Tyranny of the Ignorant

Somewhere there is a photo of me, full smile, wearing a blue beaded choker and a Liberty University sweatshirt. I'd borrowed the sweatshirt from my aunt once in high school and ended up keeping it for years. It never occurred to me to look into the place I was endorsing as I moved through the world. Liberty. It had such a nice ring to it. Bright blue letters against this perfect shade of pale, mottled gray. In the same way, I blithely wore maroon and gray, got defensive when someone suggested that my high school, the Lee Rebels, should get rid of the Dixie flag as its symbol. I might have been 14. After all, there were definitely black people at my school, and they seemed OK with it. They were the ones everyone was cheering for running down the football field, waving these flags. My cousin, who I looked up to so much, had the flag hanging in her window. Driving around town, you'd see it frequently. It's how you knew where our team was, our people.

At a panel last week at AWP, I listened to these phenomenal writers and educators talk about addressing race in the classroom. I wished that this had been a discussion on a national stage, instead of a room at a convention center where maybe 80 of us sat listening to Kwame Dawes say that there is a "Tyranny of the Ignorant" in this country, with education enabling its continuation. He said that the main problem of race in the classroom was that the dominant (white) members of our society have "the power to dismiss," because "that history [of blackness] has nothing to do with them. That which they do not understand is inferior." Someone pointed out, too, that white students are underprepared to enter into these conversations, as they "tend to come in with the presumption of centrality," which has been supported by everything they're taught in history and literature and the dominant discourse they've been fed their whole lives.

When I think back to being a teenager--hell, even being a younger adult--I remember having such a foggy sense of why any of this was problematic. I was annoyingly idealistic, sure of my tolerance and perhaps even a bit sanctimonious. At 14, I'd come in 2nd or 3rd for some statewide youth poetry contest for my poem "Parallel Worlds" about an interracial relationship. I wrote it about a boy I'd met at my friend's quinceanera, a boy who tested what he'd heard about white girls being insanely jealous by telling me he'd cheated on me at a party. When I found out he'd lied just to test me, I broke up with him. But that's not in the poem.

I believe that there's a moment in everyone's life where you have to take responsibility for your own ignorance. For me, the trip really began with the Penobscot Chief sizing up my blue-eyed, blonde-haired self just over 10 years ago and telling me that if I wasn't going to do justice to his people's story, he didn't want me here. Reading bell hooks, Tim Wise, James Loewen, Angela Davis, Sherman Alexie, Eduardo Galeano, Edward Said, and others forced me to confront my role and the myriad and minute ways privilege has accrued throughout my life. It's why I want to teach high school and not just college creative writing classes. It's why I needed to sit in that room and hear someone say that it's not those ignorant white kids' fault that they're ignorant (it's not their fault yet). That this is how they've been raised.

But it's how most of us have been raised. And I sit in the staff meeting and see how segregated we adults are in the library. The very few people of color clustered in two groups among a sea of white. On the one hand, I'm glad that it's me in front of these kids, but on the other, I think it's one of the reasons I'll leave. That there aren't efforts to hire more people of color, that I hear the principal call for "the brown man" over her walkie-talkie, a title given to her Indian right-hand man by a child, but so much more offensive in its appropriation by an adult. That when I mention why it's problematic for a woman of color to be sitting in this parent-teacher conference about her daughter, faced with all white teachers and administrators, I see muscles twitch and faces wince. Because I don't give a fuck about their excuses and maintenance of the status quo. Not once they're adults, not when they're responsible for their own lack of change. Writing, literature, poetry, photography are all about communication, about figuring out how to relate to and understand the world and people around you. How long can I be somewhere that refuses to aid that understanding? Because I will teach Gwendolyn Brooks' Lovers of the Poor, and Langston Hughes and Sherman Alexie and Jericho Brown and Art Spiegelman until the cows come home, but if our core curriculum must be Brit Lit and Ayn Rand, and I'm not allowed to order Zora Neale Hurston or use the untouched copies of House on Mango Street... well, there's only so much I can do.