“This is some racist bullshit!” To be fair, four out of five of those words absolutely did describe the situation that I found myself in the other day, standing outside the classroom having a yelling match with a couple of students who happened to be the only black students in the class. Let’s go back to the beginning…
Students can be total jerks and sometimes, only sometimes, they do something that really gets to me. Usually something incredibly stupid, as the case was on this day. The last period of a long day came and I was tired of them and just tired in general, so when someone decided to play a neat little ditty on their cell phone for all to hear…I kind of threatened to “murder [them] all” if it didn’t stop. Did I mention it was also really hot that day?
Needless to say, it didn’t stop. And unfortunately one student decided it would also be fun to act threatened about the whole murdering thing, and I was forced to use my best this-conversation-is-f-ing-over-voice, which is actually pretty scarey. It did stop the whiney kid, but it didn’t stop the noise. The noise kept coming because they knew, and I knew, there was no definite way of stopping it. Except one: the faces.
High school students cannot lie. People think teenagers are good liars, and I’m sure they are, on their own. But in a pack, they give each other away, they can’t help it. Sometimes these Masters of Subtlety will be real smooth and a whole group will look at you at the same time and then turn away quickly. You don’t really have to wonder if, but what, they’re doing wrong then. But the best trick is to look at all of them at once, like a magic eye poster. It might be a stifled giggle, a quick glance towards the guilty party, or a stupid I’m-not-doing-anything-wrong smirk. Today it was the smirk. The problem was, as it was so delicately pointed out to me by one of these gentlemen (see the first line of this post), that the only guys wearing the smirks were the only black kids in the class. So when I kicked them out, things got a bit…yell-y.
“You don’t know what we go through” said one of the boys, incidentally the same kid who didn’t like the idea of me murdering them. He was right, and I told him so. I don’t have a clue what it’s like to be a black teenage boy in our society, I can imagine it’s not always pleasant. That wasn’t the point of why they were outside, but it certainly became the point, to them at least, and frankly who am I to argue? Well I’m the person who is not cool with being called racist. So we did argue – for practically the whole period, in little outbursts every time I stepped outside.
Every time I stepped back inside, though, a certain song kept popping in my head as it does quite often in situations like this. If you know the chorus to Radiohead’s Just, then you know what I’m talking about. I shouldn’t have threatened to murder anyone, I shouldn’t have even acknowledged this sound, except possibly with my you-are-all-stupid-little-children face that is usually quite effective. But I don’t know, something about that damn crying baby really irked me and apparently turned me into a perceived racist. And it sucks to know that someone thinks that of you, even if it is a totally misguided notion. Does it even matter that it is misguided if that’s how I made them feel?
So I kept going out. I kept trying to talk to them, and eventually we worked it out, sort of. We all apologized for overreacting and they even took out the work they were supposed to be doing (granted, they put it right back when I walked away). I came back in feeling nauseated and extremely confused about how I handled the whole thing, a feeling which will probably never go away. But I left knowing that Thom Yorke is right, I did it to myself.
