Learning While Black

I had an interesting conversation with my cousins on Facebook the other day. As they are biracial, it was conscious raising to learn about their experiences in high school and compare them both to mine. One of the first common threads is that high school can be a psychologically traumatizing spot for anybody. But in our three cases, we experienced racism in three different ways. In their case, they had to negotiate the taunts of being biracial. In fact the quote that inspired this post was when one of my cousins was referred to as "the Black guy who dated someone's sister." This to him may have been innocuous, however when I saw many of his friends posts, it looked as though they were trying to say, don't sweat the small stuff. Me, being probably too deep was like, there is nothing to sweat, and yeah, you are at least 1/2 African American...As his sister chimed in, she gave more of the back story. They both went to pricy private schools, but it broke the household in the process. She to an all girls school and being a true ethnic minority in a heterogenous gendered school, her Black Consciousness may have been more magnified. He on the other hand went to a school where the marginalization was more economic. Maybe he was taught that race doesn't exist there. At least that's his thought pattern today. For me, the racism was twofold and really more institutional. I was a freshman in high school in Knoxville, TN. My English grades in high school were lousy. I blame that on the fact that the teacher and I simply didn't get along. That said, my standardized test scores for English reflected something totally different. I placed in the 95 percentile of American students for mastery of the English language for my age group. Because my test scores were slow getting to my new high school (which was out of state) the guidance folks placed me where the existing data recommended; remedial English. In this classroom, in my adult opinion, I think this is where they placed the students who were behavioral problems. The learning in this room was minimal. Because I spoke in un-accented English and I crushed the assignments in the class, I was labeled the little professor by one of the Black students. I was called Oreo on a regular basis until finally me and the other Black child in the class got into a shoving match. The disinterested white teacher took us both like two animals by the scruffs of our necks off to the vice principal's office. There we received our paddling and went back to class. Finally when my scores arrived, I was placed in an appropriate English course, accelerated. But here, I was the only one, and viewed as the anomaly, I was trying to be white....
Today, some 28 years later, I tell my students linguistics has little to do with race and more to do with being literate. I wish someone told me that in 1984.