Breaking out of a bubble

Reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X changed my life in high school. But it was also the beginning of my race education. Right around that time, our school had some guest lecturer do the blue eyes/brown eyes experiment. We also read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

After that, when someone commented on how they liked my eyes, there was always guilt mixed in with a race education discourse I felt I needed to dispel instead of just saying thank you.

In college theatre, I played a few evil racist white women.

When I was seeing a guy in New York City, I was told, “My mother wouldn’t have a problem with a white woman, but my sister would.”

Teaching in South Los Angeles for years, I am constantly dealing with race, class, and culture. It gets tiring. Especially when programs like UCLA and TeamsAmericorps bring in lecturers who pound our country’s racist history in our face, leaving me feeling powerless and drained.

My colleague who also teaches in the inner city once said through tears that being “the rich white woman from Beverly Hills” gets old. She’s never lived in Beverly Hills, was married to a Latino while living in Mexico, and is now pregnant with a Latino baby.

When my students ask, I tell them about my Finnish grandfather who didn’t go to high school because he had to drop out and help on the farm. He was the oldest of fifteen children. Or how my great grandmother was part of the Polawadamee tribe, but her mother died very young from tuberculosis. Or why The Magdalene Laundries are so devastating to me because of my Irish ancestry.

It’s easier to put people in bubbles…because once people aren’t able to categorize, data isn’t as simple as making a statistical graph to support your presentation.

Just today, as my students were taking the high school exit exam, they asked me what to bubble in for ethnicity. Thinking in the bubble keeps people in a bubble. One of our standards is 2.2 Write responses to literature that show understanding of key ideas; analyze language and theme; provide textual support; reveal awareness of author’s style; and address ambiguities, nuances, and complexities in the text. Until we can understand the complexities of ethnicity, I don’t know how we expect our students to graduate high school prepared to be part of a community.