Day Twenty-Five

Started my powder keg unit today.

My students are reading Richard Wright's autobiography Black Boy, which revolves around the author's childhood in the segregated South and how it shapes his manhood. I like this book because it's simply written and it's a great springboard to discuss racism and homophobia.

Now most kids will tell you that they don't harbor any prejudice. So what I try to do is show them that even though that might be true, it doesn't mean that they're opinions about African Americans haven't been influenced by outside forces.

This is how I started my class.

On the overhead, I showed a picture of two African Americans watching TV. I then asked the class to guess what the couple was watching. Here are their answers:

a) The News.

Me -  About what?

Student - Riots.

b) Basketball.

c) The Weather Channel.

Me - What kind of weather?

Student - A storm.

d) Their Lottery Numbers.

e) An Action Movie.

Me - Who are the Black characters?

Class (collectively) - A drug dealer, a hooker, a pimp, a gang member.

f) A Rap Video.

Me - What are they rapping about?

Class (collectively) - A drug dealer, a hooker, a pimp, a gang member.

You get the picture.

I then asked them why every one of their answers focused on the negative?

This made them very uncomfortable. For all intents and purposes I had pulled the rug out from under them.

I then swooped in and told them that this wasn't their fault. They had been taught to think this way via TV.

To calm their nerves, I then showed them clips from Bowling for Columbine, focusing on "Fear of the Black Man", which basically talks about how African Americans and Latinos have been characterized as threatening people in the media, leading people to think that every person of color is out to get them.

Over all, the kids got it. It was interesting to see how a lot of them had never thought about this stuff before. One girl had a great insight which I'll share...

 GIRL - African Americans are playing the role of the villain.

ME - Hmm. Can you expand on that?

GIRL - Well, every story has to have a bad guy so we'll stay interested...like in a TV show or a movie. The media knows that so they give us a villain because that's what we are used to.

Pretty good for a seventeen year old.

To cap off the day, I then showed them Dave Chappell's Clayton Bigsby sketch, which tells the story of a blind, Black, White supremacist. To make matters worse Clayton writes White Power books and he's considered a messiah of sorts by his  "White brothers", who don't know that Clayton is African American because he lives in seclusion.  

If you haven't seen it check it out on YOUTUBE. It's genius.

Anyway, this always gets a laugh and for the most part they get the message that racism is learned.

To quote Mary Poppins, "Just a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down!"

And that in a nutshell is why I still like teaching.

Signing off.

Birds-Eye