A short essay from a teacher, Frank McCormick, that has been gaining traction as of late on the behavior of his black students and how they fit in the school administration’s management of teachers:
I’ll never forget when my principal asked me to “reflect” on why most of the students sent to the office were Black and I told her it’s because they misbehave more.
You could actually watch her have an aneurism in real-time. Not because she thought I was racist, but because she didn’t know how to respond to a teacher being truthful on the issue.
They use language like “reflect” to have you engage in some sort of pseudo-psychological struggle session where you discuss your own “intrinsic biases” and how you’ll “do better,’ but ultimately it’s an implied threat: change your behavior or lose your job.
What 99% of teachers do is simply stop referring Black students to the office.
This emboldens them, and their behavior becomes worse. Everyone notices- including the students- but no one says a thing. It’s Orwellian.
It got so bad that we literally had Black students walking around the halls during class doing whatever the hell they want. Security and administration would just shadow them and ask them to talk politely 2000 times.
The kids would just keep walking while mumbling “fu** this n****a *mumble mumble” and so on.
It increased racial resentment from other students and staff members, and the increased visibility of this behavior just reinforced stereotypes.
These are the kids that become the adults in society that get in standoffs with police over minor compliance issues, get shot, and become “civil rights martyrs.”
Schools are creating walking powder kegs that blow up. Society is collateral.
What the school administration is doing is essentially the same as the scenario depicted in this old political cartoon on the dilemma of policing black people:
Despite how Frank McCormick’s black students misbehave, the school administration refuses the address the issue, but rather chooses to focus on appearing enlightened and non-racist at the cost of everything else. The same thing is happening outside of academia, as well. The above political comic is fairly well known and gets posted around frequently. When I tried to search for it on google, no matter what keywords I tried, it simply would not show up on their image search.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I went on Yandex (which is a search engine from Russia), and was able to easily find an image of this comic using the same combination of keywords. The image was appropriately placed near the top of my search results from Yandex.
I guess Google simply thinks this comic does not need to be shown to the rest of the world. How nice that they get to decide for every one of us.
Original screencap of Frank McCormick’s post:
Temple of Zagan 