The Great White Hope & The Black and Brown Heroes

September 3, 2006

This upcoming school year will be my mother's last one as a Chicago Public School system high school teacher. For the past 35 years, my mother has been educating the youth of Chicago with hints of wit, loads of laughter, lots of fun, immeasurable knowledge, and most of all, more love for her students than most teachers have for their own biological children. From Gage Park, to Hubbard, to CVS (where she stayed for 15 years at a school nicknamed Crime, Violence, & Sex), to Proctor APC (a school for kids 15-18 who had impossibly low reading and math scores), and finally back to Hubbard, she has taught many of Chicago's Black and Hispanic inner-city teenagers.

But that's now where her story as a teacher begins. Her first teaching assignment at Gage Park was not exactly all she had dreamed off. A product of the revolutionary late 60s and early 70s, my mother had envisioned going into her own community and educating her pupils with a "say it loud, I'm Black and I'm proud" curriculum. Instead, her first teaching assignment was at Gage Park High School, located on Chicago's southwest side in the neighborhood of the same name. Although the school now enjoys the ethnically diverse mix of 61% Hispanic and 38% Black, this was not the Gage Park of 1972-1973. The Gage Park H.S. of the early 1970s was a school that reflected the trying times that the nation had entered. Although many people think only of the 60s as turbulent times, one must acknowledge that with all the trauma the 60s brought, the nation couldn't have possibly healed by the 70s (and it still isn't healed if you ask me). Gage Park H.S. and its surrounding neighborhood were predominantly white and racist. These years brought about the busing experiments done all over the country where, in an attempt to integrate, black children were put on buses and sent to white schools were they were often harassed and generally unwelcome. As the population of Blacks at Gage Park neared 10% the parents of the white students nearly rioted. My mother remembers arriving early each morning to a nearby Black neighborhood where she would pile into a car full of other black teachers, and ride down the middle of the street with police escorts on either side.

My mother allowed her guard down one time while at Gage Park. Walking down the staircase alone, she was cornered by a group of angry white male students. They began to push her from side to side spewing their hateful language. Knowing that she was defenseless against so many of them and not seeing anyone coming to her rescue, my mother resigned herself to be pushed down the steps or worse. Out of the blue, a small group of Arab-American young men came into the staircase and began to fight the white boys. My mother escaped unharmed.

But it was at the Chicago Vocational High School that my mother truly made her mark. Working with the children in the School of Performing Arts from 1983-1998, my mother met and taught many teenagers who changed her life as much as she changed theirs. There, she met characters like Preacher who, at the age of 16, was already an ordained minister with a penchant for pretty girls. Or Nasty Zarif, whose real name was Nasar, but had been renamed Nasty by my mother after she caught him having sex in the bathroom. Lets not forget Ricardo who was one of the best drummers on any high school drumline during his tenure as a Marching Cavalier, but just could not seem to stay out of jail. Then there was Joey who had been one of my mothers favorite students until he pushed her into a wall and she pressed charges on him. There was Chris, the football star, who always seemed a few sandwiches short of a full picnic, and a year after graduating from CVS, murdered his own mother. (I thought back to the time when he locked me in a locker and only released me when Alaina made him. After I exited, shaking and angry, he scooped me up in his arms and carried me around as if he hadn't just tried to kill me!) During Saturday & Summer Social Center, Alaina would take my sister and I into the big gym on the Anthony Wing and teach us how to deepen our voices like cheerleaders do so that everyone at the football games would be able to hear us. Glenda Killingsworth taught me every four-letter word in the dictionary while we sat in the bleachers at Gately Stadium to watch another show-stopping performance by the Cavaliers Marching Band. Then there was the group of guys who, upon being told that I was home with the chicken pox, illegally left school campus, picked up some White Castle hamburgers, and delivered them to my door with a smile and a "get well soon" hug. And one of my personal favorites, Malik Yusef, who had an enormous crush on my mother after she introduced him to poetry and then failed him for the semester. You can hear his voice now at the end of Kanye West's song "Crack Music," and on Carl Thomas' debut album.

I can remember stories of her calming down angry and violent mothers who had just found out that their daughters were pregnant, again. Even now, we can hardly walk through a store without someone yelling "Ms. Carter", rushing over to hug her and asking if THESE are the girls? (Referring to my mother's affinity for constantly discussing my sister and I who were little children when they knew us.) Two weeks ago, she attended the wedding of a young woman who graduate in 1988 and went on to follow my mothers footsteps and become a teacher.

So, as you can see, although my mother is certainly under-appreciated (and underpaid) at times, she has had a rich career as a teacher and honestly won't know what to do with herself once she retires.

Although I could sit and sing my mothers praises all day without tiring, the purpose in telling these stories was not to do that. My mother, like so many Black and Hispanic men and women before her and after her, has dedicated most of her life to helping children who people have written off as hopeless, bad, or doomed. They have given their lives to help their people by helping their children. They have been cursed at, assaulted, underpaid, fired, hired, appreciated, despised, compensated, hated and loved. But through it all, they have endured.

So you can imagine how much it irks me that every few years, there's a brand new movie heralding the latest story of a great white hope. The brave, bold, and caring white teacher who enters the dangerous inner-city school where the students have no respect for themselves or their teachers. They throw things, roll their necks and eyes, tease the teacher mercilessly, but in the end, love those white teachers more than they love their own parents (who are most often drug dealers, doers, prostitutes or just absent). There's "Dangerous Minds", with Michelle Pfeiffer, which was the adaptation of a book by a white woman teacher called My Posse Dont Do Homework. Or "Take the Lead" starring Antonio Banderas where one of his most famous lines is, "All of them expect nothing of you. Prove them wrong." "Music of the Heart" tells the story of a white female teacher who brings joy and hope to her inner-city students by giving them the joy of music. The tagline to that movie being, "She gave them a gift they could never imagine. They gave the system a fight it would never forget."

And then there are the slews of made-for-tv movies that praise these great white hopes. Recently, there was the "Knights of South Side Bronx" which featured Ted Danson as a brilliant chess player who enters the predominantly Black and Hispanic South Side Bronx and teaches children to play chess, therefore teaching them respect. Then there was "The Ron Clark Story" which starred Matthew Perry as the latest savior to minority inner-city youth.

With the exception of "Lean On Me", and "Stand and Deliver", you seldom see stories that reflect the lives and careers of people like my mom, who are the majority of teachers in inner-city areas. Black and Hispanic men and women go into schools everyday in thousands of schools around the country to teach the hell out of subjects that don't even reflect their skin color because that is what they know will help their children to survive in a majority white country. My mother teaches British Literature instead of African-American Literature because she knows that Shakespeare is probably going to be on the ACT even though Larson, Grimke, Chesnutt, Toomer, and Baraka will not. My Mexican-American teacher, Mr. Vargas, taught World History which basically comprised of the white world history because he knew that we'd sooner be asked about King James before were asked about King Montezuma.

At my own high school I watched Black and Hispanic teachers struggle everyday with remedial and special education students without an ounce of recognition and minimal help while Ms. Levine was awarded the prestigious Golden Apple Award after only 4 or 5 years of teaching honors and AP courses. Mrs. Myles, the black orchestra teacher at Curie, founded a mariachi band that was one of the best in the city, but Ms. Wilson, the white dance teacher, was always the one to get recognized at the year's end ceremonies.

But where are the movies congratulating my mother's stories of struggle, redemption, success and triumph? Who will tell her millions of stories? Although teaching is not about the praise one should receive, shouldn't she be recognized for her contributions? Shouldn't there be movies that proclaim how hard she has worked her whole lives? How many lives she's have changed? But there aren't.

Like the movie "World Trade Center" where the hero was turned into a white man even though he was black in real life, Hollywood has quite the proclivity for making us try to believe that heroes only come in white even when the people who need saving are not white. It doesn't matter that the majority of inner-city public school teachers reflect their student's race, only the victorious stories of the few white people who carefully venture into their world are heralded. These couple of white teachers are portrayed as the only hope for the rapidly deteriorating minority children who make up the majority of those schools. The Black teachers are seen as footnotes in these stories and are often portrayed as the disillusioned teachers who have long given up on their students, parents, and communities. They are often viewed as the tired soldiers who only began teaching because "those who can't do, teach", and the whites are the ones seen as the teachers with non-human amounts of enthusiasm who would never give up on these poor and disadvantaged youth. I'm not discounting the white teachers who do their jobs with diligence and love but I don't appreciate the erasure of all the others who have been doing these jobs when blacks went to schools in one-room buildings and were given hand-me-down books that had been used for years by their more advantaged white peers.

Well, I dedicate this blog to all the Black and Hispanic teachers who will start school this year with little fanfare and will never have the opportunity to see their stories portrayed by much more attractive movie stars. I would like them to know that I appreciate their lives and contributions to my life and to the lives of millions of others just like me. To the Joe Clarks, Jamie Escalantes, and Ms. Carters of the world, thank you.