper, Contributing Writer, Salon, May 13, 2015
“Ben Carson Is In Danger Of Losing All Respect”: He Can Only Lose In This Campaign, And More Than Just The Republican Primary
Over decades of a brilliant career as a brain surgeon, Dr. Ben Carson attracted legions of admirers — black, white and brown; liberal, moderate and conservative; fundamentalist Christian and agnostic. His story is the stuff of legend, the awe-inspiring tale of a poor black boy in Detroit who overcame daunting obstacles and vaulted to the very top of his profession.
Given that his profession was pediatric neurosurgery, black Americans were particularly proud. Carson, who was the first surgeon to successfully separate conjoined twins attached at the head, stood as stark repudiation of invidious stereotypes about black intellectual capacity. His memoir, Gifted Hands, has been passed through countless black households.
But the good doctor’s foray into Republican presidential politics threatens to become his epitaph, to overshadow — perhaps even to overwhelm — his academic and surgical accomplishments. He will likely be remembered as the GOP’s latest black mascot, a court jester, a minstrel show. He’ll be the Herman Cain of 2016.
Clearly, Carson’s chances of winning the Republican nomination for president stand at less than zero. No matter how many cheers he attracts at conservative gabfests, no matter how many of his bumperstickers appear on the vehicles of true believers, no matter how many Fox News pundits suggest he’s a viable candidate, he won’t come close to becoming the GOP standard bearer.
Nor should he. He is dangerously unqualified for the presidency — a political novice who is happily ignorant of policy, both foreign and domestic, and contemptuous of religious pluralism and personal liberties.
Carson catapulted to stardom in the ultraconservative firmament in 2013, when he addressed the National Prayer Breakfast with a speech in which he lashed out at the Affordable Care Act as President Obama sat nearby. Though the breakfast has a long history of nonpartisanship, Carson chose to criticize many of the policies that the president supports, including progressive taxation.
That was enough to cause conservatives to swoon. Since Obama’s election, Republicans have been sensitive to charges that their small tent of aging voters has become a bastion of white resentment, a cauldron of bigotry, nativism and fear of the other. They want to show that their fierce resistance to all things Obama has nothing to do with race.
That promotes a special affection for black conservatives who are willing to viciously criticize the president. As with Cain before him, Carson garners the most enthusiastic cheers from conservative audiences when he’s excoriating Obama, the most rapturous applause when he seems to absolve them of charges of bigotry. Why would Carson trade on his reputation to become their token?
I’ve little doubt that his conservative impulses are genuine. He grew up Seventh-Day Adventist, a conservative religious tradition. Moreover, he has adopted a view popular among white conservatives: that black Democrats give short shrift to traditional values such as thrift, hard work and sacrifice. (Hasn’t Carson ever heard any of Obama’s riffs excoriating deadbeat dads and promoting discipline, scholarship and parental involvement in their children’s lives?)
But Carson hardly represents the long and honorable tradition of black conservatism in America. Starting with the father of that movement, Booker T. Washington, its adherents have had a healthy appreciation for the reality of racism in America. Carson, however, thinks Obamacare “really (is) the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery. And … it is slavery in a way.” Washington and his peers, who knew better, would never have countenanced such nonsense.
Moreover, black conservatism has promoted self-reliance, but it hasn’t been a font of right-wing intolerance and know-nothingism. Carson, for his part, has dismissed evolution (giving his former colleagues at Johns Hopkins heartburn); he has compared homosexuality to bestiality; and he has spurned the First Amendment’s separation of church and state.
Given the ultraconservative politics of GOP primary voters, those extreme positions may help Carson in the early campaign season. But those views also guarantee that mainstream Republican leaders and their donors will flock elsewhere, seeking to find an experienced, broadly appealing and electable candidate.
Carson can only lose in this campaign — and more than just the Republican primary. He also stands to lose his place as one of the nation’s most admired men.
By: Cynthia Tucker, a Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, May 9, 2015
“A Quintessentially American Experience”: Black History Is More Than Just One Month
Is it already that time of year?
It must be: Black lecturers are busy on the speaking circuit; black authors have been pushed to the front shelves of bookstores; schoolteachers, black, white and brown, are teaching their charges how George Washington Carver, ah, invented the peanut.
It’s Black History Month, that annual tribute to the accomplishments of black Americans, whose ingenuity, perseverance, creativity and fortitude made America what it is today. But there is a problem with the yearly observance: It manages to make black history seem a thing apart, a separate reality, a slender appendix to the encyclopedia of American history.
It isn’t. Black history is American history — baked and bricked into the nation’s foundations. And that’s how it ought to be taught, right in the same volumes as the Boston Tea Party, the settling of the Old West, the defeat of the Nazis. Black Americans were part of each of those monumental chapters, as well as countless less-celebrated episodes.
It’s time to retire the annual celebration, as outdated now as rotary phones, segregated drinking fountains, and the term “Negro.” Ask yourself this: Will the current occupant of the White House — president of all of the United States, not merely of its black citizens — be celebrated only in February?
Carter Woodson, a black historian, started Negro History Week in 1926, when racism was still raw, public accommodations segregated and the Ku Klux Klan a powerhouse. The notion that black Americans were intellectually inferior and that they should be assigned a second- (or third- or fourth-) class status was taken for granted by most whites, including the leadership classes.
Woodson saw that black contributions to American history “were overlooked, ignored, and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them.” He began a systematic study of black history and chose a week in February to commemorate it — timed to honor the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln, Feb. 12, and famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Feb. 14.
Happily, much has changed since then. Monuments stand to honor the accomplishments of black Americans, from the Buffalo Soldiers who served in segregated cavalry units after the Civil War, to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who became the first black American to be commemorated on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
Movies celebrate the bravery of the Tuskegee Airmen, who persevered at a time when most whites didn’t believe black men were capable of becoming fighter pilots. There is even a Smithsonian-run National Museum of African-American History and Culture, designed to “educate generations to come,” under construction on the National Mall.
(Yes, there is irony in the notion of a separate black history museum. But founding director Lonnie Bunch has promised that it will allow visitors to delve “deeply into the African-American experience and understand that … it is a quintessentially American experience.”)
Many black Americans would argue that Black History Month is still necessary in a land where racism, though waning, continues to exert a peculiar power. There are its blatant manifestations, evident in police brutality and in prison populations. Then there are its more subtle signs, such as research into hiring practices that shows applicants with “black” names are less likely to get jobs, regardless of their stellar résumés.
Moreover, the dominant culture remains reluctant to acknowledge the essential Americanness of its black members. We remain exotic, the other, ethnics. A vocal minority of white citizens continues to insist that President Obama is illegitimate, a foreign-born usurper. The “girl next door” is blonde; the superhero is blue-eyed.
Unfortunately, though, Black History Month merely reinforces that fundamental bias. The one-month observation — ironically, the shortest month of the year — keeps our history away from mainstream history. Instead, it should be included in every history text, taught in every history class, commemorated in every history museum — from maritime to martial, from agricultural to architectural.
The story of America is accurately told only when the stories of black Americans are included in every month of the year.
By: Cynthia Tucker, a Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary, 2007; The National Memo, February 21, 2015
“Structural Racism”: ‘Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist’ Doesn’t Excuse Ongoing Police Violence
On Thursday, FBI director James Comey gave a long and searching speech called “Hard Truths: Law Enforcement and Race” – complete with deep meditations on race, predictable but annoying equivocations, and harmful misdirection about the violence of policing.
It also included – in an unquestionable first for an FBI director giving a public speech – quotes from the oversexed, cursing puppets of the Broadway musical Avenue Q. (Who knows if FBI brass have quoted them in private before; if only J Edgar Hoover could have lived to see this!)
Comey frankly acknowledged his predecessor Hoover’s immoral pursuits of Martin Luther King and that at “many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.” He invoked his own ancestry to show how the Irish were once so loathed by the cops that vehicles used to mass transport prisoners are still called “paddy wagons” without forgetting that, although the “Irish had tough times – little compares to the experience on our soil of black Americans.”
And while it was encouraging to hear Comey say that Americans need some actual goddamned government statistics on how often cops kill people rather than relying upon sites like KilledByPolice.net, it didn’t exactly fill me with confidence that he was so convinced only after he “listened to a thoughtful big city police chief express his frustration with that lack of reliable data” who “didn’t know whether the Ferguson police shot one person a week, one a year, or one a century.”
Does it matter? Isn’t one lost life one too many?
In his prepared remarks, Comey never used the word “racism”. He did use the word “racist” three times – but twice it was to say cops really aren’t racist, and once to quote the song “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” from Avenue Q.
Though I was as gleeful as the next homosexual to see a raunchy Broadway musical quoted by the head of the FBI, Comey was actually equivocating on racism’s power to harm by using it: “We all – white and black – carry various biases around with us”, he said. And while that may be true, no level of civilian bias against police, not even cars blaring NWA’s Fuck the Police (as I heard often while in Ferguson myself) justifies the police violence against which protesters are fighting. The structural racism people of color experience isn’t harming police – unless they’re people of color, off duty, and subjected to stop and frisk by their fellow officers.
He did address the cynicism and “mental shortcuts” which exacerbate racial profiling. But then he alleged it doesn’t mean an officer is racist when “mental shortcut becomes almost irresistible and maybe even rational by some lights”, nor did he even name systematic racism as at work there.
Comey also talked about how “data shows that the percentage of young men not working or not enrolled in school is nearly twice as high for blacks as it is for whites”, adding that he understands “the hard work to develop violence-resistant and drug-resistant kids, especially in communities of color.” But kids in communities of color don’t need to “Just Say No” – they need, and we need, to demand an end to economic segregation and a lack of educational opportunity.
The FBI director hinted at the existence of racism when he talked of changing a legacy “so enormous and so complicated that it is, unfortunately, easier to talk only about the cops”. He is right that it’s not fair to pin everything on police; but, it’s unhelpful misdirection to point at (unarmed) citizens failing to “really see the men and women of law enforcement” (who are always armed) as the problem with policing.
It’s also unhelpful to act like being a cop is more dangerous than it actually is. Existing data has shown that it’s not a particularly dangerous job; it’s not even among the 10 most dangerous jobs in America. Far more people are killed by cops in any given year than cops are killed by civilians – and, cops who do die “in the line of duty” are about as likely to do so in a vehicle related injury than by being shot.
Still, no amount of pandering to the homosexual agenda with Avenue Q quotes can soften the blow of hearing the nation’s top cop ignoring the very basis of our legal system by claiming – right after a year with a record number of legal exonerations – that “criminal suspects routinely lie about their guilt, and the people we charge are overwhelmingly guilty.” Actually, criminal suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law; exonerations indicate that even those decisions aren’t permanent.
This week, there have been a number of positive developments in the fight against police violence; Comey’s speech is among them, to be sure, along with the lawsuit against Ferguson debtors’ prisons and the MacArthur Foundation ponying up $75mn to fight overincarceration. But Comey’s speech isn’t the big sign of progress; the real progress is that, six months after Mike Brown was killed, the movement that his death triggered is still so powerful that the head of the FBI finally feels the need to address the injustice that so many Americans now find apparent.
By: Steven W. Thrasher, The Guardian, February 13, 2014
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