Black & Right re-posts an essay by a teacher he found on Craigslist, “before it’s deleted”.
PS: Don’t miss the 150+ comments…
Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state. (…)
Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock.
Many black people, especially black women, are enormously fat. Some are so fat I had to arrange special seating to accommodate their bulk. I am not saying there are no fat white students — there are — but it is a matter of numbers and attitudes. Many black girls simply do not care that they are fat. There are plenty of white anorexics, but I have never met or heard of a black anorexic.
“Black women be big Mr. Jackson,” my students would explain. (…)
Unlike whites, who tread gingerly around the subject of race, they can be brutally to the point.
We were talking about the crimes committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I brought up the rape of a young girl in the bathroom of the Superdome. A majority of my students believed this was a horrible crime but a few took it lightly. One black boy spoke up without raising his hand: “Dat no big deal. They thought they is gonna die so they figured they have some fun. Dey jus’ wanna have a fun time; you know what I’m sayin’?” A few black heads nodded in agreement. (…)
There is a level of conformity among blacks that whites would find hard to believe. They like one kind of music: rap. They will vote for one political party: Democrat. They dance one way, speak one way, are loud the same way, and fail their exams in the same way. Of course, there are exceptions but they are rare.
There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white “nerds,” “hunters,” or “Goths,” for example. (…)
My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanic immigrants. They would vent their feelings so crudely that our department strongly advised us never to talk about immigration in class in case the principal or some outsider might overhear.
There is something else that is striking about blacks. They seem to have no sense of romance, of falling in love. What brings men and women together is sex, pure and simple, and there is a crude openness about this. There are many degenerate whites, of course, but some of my white students were capable of real devotion and tenderness, emotions that seemed absent from blacks — especially the boys. (…)
Blacks are extraordinarily quick to take offense. Once I accidentally scuffed a black boy’s white sneaker with my shoe. He immediately rubbed his body up against mine and threatened to attack me. (…)
Pregnancy was common among the blacks, though many black girls were so fat I could not tell the difference. (…)
One tragic outcome among whites who have been teaching for too long is that it can engender something close to hatred. One teacher I knew gave up fast food–not for health reasons but because where he lived most fast-food workers were black. He had enough of blacks on the job.
This was an extreme example but years of frustration can take their toll. Many of my white colleagues with any experience were well on their way to that state of mind.
At some level, my students understand the same thing. One day I asked the bored, black faces staring back at me. “What would happen if all the white people in America disappeared tomorrow?”
“We screwed,” a young, pitch-black boy screamed back. The rest of the blacks laughed.
I have had children tell me to my face as they struggled with an assignment. “I cain’t do dis,” Mr. Jackson. “I black.”
