Which Families Deserve Respect? One Thought on the Recent Killings of Teachers by Young Men

“Student Kills Math Teacher, Then Himself, at a Middle School in Nevada.”

“The boy, whose name and age have not been released, wounded two students during the attack.”

Two days later…

14-year-old Philip Chism  was arraigned as an adult for the alleged murder of a math teacher. 

Both cases are troubling and beg the question of what is causing boys, young men, and men to behave in such a way? How might the ideology of masculinity have shaped their behaviors is something we as a society should interrogate. Instead, we are more likely to have a conversation on gun availability (the Chism murder does not seem to involve a gun and only targeted one individual) and mental health. I completely agree that these are important conversations for us to all have. However, I think that the conversation remains incomplete when we fail to consider how the social construction of masculinity might contribute to these incidences.

However, this is not why I pen this post. My concern rests with how the media decides to share information about who is involved in such murders. 

Since this alleged murder I’ve learn about Chism's parents and about his life.

Meanwhile there is little information shared about the young man who murdered the teacher in Nevada and then committed suicide. We know nothing of the first young man except that he was in middle school.

How do we begin to theorize the media's differential treatment of these two young men (a term I use rather loosely as I see them as boys)? Why is it that so little information is provided on the first young man?

According to the New York Times, “The authorities say they are withholding the student’s name out of respect for his family.” Is Chism’s family not deserving of respect?  

How do we determine which families are deserving of respect? Who gets to make such determinations?

I don’t have the answers, but I do have to wonder: Might race play a factor? How might the social construction of race and violence influence the media's differential treatment of these young men? 

This is the eleventh post of my 31-day blogging challenge. You can tweet me at Dr_JZ using hash tag #31dbc to share your thoughts and share your stories. 

“Paper Cuts Hurt Too”: Getting Students to See Race when they Claim that They Don’t

I teach courses that deal with race and racism, gender and sexism, class and classism. The challenge I often confront is how to get students, students of color and Euro-American students, to “see” race and racism. Many of these students have been introduced to race via multiculturalism. One of the challenges of a multicultural curriculum lies in the ideology that we are all “one.” Additionally, students are often taught that to see race somehow makes them individually “bad” because only evil people see race and to see race is to be a racist. Thus students often argue that they don't see race. 

For my students of color, they too don’t see race. Many of these students subscribe to the ideology that we are now living in a non-racial society as a result of the ideology of individualism. The ideology of individualism is often worn as a badge of honor to prove that they “belong”.

I won’t necessarily focus on how the myth of multiculturalism hurts both students of color and Euro-American students alike, albeit in different ways. Instead, my focus is on how to get them to see race and racism as ideologies that are still present in their lifetime.

To help my students to see race, I rely on the analogy of a paper cut. It’s not perfect. But it at least gets most students to envision the existence of racism as something that they might not “see” but that can simultaneously exist.

As I introduce my students to theories of race and racism I often ask, “How many of you have had a paper cut?” Every hand floats into the air. I then ask them, about their experience with the pain associated with such a cut. Many will say that for something often so small and invisible that the pain can be intense. Then we talk about getting others to see the cut. Think about it, you know the paper cut exist because of the pain and more than likely it bled. However, after you’ve wiped away the blood, the obvious evidence, it is almost impossible to get someone to see your injury. The evidence of your pain is not always evident to the naked eye.

I then begin to introduce students to the legacy of slavery. While the institution of slavery is no longer evident (as they envision it as a result of what they see on television), the impact of slavery is ever present in today’s society. Why? Because racism and the hierarchy of race have not disappeared. They might not be able to see it (and believe me when I tell you that we have an entirely different lecture on why they believe they don’t see race, when they use it as an organizing principle) but their understanding of absence does not render race absent.  After all, someone telling you that they don’t see your paper cut does not mean that it does not exist.

We then use this analogy to transition into conversations on institutional racism and how it’s possible to have racism without racist (see Bonilla-Silva). With this analogy, students are better able to comprehend passive racism and active racism in a way that is non-threatening as it takes away the “I” from the conversations. Thereby allowing us to have more in-depth conversations that go beyond personal guilt.

This is the sixth post of my 31-day blogging challenge. You can tweet me at Dr_JZ using hastag #31dbc to share your thoughts on how you teach on difficult topics. 

Public Displays of my Blackness: Personal Politics with Public Consequences

I’m a girl from the little Island of Barbados. For the most part, I grew up with folk that look like me—some might have been darker, some might have been lighter. My family is an interesting mix of people that reflect the legacy of colonialism and slavery. At the age of 16 I decided to permanently reside in the US. My college experience (at the undergraduate level) was not always the most challenging, but my experience with race was a different story. I won’t take you through my various experiences with race; instead, I’ll focus on how I negotiated my personal politics with the public display of my Blackness. 

Talking about race is not always easy. However, I believe that for my personal wellness race, like money and intimate relationships, must be dealt with even if it makes us uncomfortable. At the age of 16 I did not understand that I could have a personal politics on this issue. I couldn’t even name what I felt. However, I did feel the need to confront some public representations of poor Black women (even if veiled in the “legitimacy” of political discourse). About three years into my education, one of my Economics professors stated that on the 1^st and 15^th of every month drug sales increase because that’s when welfare checks are received. I was the only person of color in the class. No one said anything. Here I sat, a 19 year old immigrant, still learning to confront and understand racial differences, feeling to my core that something was wrong with this statement. So I raised my hand and asked (I’m paraphrasing here) “Doesn’t the rest of America also get paid on those days?” I can’t remember her response, but I can remember how I felt. Let’s fast forward to my experiences in academia where I sit in the position of colleague and professor. Most of my professional life has been spent at Historically White Institutions where I find myself in the position of being the only one in my department and/or one of a few in the entire institution. That same feeling that I had as a 19 year old still raises its head from time to time. Something isn’t right and will I be the lone figure to raise my hand. 

Many moons have passed since I sat in the classroom as a 19 year old young woman and I’ve had many experiences with race that have left me wondering “why am I doing this to myself”. The beauty of all of these challenges is that I’ve come to a place where I manage the public display of my Blackness. By the public display of my Blackness, I am referring to situations where being the only one makes me stand out. For example, attending graduation and family day are events where my Blackness is put on display—often in stark contrast. Needless to say, these very public events can leave me with diverse feelings ranging from anger to sadness. I get tired of having these feelings. I get tired of wondering, why? So I made a very conscious decision to manage the display of my Blackness in the face of systemic and institutional racism.

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For one, I’m unapologetically Black. No I do not embody the stereotypically constructed image of the “angry Black woman”. This construction suggests that my anger is mis-placed and that I should be eternally grateful that I was given a chance to be in academia or any other majority White space. Being unapologetically Black means that I don’t apologize for anyone’s discomfort at my presence. It also means that I don’t pretend that Blackness does not mean something to both me and the person(s) that I happen to be occupying a specific space with at a specific time. For me, being unapologetically Black means that I don’t have to wear a mask; a mask that often hides mental illness, such as depression. I don’t go around crying “Woe is me”, but I also don’t hide the struggles that I often confront when I disrupt White spaces and resulting narratives. 

Second, I choose (within reason) when I want to be on public display. So there are some functions I simply don’t attend. Some might say that this is not collegial. Others might say, aren’t you afraid that you won’t get tenure. I’m tenured and even when I was not I made choices concerning the public display of my Blackness. This is about the exercise of my personal power. Nothing makes me feel worse than being disempowered. We all have to learn the unspoken and spoken “rules of the game” by which we are to be judged. However, these rules do not have t render us powerless. We can make choices. For every three events I’m invited to, I typically say no to two. I am able to do such, because I make trade-offs—I find other ways to engage in service to my institution where the display of my Blackness can be minimized and where I can also feel that I have some level of control over the display. One can be a team player and still have power.

Third, I’ve learn how to create safe spaces. Not safe spaces only in terms of physical space, but also in terms of mental space. It’s about transcending the boundaries in which I’m often confined. I do this by organizing my physical space to reflect who I am. Every small token counts! Again, I make no apologies for surrounding myself with Black art, etc. This physical space provides me with an opportunity to create the mental space I often need to manage the public display of my Blackness. When I can’t escape to my office, I escape via my mind. I fill my mind with stories of Black women who’ve “triumphed”. I surround myself with the stories of Audre Lorde, my mother and my grandmother. These are women who mother me through their narratives. I surround myself with Bible verses that help me to transcend to a space where I feel safe and secure.

Finally, self reflection is a constant part of my consciousness concerning the public display of my Blackness. Periodically, I ask myself, “Why am I doing what I’m doing?” Asking this question is relatively easy. The difficulty is in answering honestly. The tools I use for self reflection sometimes change. What remains constant is staying true to who I am regardless of the situation in which I find myself. I’ve found that some of us, particularly Black women, spend a considerable about of time trying to figure out how to fit in. As a result, we forget who we are and our purpose. We twist in the wind trying to embody other’s understanding of how we out to publicly perform our identity. After watching some women I know struggle with their presentation of self, I made a very conscious decision not to wear a mask. For example, I jokingly tell my students “I know that I’m Black, I’ve been Black for 21 years.” This is my attempt to openly address that fact that we are racialized beings and we can choose how we want our racialization to influence our interactions. Some students don’t always understand this, but I’ve found that being open allows me to publicly confront stereotypes and beliefs about my role in the classroom. When I first entered academia, I could not do this. In part, because of was afraid of the consequences. I took some time to reflect on my perceptions of the consequences of publicly recognizing my Blackness. Eventually, I concluded that while I could not control the consequences, there was one that I absolutely could not live with. I could not live with the consequence of denying how all of my identities interact and intersect to make me who I am. 

As a Black woman, not only do I struggle with the proverbial battle of self-identity, but I also struggle with other people's conceptions of who I am and how I should be. Black women are expected to be angry and loud or meek and subservient. I am neither. This often means that some folk literally don’t know what to do with me. I’ve disrupted their narratives by controlling, in a very honest way, the public display of my Blackness.  My toolbox is a constant work in progress as I seek tools to handle not only my understanding and performance of my Blackness in public spaces, but also for how others understand and expect me to perform such. 

This was first published at All Black Woman