Not Recommended
Our presence means things are not working as planned. Our success means things have to be changed. I think about that in terms of education and job qualifications. Our entrance into school systems is a devaluation of school systems. Our success in education requires the diminishment of whatever accomplishments we have gained and if that doesn’t work a diminishment of the accomplishments all together. A college degree becomes worth less in our hands so then everyone has to have a Masters. We get them just in time for that qualification to become worth less. The goal post is moved to getting a terminal degree. We get them as well and then they too become worth very little. If we dominate an area it becomes a ghetto, just like when we integrate into housing. The fields in which we work or are channelled into are low-status and low pay. If we enter into a field, it is the signal that it will become low status and low pay. If we enter into a prestige field we are paid less, devalued, and marginalized within the field while we work with people who fail to measure up to us. Keep in mind, we would not be there if we were not exceptional and they could find any excuse to keep us out. But then what is even the point of it because at the end of the day we are making money for people who despise us? We are working hard to make their lives better. With our bare hands we are putting our food the mouths that bite us. It’s quite hard to square.
I have only worked in corporate situations a few times and often as a temp. It’s humiliating knowing that you are working so hard against yourself to make rent. You feel as if you are a rebel working on the Death Star. Even in academia, it was not a good look. Working at an elite PWI all I could see was that I was working so hard to help people who already had all the help they could ever want. Plus the pay was shit, there was no prestige, and no career ladder. I felt should have been helping those who really needed it- or who even needed it a little. I enjoy teaching and I liked teaching at the university level, but it just felt off to me. I should have been working to support a community that would have supported me or people like me in return. I felt like a wasted resource. I rarely met any Black faculty at the places I worked, so I never had a chance to ask them how they felt about fueling the anti-revolution.
It seemed there were not lot of options. Everyone wanted to work in the community colleges, you know, with “real people”. Those jobs were hard to get and often poorly paid, but they provided a sense that you were contributing to a solution. It seemed everyone I ran across would have preferred to teach immigrants, migrants, newcomers, prisoners, people in shelters, hell anyone but the spawn of privlege.
Before teaching higher ed. I worked in a few K-12 schools that were almost exclusively non-white. The lack of resources and poor instruction quality was as astounding as the number of white people who worked there. I imagined they must have all had long commutes and lacked the skills or ability to find jobs in the white communities where they lived because they were sour. I don’t think I had a single African-American teaching colleague in my 2.5 years working in NYC public schools in the South Bronx. There was one mixed-race dude, I think, maybe teaching science or math. A unicorn in 2002. The majority of the teachers were old school Puerto Ricans, New Yorkers through and through with their own sad little Board of Ed. fiefdom. In one or two of the schools the principals or vice principals were black women. They were incredibly ineffective, which was a shock to me until I learned that they had been a product of some kind of government run “academy” that was funneling unseasoned black brown and female teachers into school management positions. This tells you that the white men were done with those positions and the white women knew better than to bother. They were set up to fail; I read somewhere that it is called a glass cliff. The little bit of extra pay was no shield to the intense political attacks and targeted community ire that came with the job. But you know, we love a qualification and we love a chance to get more education. I think they got some kind of diploma stamped with NYCBOE Principal’s Institute. Some kind of diploma that was worthless outside of the 5 boroughs. It reminds me of the Red Diplomas I heard about in Hungary-you could get one just by being in the Party.
The segregation in NYC is real and resistant. You can see it best in the public school systems. I don’t know where the African-American children were and by African-Americans I mean descendants of slaves. Those of us who just go by Black and are now waking up to the folly of BIPOC. Allies is a cute word. I don’t know if we have any. I haven’t seen them. Many of us are not even allies to ourselves. Only a real masochist would join up with the losing team for the long term. Maybe bedfellow is a better term, because after they fuck you and get what they want, they leave the bed with you in it. We definitely have bedfellows.
Still, I wonder what it would have been like to work in a Black school. I had hoped they at least might have had what I imagine is an HBCU feel. I went to an alternative private woman’s college but… Kente flags waving. Fine brothers escorting the children to the cafeteria for a culturally relevant celebration of Blackness. The faculty and staff keeping it real and just respecting the hell out of everyone and doing the ancestors proud. An elderly janitor who was in the movement, he marched with King. The principal had two Phds. Apparently that was not the case. The major Black schools I heard about from my classmates in the Teaching Fellows program were hotter and messier than a hot mess. This is not to say that all majority Black public schools are bad, maybe just that the ones that would be accepting untrained out-of-state teachers-in-training from a scab alternative teacher training program.
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For me at the time, I was 100 percent about teaching ESL so that meant I would be in schools that had large immigrant populations. I did not know that meant in place of non-immigrant populations. They carve it up pretty nicely and from what I observed no one is moving to America to have their kids in a school that is majority black. In fact the only two non-Hispanic/Latinx….ok let’s just make it easy and accurate non- Dominican, Puerto-Rican or Mexican students I had, left the school ASAP. Their families where very new, wised up fast, and booked it to Queens to find their people.
Queens is a hotbed of diversity and was known at that time to have better schools. In fact everything was supposedly better and here we come to it, because of the particular type of immigrant mix pronounced as Asian. We even lost a few teachers from our district to Queens. It was the Holy Grail for the young idealistic ESL K-12 teacher! In Queens you would be teaching in a classroom that mirrored the UN. A modern day Tower of Babel. And those children would want to learn and those parents would pack into the parent teacher conferences, bowing slightly as they entered, and you be showered with small desktop gifts and homemade foodstuffs from around the globe. They came from cultures where a teacher was treated like a god and education was a devout religion. The community would rally around you like in a Bollywood film and everyone would be trying to marry you off to their oldest son who was training to be a doctor-engineer-lawyer. You would teach generations of newcomers and you would be able to speak to them all in their own language at the cultural celebration they invite you to for you have achieved multilingualism by osmosis. You would have a student from countries ending in -stan. You might meet a child political dissidents. You could finally start that community ESL program that would eventually be named after you. I wanted to go, but the subway trip would have been epic and I am probably not the teacher they were looking for. Black-adjacency in any category is not the American Dream.
The teacher in the classroom next door to mine was from Ecuador. She was was not- as they would now say- vibing with the ethnic mix of our school. From what I understood, her immigrant experience was different. It was very much a stranger in a strange land. She did not live in a tight predominantly Ecuadorian community. Only her immediate family was in the US and then only in NYC. And judging by the way she dressed and wore her hair and the way she socialized, she had not assimilated into the dominant NYC Latinx culture. I think my PR and DR colleagues spoke more Spanish with me than her. She was definitely treated as an outsider. She had a care-free air about her that seemed to put people off. I don’t know why, but I am going to make a guess that she was seen as flaky because she had not been beaten down by her world and did not conform. Pretty sure she listened to Rock en Espanol. Know what I am saying? Anyway, I was sad when she went to Queens. It was a loss to our students and the school although- screw the school really. I hated the administration, most of the staff, and the people in the main office. They tried it with me and found that it wasn’t going to work out like they thought. I miss the kids. I have a picture of my class with all us in it. It's one of those official class photos where the kids are in rows and they fight to hold the sign that says our class information. I wish I had brought it with me or digitized it.
