...and That's Funny How?

"You're acting like an overweight black woman from the south!"

Seriously?  Yep- that's just one of the "funny" things my students are saying to each other  in class. Compound that with students who argue with each other over whether such comments are offensive and you have Spring Fever 2013. For the most part, these comments are not mean-spirited, but I know first hand, that they are still hurtful to those who hear it.

When I moved to the Tidewater, Virginia region that January in 1980, I was in seventh grade. I was still shell-shocked by the epic 1978 mini-series, Roots. Moving to the southeastern seaboard after seeing that, was the last thing I wanted to do. It was a bad move: full of spirit-crushing bullying. I went to military for 8th and 9th grade.

When I returned, no one but my closest friend remembered me, that was a good thing. High school was a fairly seamless transition from military school. Maybe it was because I was miserable in a military setting of endless regimentation and no arts and maybe it was because I was pleased to spend my extra-curricular and elective time in music. Unlike the junior high debacle, I found making friends a pretty easy exercise, but that's where the problems that relate to the beginning of this blog arose.

I returned to public school during the 1982-1983 school year. The Civil Rights victories of the  1960s were not even 20 years cold. This may account for the awkward situations I found myself in those years. Whereas at Western Branch Junior High School I found myself a pariah: yankee, upper middle-class, articulate and an avid learner; in high school I experienced overwhelming acceptance. I also found myself a niche' of similarly inclined outsiders. We called ourselves the import club because we were all from somewhere other than Tidewater.

These friendships in high school and even at the military acadamy had their pitfalls, however. Let me flip it and reverse where I am going with this: some of my best friends were biggots. Don't think that's possible? I wouldn't believe it if I had not experienced it.

In polite society, one should avoid talking about finances, religion, and politics, right?--- didn't most of us learn that from our moms? However, when you befirend someone, you start feeling each other out on these issues. That's where the comment comes from.

My friends would gleefully come to me to share a great joke they heard since the last time they last saw me. First, there were the black, white and red all over jokes: skunks in a blender-- but as I got older they turned darker. Jokes about blacks from my white southern friends.

When they saw I was offended, they would assure me "We don't mean you--- you're different." As if that was supposed to make me feel better about them finding humor in impugning members of my race with their stereotypes. What did they mean "different?" And then the other kicker "yeah, but you don't really act or talk black, you're more like us." Act black? Talk black?

I wish I could take the 46 year old version of me and teleport into the teen me. There are things I would say-- no, cussing a blue streak isn't on my mind. My friends were operating under stereotypes that were so entrenched that even our friendship could not dispel them.

Acting black? I don't need to act a color. I am the descendant of African slaves who  kidnapped and shipped to the New World, --some as many as three centuries ago. The comment was a reference to my diction and elocution. Our home lives were similar. Both of our parents were college-educated and expected us to succeed in our studies, go to college, and become productive members of our communities. This meant that my folks were just as anti-slang, anti-regional dialect as theirs were. No one in my family spoke ebonics.

The same could not be said for many of my African American classmates at WBHS. I also was one of three African American students enrolled in advanced, honors, and accelerated classes-- where I met many of these friends. My school had a 60/40 white to black ratio demographic and there were well over 450 students in my graduating class alone.

For many of my friends, I would learn over the years, I was their first or only black friend. We played on sports teams together, hang at each other's houses playing video games, watched movies, crammed for tests, even visited each other's places of worship on a few occassions. We were friends, but since I lived in their neighborhood, was in their "hard classes," and did not live up to what they had grown up was true of "those people" I was "other," and like them.

I was offended by their jokes. It did not matter to me that they were not talking about me. They could have been talking about cousins who acted out a culture that they only had a cursory understanding of. This was decades before I would teach a course at the College of New Jersey called "Race, Class, and Gender," where we learn the socio-polical history of these assumptions and their economic, political, and educational rammifications.

When I hear these things. I cringe, I question, I try to gently educate. I believe it serves no purpose, as an educator, to react like a school-nun who overhears blasphemy. I try to get my point across subtlely.

Navigating these murky waters of human relationships impacted upon by racial, religious, and ideological differences has been part of my life story. I lived in white neighborhoods and predominantly white school districts most of my life. Most of my black friends that I had growing up, were relatives whom I only saw when I travelled to my grandparents' homes in Ohio. Many of my cousins had the same life experience because they were also born to college-educated, upwardly mobile and achieving parents. That was our family identity.

My paternal grandfather, a mason contractor, noticed that folks with college degrees struggled significantly less during the Great Depression than those who did not. He made sure all seven of his children went to college in the 1940s and 1950s.

The student who said the opening lines of today's blog? He is an avid reader who reads well above grade level. I gave him a choice of Having Our Say, Black Boy, and Selected Stories of Edgar Allen Poe to read during PSSAs. He devoured Poe and Wright. When he finished Black Boy, he came to me before homeroom to talk to me about it.

"I had no idea things were like that back then..." I looked at him.

"Do you understand why I had an issue with what you said to her?"

"Oh God! Yeah! Geez... I'm sorry." I hope I smiled gently, I was relieved he seemed to get it.

"Not everything is funny just because you think it is. Know what I mean?"

"Yeah."

"Cool."

That's it. No need for a write-up or call home. Other teachers were aware of what happened because other students immediately realized that  he should not have "gone there" in front of me. My point-- no one should go there, regardless of in front of whom.

I'm caught in the middle. I understand when to pounce and when to wait for a teachable moment. I'm an educator, not a thought policeman. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.