Norman Rockwell, “The Problem We All Live With”
Monday – Martin Luther King Day
As today is the Martin Luther King Holiday and tomorrow I begin teaching, I am posting a Clint Smith poem about being the only African American student in a mostly white classroom. Published recently in Watershed Review, it reminds me of Langston Hughes’s well-known poem “Theme for English B.”
Smith mentions the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case that required all schools in the country to desegregate. As someone who was born in 1951 and raised in southern Tennessee, I can report that the schools in my county had still not complied with the Court’s ruling by 1960. As a result, I was a plaintiff in a lawsuit, brought by four black families and four white on behalf of their children. The suit said that we were being denied our rights to attend integrated schools.
I’ve described how we won the case and how the first black students began attending Sewanee Public School in 1962. It seemed like a miracle to me when Ronnie Staten, the only black kid in seventh grade, walked into my class. I find it no less miraculous these days that my white and black students take it for granted that they are in classes together. I had assumed, as a child, that segregation would always be with us.
Of course, much remains to be accomplished, as Smith’s poem points out. Like “Theme for English B,” his poem complains that assumptions are still made about African Americans based on their skin color. Everything is filtered through racial stereotypes.
Speaking as a teacher, I go out of my way not to engage in stereotyping. When one pays close attention to students responding to works, as I do, one sees them in their full individuality. That being said, there is one universal that I can fairly accurately predict: virtually all of my students of color have run up against racial stereotyping somewhere along the line. This is something we do talk about in my classes.
Smith, incidentally, has given a TED talk on “how to raise a black son in America” and he has taught black convicts in the prison system. He knows up close how one can descend from stardom to asteroid dust.
Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class
By Clint Smith
You, it seems,
are the manifestation
of several lifetimes
of toil. Brown v. Board
in flesh. Most days
the classroom feels
like an antechamber.
You are deemed expert
on all things Morrison,
King, Malcolm, Rosa.
Hell, weren’t you sitting
on that bus, too?
You are every-
body’s best friend
until you are not.
Hip-hop lyricologist.
Presumed athlete.
Free & Reduced sideshow.
Exception and caricature.
Too black and too white
all at once. If you are
successful it is because
of affirmative action.
If you fail it is because
you were destined to.
You are invisible until
they turn on the Friday
night lights. Here you are
star before they render
you asteroid. Before they
watch you turn to dust.