What It’s Like to “Teach” Blacks

This is part of our continuing series of accounts by readers of how they shed the illusions of liberalism and became race realists.

Since the 1980s, I have worked as a teacher in various capacities: high schools, state universities, community colleges; as a substitute and full-time. Below are a few highlights that show what having black students — and liberal administrators — is really like.

High School, Physical Science

Though ostensibly a class for ninth graders, this South Central Los Angeles classroom was mostly black seniors. But even that was theoretical: of 27 enrolled students, average class attendance was ten. Grade inflation was pandemic in this school, and I was in the principal’s doghouse for giving out Ds and Fs to excess. If I had been able to give entirely truthful grades, less than ten percent of my students would have gotten a C or higher. I realized the situation was even more pitiful than I had previously thought when one day I stumbled across some old textbooks published in the 1960s — they made the textbook I was using look like something designed for an elementary school.

State University, Astronomy Lab

In 1993, I had a young black woman in my class whose mother taught at the same university’s school of education. This student showed up for the first two classes, then disappeared until the last lab, when she turned in all her labs at once. This nearly guaranteed that she had copied the labs from a student who had actually participated in them, so I gave her an F. She then demanded a meeting with me. When we met to discuss her grade, her clothes looked like they had been painted on and it was clear she was trying to seduce me. That ploy ended when it became clear I wouldn’t budge. After the meeting, she filed a formal complaint to the university administration. I decided to not fight, and issued her a courtesy C to get her off my back.

Community College, Astronomy

One of the main projects of this class was to draw a map of the constellations. I had given the same assignment to students from another college, so showed my current class some of their work as an example. At some point when my back was turned, the only three black students in the class stole one of these examples, put their names on it, and later turned it in to me — otherwise unaltered — as their own work. I failed all three of them, which infuriated the administration’s ombudsperson, but that time I held my ground.

Public High School, Algebra 1

In January 2001, I received a black transfer student who had special permission to go to the restroom anytime he wanted because of some vague medical condition. The student would go to the restroom immediately after class started and then return just before it ended. When I checked his file for the note, I found a one-page document full of grammatical errors — almost certainly a fake, but I knew the administration wouldn’t look into it. This student also invariably wore his pants so far below his waist that most of his buttocks was exposed — a violation of dress code. Every day for three weeks I would tell him to pull his pants up and put on a belt. Each time he would ignore me, so each time, I sent him to the school’s dean with a write-up for defiance. This ended when I received a letter from the student’s father threatening to sue me, and the school began an internal investigation of my alleged “racial harassment.” After nine months of “investigation,” I was exonerated of any wrongdoing.

At the start of the next school year, one of the administrators who had headed that investigation became school principal. He wasted no time in dubbing me “incompetent” and firing me. This left the school with no AP computer science or physics teacher, but I believe my termination was part of an “out of court” settlement with the man who had threatened to sue.

And Finally

Today I live in an apartment building in a desert town. The southern half is white and the northern half is black. It didn’t take me long to notice the high number of brief 1-2 minute “visits” happening in the northern half, so I began taking notes and writing down license plate numbers. One day, somebody noticed I was doing this, and these incredibly short “visits” dropped to nearly zero. The blacks involved in these visits are now trying to intimidate me. Stray pieces of garbage and junk are thrown at my unit’s windows and walls at night. Sometimes they even set-off firecrackers to scare me. I receive vague verbal threats on occasion as well. But I have no intention of backing down: the sheriff’s department will be getting all my documentation quite soon.

If you have a story about how you became racially aware, we’d like to hear it. If it is well written and compelling, we will publish it. Use a pen name, stay under 1,200 words, and send it to us here.