What About Anti-Elitism?

Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Mica Pollock, is the editor of a new book on race in the classroom. Every Day Anti Racism: Getting Real About Race in the Classroom sounds like a boon to all educators - I mean, what classroom couldn't benefit from some balls-to-the-wall for real talk time about race? Further, what faculty meeting? The answer of course is zero - no matter how diverse or homogenous, how well performing or under performing, how rich or how poor your classroom, there is no place in America that couldn't stand a good dose of conversation about race.

But, how best to go about it?


This book, which author Tim Wise advises reading before attempting to teach another day, purports to contain some helpful hints. I will read it, eventually. I'm in the middle of Dune right now, and then I was going to pick up the new Michael Chabon novel, and then I'll get to it. I went to Harvard, so I must already have the answers, right?

No! No no no! The contributors to this book include (but are not limited to) a professor at Duke University, a Kennedy School economist, a Professor of Law, an Assistant Professor at Harvard...blah blah blah. Very very smart people. Likely wonderful writers to boot. I am sure many of them have conducted extensive research into classrooms in urban public schools. But when, I ask you, WHEN is the last time they taught in one of them? Because when I was at that castle of brick and ivy, none of my professors had set foot in a public school classroom in many, many years. I wonder how many of them attended public school as children...


I hope I'm wrong, and that all these economists and law professors have spent sixteen years each teaching in LA Unified. And, I'm sure Mica Pollock, who is a super nice, super smart lady who gives a huge shit about public education and has done her fair share of teaching, would have liked to put the microphone in public schools and not the Harvard Club. There is a prerequisite for publishing in academia, and I am so frickin' tired of it: you must paste over-credentialed names all over the cover. This is problematic because in order to GET over-credentialed one must abandon the schools most in need of help. [Not to mention the fact that it comes from Harvard...a place that has a notoriously tough time retaining and giving tenure to professors of color.]

I want to hear from teachers, like me, who admit on a daily basis that we have just about ZERO clue if what we are doing is right, but we're doing it. I want that stuff right alongside the PhD economists and the professors of 18th Century Scatology or whatnot. So, for the five or six of you out there who read this blog and who also teach or parent or go to school - I would like to hear your stories about race in the classroom or race in the faculty meeting or race in the hallway. Maybe this is a result of my own prejudice about lands of brick and ivy, but I just don't see them as bastions of "getting real." Real is: you are running on two hours sleep, overtired from a long night of waiting tables, which you do so that you can afford to live in the city where you teach, and you've got tests to grade, papers to read, it rained a lot so the hallways are flooding again so your class is moved suddenly to the computer lab and everyone is jumping around looking at myspace, putting headphones on, shouting, laughing, arguing, and one of your students says, at the top of her lungs, "Fuck that, nigga, she's some ghetto ass Puerto Rican hood rat bitch I'm gonna fuck her shit up" right next to you and you've got to address that statement in all its racially charged glory...what do you do?

Tell me, Professor, over some brie and a lovely Chardonnay, what do you do right there?