Race and Ethnicity

When my daughter pulls hard on the heavy glass doors of the Martin Luther King Jr. Laboratory School and races upstairs into her fifth-grade classroom, she is living my dream.

It happens in every class. We’re discussing a text, a publication, a current event, a poem. The content doesn’t matter. It’s the phrase that counts.

A student comments and uses the phrase “African American” or even “black people.” The student is white. The reaction of the class – almost all white – is swift. As if choreographed, all eyes turn to the one student of color. The spotlight of eyes shines down and he or she blinks back as if staring into the sun. 

The teacher should use this moment to open a discussion.  

The first day of my second year of teaching, a third-grader walked into class, saw another student and punched him in the nose. He didn’t say anything or give any indication that he was going to do this. It just happened. After cleaning up the blood and redirecting the class, I asked the attacker why he wanted to punch someone else. “He’s Mexican,” he said. “He don’t belong in my class.”

As a young white woman from the suburbs, I knew I was going to experience some culture shock as I began my teaching career in one of the more violent low-income areas of Oakland. The town I grew up in was different from where I went to college, but they had important qualities in common. Both were strongly middle class, had a clear agricultural focus, a vast white majority and a significant but well-hidden Spanish-speaking minority. I hadn’t realized how comfortable I was in those environments until I was faced with the reality of inner-city Oakland. 

So I had a lot to learn.

“Ms. Craven, we can put ‘nigga?’” 

I pause. Images of earnest sitting-in-a-circle chats in college flash through my brain:

• A classmate from Kentucky explaining how she will never say that word, even in academic circles, because, being white, she will never be able to fully grasp its implications;
• Another black classmate asserting that the word has been reclaimed, and that when black people use it, the poison of the original use gets diluted.

May 31 marks the 90th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Riot. You can be excused if you've never heard of it. Despite being the bloodiest attack on African-American citizens in U.S. history, the riot was almost completely ignored by most history books for about 75 years. Only recently has the event received the attention it deserves.

Leslie, a 38-year-old social worker who counsels children with stressful life situations, found her 4-year-old daughter, Sophia, engaged in animated play with her dolls. She watched incredulously as Sophia invited the four white dolls with blonde hair to a tea party while the dark-skinned doll with black hair lay alone across the room. 

Today is the kickoff of Farmworker Awareness Week. It is a time to honor the backbreaking work that goes into harvesting our food.