WVOL, Nashville’s so-called urban station, always making a point not to go to sleep until I had heard Parliament’s “Theme From the Black Hole,” or something, anything, by Kurtis Blow.
I had actually been the first person in my school, white or black, to memorize every word to the fourteen-minute version of “Rapper’s Delight” (the first major rap hit, though purists dispute the legitimacy of its pedigree and performers, the Sugar Hill Gang). My friends and I would have rap battles to see who could get through the latest song without forgetting any of the words. I usually won these rather handily.
But all this cross-cultural competence didn’t endear me to the white teachers, many of whom had been teaching long enough to remember (and prefer) the days when white faces were the only ones in front of them; and by God those white folks had known what it meant to be white—and what it surely didn’t mean was beatboxing.
One teacher in particular quite clearly despised me. Mrs. Crownover, who was my teacher for Language Arts (literature and English class), spoke to me in a voice that barely concealed her contempt, and looked at me with an expression similar to that which one makes around rotting food. When she gave me a D in the class for the second grading period of fifth grade, my mother was stunned. Given that it was a reading class and I had been reading since before I was three, it made little sense that I would have done so poorly. Frankly, I hadn’t been doing my best work. I found the class boring and her lessons tedious, so I knew I wouldn’t be getting a good grade; but a D seemed extreme, even with my lackadaisical effort.
When my mother went to meet with Mrs. Crownover to discuss my grade and find out if there was anything she needed to be worried about in terms of my own effort, focus, or reading skills, it became clear that the grade had been largely unrelated to my effort or ability; rather, it was principally connected to how she felt about my social circle. As Mrs. Crownover told my mom, “Any white parent who sends their child to public schools nowadays should have their heads examined.”
As it turns out, this would prove to be a not-so-incredibly bright career move on Mrs. Crownover’s part. Standing up for my friendships and her own principles, my mother took action, getting together with a few other parents and demanding a sit-down with the principal. Within a matter of weeks, Mrs. Crownover had mysteriously and quite unceremoniously disappeared, at first to be replaced by a series of substitute teachers, and finally, the next year, by someone else altogether. An extended sabbatical, and I believe an early retirement (though not early enough), was to be her much deserved fate.
On the one hand, an act of antiracist resistance such as this is worthy of praise. My mom did what she should have done, and what any white parent in that situation should do. But there is an interesting aspect to this story that is equally worthy of attention, and which demonstrates that even in our acts of allyship we sometimes miss the larger issues. Yes, my mother had resolved to get the individual racist teacher in this instance removed. So far so good. No longer would she be free to work out her own personal damage on children. There would be one less teacher at Stokes carrying around the deep-seated conviction that black children were inferior to the white children she apparently felt should have all fled to private schools at the first sign of integration.
But with that excision accomplished, there remained a far more dangerous institutional cancer operating in the heart of the school that I shared with those black friends of mine. When I returned to class after Mrs. Crownover’s removal, I was still attending a school system that was giving the message every day that blacks were inferior. The school had never needed this one teacher to impart that lesson; it was implicit in the way the school system had been tracking students for five years by then, placing blacks almost exclusively in remedial or standard level tracks while placing most all white students in advanced tracks, or so-called “enrichment” programs, as if those with privilege needed to be made richer in terms of our opportunities. And neither my mother nor I, with all those close friends, had said anything about that racism.
Even in sixth grade, when the racialized nature of tracking became blatant, I wouldn’t catch it. My primary teacher that year, Mrs. Belote, would literally wave her hand, about mid-way through fifth period, signaling to the white kids that it was time for our V.E. class (which stood for, I kid you not, “Very Exceptional”) down the hall. We would quietly rise and depart the integrated classroom like a receding tide of pink, leaving a room filled with black kids who couldn’t have missed what was happening, even though we did. We never thought about it once at the time, friendships or no.
In other words, even as my mother had stood up against the obvious bigot, she had dropped the ball, just like everyone else, when it came to confronting institutional racism. My closeness with black people hadn’t protected them from that system, and hadn’t allowed me to see what was happening, let alone resolve to fix it, at least not yet.
OF COURSE, THERE were a few exceptions to the racialized tracking scheme at Stokes and throughout the Nashville public schools. Typically there would be one or two black females in the enrichment classes but rarely ever a black male. One of the black females in particular is worth reflecting upon, as her experience demonstrates quite clearly the absurdity of racism as a national and even global phenomenon. During that fifth grade year, she was the one black student who was consistently placed in the advanced track. Her name was Rudo Nderere, and she and her family had recently come to the United States from Zimbabwe, arriving, if memory serves, before it actually became Zimbabwe—when it had still been Rhodesia, a racist, white supremacist and apartheid state, much like South Africa.
White teachers loved Rudo, and on several occasions I would hear them commenting upon how intelligent she was (which was true), and how articulate she was (also true), and how lovely her accent was (absolutely inarguable, as the Southern African accent is among the most pleasant in the world). But of course there were also native-born blacks in that school, and in those same teachers’ classrooms, who were every bit as brilliant and articulate. But the teachers rarely saw that, which is why their astonishment at Rudo’s articulateness was so implicitly racist: it suggested that such a characteristic was somehow foreign to black people, that the ability to speak well was a white trait that no black person had ever managed to possess before.
In any event, what was fascinating about the way Rudo was viewed in that Nashville middle school is how utterly different the perception of her—the very same her, with the same intelligence, accent, and ability to string words together in coherent sentences—would have been, and indeed had been in her native country. In Rhodesia, from which place she had just recently departed, she would have been seen as inferior, no matter her genius. She would have been a second-class citizen, her opportunities constrained, all because of color. But in America, she could be viewed as exotic, as different, as capable. She could be contrasted with local black folks who were perceived as less capable, as aggressive, as uninterested in education, as inferior.
Many years later I would realize the process at work here—the way that foreign-born blacks are often played off against native-born African Americans in a way that has everything to do with racism and white supremacy. Reading a story in my local paper about a white church in town that had been working with Sudanese refugees to help them find jobs, child care, and various social services, I was struck by one of the statements made by the church’s pastor. When asked why the church had gone to such lengths to help African migrants, but had never done similar outreach with local black families in need of the same opportunities, the pastor noted that in some ways it was probably because the Africans were so grateful to be here. They had chosen to come, after all. They had wanted to be like us, like Americans. Native-born black folks on the other hand had made no such choice, and they regularly contested the dominant narrative about what America means and has long meant. African Americans, in other words, were pushy and demanding, and felt entitled (imagine that) to the fruits of their prodigious labors throughout the generations. But African immigrants
