BLACK PEOPLE SHOULD STAY IN THEIR PLACE

Like Black folks strolling in church on an Easter Sunday wearing their fly suits...I'm LATE.  Late, delayed, missing in action..I have vanished from the scene of writing entries to this blog.  Quite honestly, I'm flattered by the number of emails I've gotten saying, "What's going on with the students?"..."I need some comedy from your school stories"  Simply, they want to know ...WHERE HAVE I BEEN ONLINE?  Well, just like you, I am juggling this thing called life, plus I am trying to juggle the lives of my countless students too.

I made it through the first year pretty darn good and was thinking to myself, "ahh, my second year is going to be much smoother".  Well, I got a big "HELL to the NAWH" newsflash on my forehead as I entered my second year a few months in September.  I arrived on my first day back at school and was notified by administration that the class I taught last year (public speaking) was being replaced by more "regents based/academic" courses (aka more chemistry classes..forensics, etc).  I honestly had tears in my eyes because my passion was teaching these kids how to speak up logically about hidden concepts of racism, classism, and injustice in politics...not about protons and neutrons.  HOW WAS I GONNA TALK ABOUT POLICE BRUTALITY in a lab coat analyzing petri dishes and friggin' beakers?

but there is a God...

Two weeks into school, they asked me to teach a senior English class.  I now have 18 year olds who have a few months before they are responsible for themselves in the real world.  So, along with Chemistry, freshman Biology and a Social Studies course (YES, I feel like an immigrant working 1,001 jobs), I also teach one general education English class, and I have been touched on many levels from working with them. 

The first day of class, I did a "getting to know you" exercise.  We were deep into the intriguing game, and suddenly I decided to let them ask me anything they wanted to within a two minute window. (why in the world did I decide to do that...non-thinking teacher move #1! ha).  I like to be as transparent with my kids as possible without it being disrespectful and thought it was going to be cool.  I got the basic questions ALLLL my students always want to know.."am I married? do I have kids? do I have a man? why do i talk funny ..they like my southern accent."  Then I was asked a question I never had been asked before....A young man said, "Hey Ms. Thompson, when did you lose your virginity?"  I think if I were white or even light skin I would have turned burgundy from surprise!  I didn't get mad because the reason why he said he asked is because he felt as if too many young girls lose their virginity too young and conduct themselves like sluts, and he wanted to know if having sex at a young age was "Good"?

So here was my opportunity to turn his question into a lesson.  We discussed double standards in society and why was it more readily accepted in society for a guy to start having sex at a younger age, but for the women to "save themselves"?  It was a wonderful discussion and I think they understood what type of atmosphere the class was going to have...a brutally honest, transparent, and critical thinking tank.

So from there...I told them every Friday, we were going to have a "Critical Think Tank"..I would give them 5-6 days to write a critical response to the "question of the week" I would throw out, and then we would verbally discuss it out the following Friday.

So ya'll, we've had about 4-5 think tank sessions ranging from "is love a choice or emotion".."is marriage necessary..why not just live together?...has racism improved or gotten worse? are you pro-life/pro-choice regarding abortion? ..and their views of the death penalty.

This blog entry was simply to introduce you the sane, insane, sad, profound responses to these "questions of the week" from my students that you will read in the upcoming days and weeks.  As judgemental as I sometimes want to be with them, I have to ask myself, what was I thinking at 17/18 years of age? What were you thinking?

All I know is this...I threw out the question for  this week "Is America ready for a Black President?"  There was one reaction from an African American guy named Fred that made my blood pressure shoot up.  "Ms. Thompson, only a White person is capable of running this country, I just think Black people should stay in their place."  He was DEAD serious.  I honestly don't think I've felt that strange fusion of fury and sadness since my first heartbreak.

then the bell rang before I had time to yoke him up. 

We will discuss his comment and question this upcoming Friday...the last Friday before history is bound to take place in the United States.  Thank God our ancestors did not just "stay in their place."  They kept moving.  They refused to live the life they were told they had to live.

Are you aimlessly running on a treadmill or on a path you created which leads to a destination?  

Keep moving and Go Barack.

"Just wait 'til tonight"--VALENTINE'S DAY @ my school

“I need money so that I can use it to buy liquor and hopefully two strippers will take me home and molest me”. If you’ve been near the Macy’s by Penn Station in NYC then you’ve seen this or you're bound to see it. Well, as I’m on my phone walking from Penn Station, I stopped in mid conversation with thee most perplexed look on my face after I saw a rugged homeless man holding up a sign with the statement above. My mouth hit the ground and I started chuckling out of disbelief and comedy. The homeless man and I caught eyes and we both started smiling. It was at that point that I casually said aloud to myself, “only in New York”…and I didn’t even really break a stride. At that point, I think I officially branded myself a New Yorker and I realized how much I appreciate the brutal honesty of folks, well to a degree…including the honesty of my kids on what is considered by most the “love day” of the year….Valentine’s Day.

So it’s February 14…I head to school feeling pretty good because as I get older I refuse to buy a ticket to the “Single’s pity party” sponsored by Hallmark. Whether I’m single or with someone, I don’t really get too giddy about Vday…hell, it’s just another day, but my kids did not see it that way.

As soon as the first bell rang (I don’t have a first period class), I step out in the hall to go to the front office and I couldn’t even see to the end of the hall due to the clusters of inflated balloons, huge cards, teddy bears that people could not fit in their lockers! It looked like a flea market and everybody was a bootleg vendor spitting outrageous comments such as “look what I got”…”can’t nobody top my gift”…”you should see what’s inside the card”.

Often, when I’m not dressed up, I blend in with the crowd and especially on this day I was hidden behind tons of balloons and I heard some comments that I SURELY did not want to hear. “ohhhh, girl, wait ‘til tonight…he doesn’t know what sweet is until he tastes me” and then laugher erupts from a group of fast girls. (I felt my chest tightening from the raw comments of 15 year olds).

There were dudes carrying flowers and giving it to girls, but should I have been disturbed when I peeped the MAD game of one of my students named RJ (I’ll call him that for now)? Before I tell you the story, you need a visual of him. RJ stands about 6’3, brown-skinned dude with a full lined beard, deep tsunami waves …and he’s 15. The girls pine over him like skeeters to a porch light. (yes we say skeeters and not mosquitoes down south…smile). Anyway, so I see RJ come in the room with two huge bags and his book bag. I say, “RJ, why all the bags?” He responds with, “Well, I have a lot of gifts today Ms. Thompson, you know I gotta to show my love.” I thought to myself…ohhhhh okay, he is GIVING the gifts to a girl, how sweet of him!” However, RJ had one bag of full of Godiva chocolates he was distributing out to the girls he knew were going to get him stuff...and recycling chocolates that girls gave to him to give to OTHER GIRLS!!!!

Then in the other hand he had a footlocker back with a box of Jordan’s, a jump man sweatshirt, and about 3-4 boxes of candy and a stash of cards he had not opened yet. He was collecting gifts in one bag and distributing from the other but his chocolates didn’t compare with the friggin’ wardrobe girls were lacing him with! I asked him about the difference in content of the bags. RJ says, “Ms. Thompson, they all know the deal, they know I don’t stay on lock with one girl that I have enough love for everybody:”

I laughed and thought to myself ”times have changed!” What happened to the cards with the sucker attached that said, “be mine” like in grade school? Or I was even shocked dudes were handing out gifts when we are clearly living in the times of “I’m too cool to show girls I like them” era. Also, where were these kids getting money to buy Jordan’s when they are not old enough to really work?...and then the guy is not even their “exclusive” boyfriend??? It was as if the girls were trying to compete with each other with the caliber of gifts to see who would win the man?

Now surprisingly enough, the feminist in me decided to fall back on that day and just observe. Did it eat me up that the girls were starting at such a young age trying to buy affection? Yes. Did it reveal to me that their level of self-worth was “possibly” reduced due to the increase of competition in pursuit of “what they thought was a man”? Did it bother me that our young men were glorifying a “pimp-like” persona and being praised for playing the field? Did it bother me that the girls were 100% and fully aware that they were all vying for one man and didn’t care about how this could possibly play out? Or did they not care? Were they so blatantly honest, yet foolishly, aware of their actions that they didn’t care about the consequences? Or where they too young to even see how it could unravel? Or was I an adult who was once jaded who couldn’t see that maybe these kids were purely just showing their adoration for a person without all the complicated emotions? Or were they like the homeless man outside of Penn Station who discarded all pride…did not have one ounce of shame and showcased their honest feelings?

Part of me values brutal honesty because it reveals that you don’t really care how the world judges you and you will say what you have to say, but to what expense? Will the cost be that it will tarnish your reputation…something that we all have and can be used as a discriminatory or promotional tool in life. Is the “f*ck the world attitude, I will say and do what I want to and when I want to” personality lowering the standards of the basic human respect that we “should” have for each other? Is anything acceptable now? Technically what are the standards and who are they set by? I could go on for days asking rhetorical questions, but all I know is that kids mimic what they see in their households, in media, and within their environment. If the adults and visible government officials are acting like Rolling Stones (ranging from Kilpatrick, Clinton to unfit fathers and mothers)…if the “popular music” is so embedded with misogynistic and powerless images of “women flocking to men, losing their minds if they don’t have one, of them using their bodies to get what they want” etc, then it’s no wonder that some of the girls can’t wait to get out of their last period class to see who they can “suck off for a Vday present afterschool”…(yes, that is just another comment I heard while being suffocated in the balloon infested hallway).

Anyway..now some of my outrageous female colleagues will say that a person’s actions, especially a woman’s actions with her body, does not reduce her as a person and it can be an empowering thing. They know who I’m talking about and I’m not using this blog to go into that saga; however, just know this….we are talking about 13-17 year old KIDS who are doing the actions of adults with no real comprehension of how the story will unfold while using Vday as an excuse to act even more of a fool. For once, Valentine’s Day made my heart heavy because it was broken by the actions of people that were mine (my kids), not by someone who I wanted to be mine. I have to ask myself again…was it just another day?

AMIR...oh AMIR...

This situation deserves a blog of its own. It’s still Valentine’s Day and a fellow teacher came running into the teacher’s lounge completely appalled by what one of her male students said to her. Ms. Bino is not particularly liked by many students because she’s real serious. Her student, (I’ll call him Amir for anonymity), walks into class and the conversation unravels like this:

Amir: “Ms. B, happy Valentine’s Day”
Ms. B: “Thanks.”
Amir: “So do you have a boyfriend to spend this day with?”
Ms. B: “That is absolutely NONE of your business.”

**at this point, he has her where he wants her…very uptight and flustered”

Amir: “Well it’s obvious you don’t a boyfriend because you are so damn uptight and if you did have one, obviously he’s not piping your right.”

(THE ENTIRE CLASSROOM falls out laughing and apparently she turns red and told him that was inappropriate to say)

So when she’s telling me this in the lounge, she said, “Well, Sabrina it’s not like he cursed me out and said F*ck you”…

I was thinking what kind of rationale is THAT?

My comment to her was this…”neither one is/was acceptable and that kid knows who to pull that stunt with…in your case you should have kicked him out and had him go to detention”

He knows that I would have had hemmed his left ankle next to his throat in a WWF move and dared him to tell his parents or administration. The crazy thing is I’m not even laughing…

WHEN SILENCE FILLS THE ROOM....

During my senior year of high school in 1996, I didn’t have the normal experience of going through the whole college essay writing and application process because I was going to be an athlete on scholarship. Sure, we filled out paperwork, but it was more or less a contract of me signing my friggin’ freedom away for the next 4-5 years. So when Shemar came up to me asking me can I proof is college essay, little did I know that by the end of the day I would be in tears and not having the answer AT ALL for the one question he’d been asking himself for years.

Remember Shemar from a few blogs back titled “CHERRY PUMPS”..you know the openly gay student I witnessed stomping the hell out of someone in a gang fight? Yeah him…well, he zealously came up to me asking me to review his college essay to make sure it was worthy to submit. Although they have college advisors for this and an English dept head to do this, I had some time to kill and decided to help him out.

“When I was eight years old, my mom had a nervous breakdown and this sparked a life of trouble for me” was the first line of the paper. Honestly, I was expecting to read a generic essay of “why do I want to go to Penn State or what do I want to be in life” type of essay so, of course, the first line peaked my interests. Without going through the letter line by line..here’s the content of the essay in a nutshell.

Shemar’s mother had a nervous/mental breakdown when he was 8 years old and she was placed in a home to treat her illness. Since Shemar and his younger sister did not have any other family that lived in New York, foster care came and took them and they were placed in a group home. At this point, Shemar had to be the mother, father and protector of his 6 year old sister in a foreign setting. He felt in his heart that his mom would not be getting better and that he had to be strong for both of them. They were passed around from home to home for several years until their unknown grandma comes into the picture. The grandmother takes them into her home and things seem fine. At the age of 12, Shemar finds out who his real father is and he and his sister go to stay with him for awhile. Little to Shemar’s knowledge, his father had been molesting and raping young children for years and he was his next victim…his own son. After months of his father molesting him, he ran away from his father’s home but his sister wanted to stay because it “seemed” better for her (the father was not abusing her..just Shemar). The father is convicted, both Shemar and his sister end up back at the grandmother’s home where he finds out she is now a raging alcoholic. One night, she beats Shemar so bad that he is hospitalized around the age of 14ish. She is locked up and Shemar and his sister are split up. Shemar goes to a program called KinCare, something in the realms of foster care with one of your relatives. Anyway, he is placed with an unknown cousin who is unfit to really take care of him because she is a young mother of 4 kids. Shemar ends up taking on fatherly roles and feeding, bathing, escorting the kids to school, taken a part-time job to support the kids, but he is fed up and runs away. His school work and attendance take a toll and at this point he is 16 and wants to be emancipated. He is currently emancipated, comes to school more regularly and knows college is his only way out of Brooklyn, where he lives alone and I’m still trying to figure out how he supports himself..food, shelter, clothing…you know, the bare essentials. SIDENOTE: Lord, I pray it’s not anything illegal with him soliciting himself…(I have my reasons for this comment.)

Basically, the essay revealed all of this and told of his struggle in life and how he deserves to be admitted into college because he has beat the odds of being a black male either locked or a statistic. Although the letter was jam packed with grammatical errors, it was loaded with raw emotion, honesty and passion to proceed.

After I asked him about the story in detail and I commended him on his willingness to be openly gay and to be so confident in his writing, expression and personality, he said to me with watery eyes, “..but Ms. Thompson, I don’t want to be gay. How do I not be gay?”…

Silence filled the room and I stopped breathing for what seemed like eternity. For once I was speechless and had no earthly idea of who, what and how I should approach the question laid before me. I simply said to myself, “Lord Jesus”..and begin to cry. We were both crying and after a few moments I told him that he will look back on this moment after he’s graduated from college and know more answers. I didn’t want to pacify him and give him some generic, philosophical/theoric, biblical, or biological answer because really, I had no clue and who really does? I told him to focus on the immediate future and that is to get his essay to be spotless and to submit it. He should know if he was accepted into the schools he applied for in the near future. Pray for Shemar and sadly the countless other kids in the world walking in his shoes.