Printer-friendly versionWe are all still thinking, talking, teaching and grieving about the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old in Florida, wearing that universal hoodie. Again, as a nation, we confront the issue of race and what it means to be an African-American teenage male in this country.
While this discussion plays out on a national scale, similar conversations erupt quietly in high schools and on college and university campuses with astonishing regularity. As teachers, we should mindfully pull from the national wave of painful but honest discussions sparked by Trayvon Martin’s senseless death by connecting the nonlethal (but still incredibly hurtful) incidents that occur in our schools on a regular basis.
I’m talking about those instances when, for example, the student newspaper runs something deemed offensive, hurtful or a harmless joke. Perhaps it’s a photo of white students made up in “blackface” and Afro wigs on a majority-white campus. Maybe it’s a cartoon swathed in “satire” mocking Muslims. It erupts in a reaction that always shocks the majority and too often deepens the isolation and marginalization of the minority. It is also a crucial teaching opportunity.
Representatives of the harmed community write letters to the editor, protest outside the newspaper's office and submit columns reminding the campus that, once again, something unnoticed by the majority population feels like an assault.
“Don't you understand?” they ask. “It's like death by a thousand cuts. We put up with this all the time. Enough!”
Many exasperated majority students are confused. They genuinely have no idea what their peers experience.
The school newspaper editors and staff respond in one or more of the following ways: genuine apology, resignations, university-wide teach-ins, appropriate corrections or editor's notes. Too often, a silent, seething resentment curdles and hardens, leaving no room for empathy or real growth.
The students raising their voices are weary. They’ve explained it again and again. They feel unheard. Integration fatigue, it's been aptly called.
The folks on the other end resent the "hypersensitivity" and "overblown" reactions. No harm was meant, they say. It was satire. It was a joke. It had nothing to do with race. Why is everything about fill-in-the-blank (race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.)?
Recently it erupted again, in Louisiana. Beneath the classic headline “Offensive or Just a Joke? Students Speak Out on Comic in UL Paper,” the story described how “University of Louisiana Lafayette students are upset over a comic strip that ran recently in the campus newspaper, The Vermilion. Those students say the cartoon is racially charged and shouldn't have run in the student-run paper.”
It happened a few weeks ago on my campus. A Latina student was accosted by a group she identified as white female students who rolled their Rs and mocked the language they assumed she spoke.
In both cases we must seize the moment to make the connection. What are the assumptions, histories, stereotypes, faulty thinking and misunderstandings made visible by these local incidents? In what ways are they connected to the death of Trayvon Martin? It is our job to guide our students through these difficult but crucial conversations.
Cytrynbaum is a journalist and instructor at Northwestern University.
Comments
I do not believe this
I do not believe this incident should have happened at all, so let me say that first. I am a teacher, I have a lot of students who wear hoodies who are not hood but knowing that is the image that goes with it they should be careful of how they present themselves to the public. If you want to look like a hood, that is up to you, if you know you are giving false impressions then you need to be careful. It's a shame but that's the way it is.
My second point is that they keep presenting this young man as an innocent but he wasn't. He has his own record that shows he was not an upstanding member of the community he lived in. Does this mean he should have been shot by an idiot? No. But they need to present him as he is and use pictures that are more recent rather than old pictures of him when he WAS an innocent young man. He may be the victim, but he still needs to be portrayed as he was at that time, not years before.
i think the problem is with
i think the problem is with people like you who lay claim that "looking like a hood" gives someone a "false impression". it's your impression that is false in the first place. whether someone looks like a hood, wears a suit and tie, has tattoos - don't judge a book by it's cover. your "false impressions" are stereotypes, and that's a problem.
You are spot on, what
You are spot on, what difference does it make that he was wearing a hooded sweat shirt. It was raining out that night, or misting, and was also in February that even in Florida can be a bit cool. Would it have been any less "suspicious" as people like to say had he been wearing a rain coat or ball cap? NO it should make no difference. Listening to the 911 calls you can hear clearly that Zimmerman profiled this young man simply based on how he dressed and the color of his skin. At the point of the tape when you hear him pick up the pace of his pursuit of Trayvon you can hear him clearly say with disgust in his voice, "they always get away" THEY WHO? Then there is of course the still debated question of whether he did or did not say softly under his voice "F'ing Coons" which is a racial slur. I've listened to it probably two dozen times and I hear it....This is another sad shame in our nations history in regards to equality.