For the last thirteen years, wherever I’ve taught, I’ve always been one of the only teachers of color. Having taught college, high school, and middle school, I’ve navigated each space as “other.” I often feel like an outsider with the very people I work with, in part because so few of them understand what it’s like to regularly be a minority, often the minority.
Every day I walk through crowded hallways: teachers, students, and staff. I rarely, if ever, see a face that looks like mine. A lot of folks experience this, but it’s the bigger picture that matters: American schools continue to be as segregated as they were before the 1954 Supreme Court decision to desegregate them. There are Black communities and white communities, and there continues to be unequal distribution of resources among their education systems. This is nothing new because the racist history of the American education system is bound to the history of racism in America, but it’s important for people to remember that it remains the status quo.
These days, however, the racism is subtle, hidden in microaggressions. Discrimination is coded in policies and politically-correct language: “failing schools” (Black schools), “those students” (Black students), “remedial classes” (Black classes), “low-income communities” (Black communities). These are buzzwords—dog whistles, if you will—and they’re used every single day to describe Black students, the measures employed to discipline them, and the lessons used to teach them, particularly those who attend white schools. And the crux of this, as a Black educator in a school system staffed by primarily white teachers, is that I feel responsible to defend these marginalized students—even though I am also in the margins myself.
If I’m honest, I’m not always thinking about my race when I stand in front of my students. I am their English teacher—only their English teacher. They don’t look at me and see the only Black teacher in the building. And yet my experiences as a person of color are fully tied to who I am as an educator. I used to ask myself if I could teach a book like To Kill a Mockingbird without teaching as a Black man. I wondered how I might react when a student highlighted the n-word, saying, “Mr. Loeb, look, it’s your favorite word!”
I feel responsible to defend these marginalized students—even though I am also in the margins myself
For everything I’ve written about my experience in high school, I currently teach at the high school I attended. Even though that was twenty years ago, not much has changed. In many ways, I move through this building the same way I did back then then, my past curriculum on loop. I dole out old copies of classics: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Crucible, Romeo and Juliet, Catcher in the Rye, twenty years of dates and lists of kids’ names crossed out. Even the same teachers are here, grayed and wrinkled, still lecturing the same lectures: Christopher Columbus, a renowned explorer. Andrew Jackson, a war hero. Thomas Jefferson, a visionary. Still these versions of a tainted America. And still diversity is lacking. Black and brown kids remain on the margins, peppered in one or two seats in the classroom. Sometimes, I look at those kids, and it’s like they see through me. Without saying anything, we know we don’t belong here.
As much as our society has changed since I was a boy, this place has stayed the same. It is a throwback to an American culture that, for many people, is in demand today; it is the perfect picture of “Make America Great Again,” or more simply: it’s just white.
This small non-diverse town in New Jersey is where I’m from, and for many reasons, too many parts of America are still very similar. As a boy of Black and Jewish descent, I clearly did not fit in with my classmates with my black, curly hair, brown skin, and thick lips. I was a thorough mix of Judeo-African heritage. Going through old class pictures, the kids lined up by height, the teacher on the end of the cast of students, I was always the only brown face, teacher and students included, meaning that the only people of color I saw with any regularity were family members, and the few other non-white kids in school. This was especially obvious in middle and high school, when children and teenagers began to understand how and why they all looked alike.
I questioned why my parents moved here, but for the twenty-plus years that we lived in this town, they argued one point: good schools. Today I wonder how a good school can also be the place where kid after kid asks their only Black classmate why Black people do whatever it is they think Black people do? How can a good school also be a place where that kid’s white teachers ask him why Black people can say the n-word in rap songs and they can’t? I’ll never forget that time during my sophomore year when we watched Roots in U.S. History, and my classmates stared at me as if I was an oddity, a spectacle, as Kunta Kinte was lashed. Or those Friday nights when I attended football games and my peers drove pick-up trucks adorned with fifteen-foot Confederate flags to the mounts, those flags waving in the breeze of an autumn night as Lynyrd Skynyrd blasted from a radio..
These things happened to me then, and they’re still happening to Black kids in white schools today. I used to fantasize that had been lucky enough to have had a Black teacher at my school, they would have understood what I was going through. This could have made a tremendous impact on my education. Having a Black teacher matters because even the most sympathetic white teacher in an entire school doesn’t understand what it’s like being Black in America. That’s something only Black people can appreciate.
Even the most sympathetic white teacher in an entire school doesn’t understand what it’s like being Black in America
I returned to this community to be the teacher I never had. I returned to find that boy I was, a teenager who sometimes felt afraid in this hostile place and also angry to be the other. I came back home, even though it did not always feel like home because I wanted to make a change. I believe a school like mine in a community like this needs teachers like me. And as much as my Black students need representation, they need to identify with the teacher in front of them, my white students need Black teachers too.
New Jersey teachers of color make up 16% of the state’s teacher workforce, and because the Black population in my town was almost nonexistent, this number was even smaller. In comparison, other communities where minority students are the majority are still educated by people who, for the most part, don’t look like them. Representation matters, especially in education. New Jersey, the most densely populated state in America, has a real shortage of Black teachers, but even across the nation, Black teachers still remain among the most underrepresented demographics in teaching compared to their percentage of the general population — and the student population.
I think the reason is a self-fulling prophecy – Black kids don’t have Black teachers, so they don’t consider it a viable career path. From kindergarten through high school, I never had any Black teachers. As a student who struggled academically and behaviorally, I know this was partly due to the racism and microaggressions I experienced. I was ostracized by my peers for being different, and my challenges were not recognized by teachers, administrators, and guidance counselors. But what if there had been even one teacher who understood how I felt? How would have that changed my educational trajectory? To be seen, to be valued—these things matter. I became a teacher in spite of what happened to me, almost spitefully, to say I will be the minority teacher for the minorities. But I’ve also spent the majority of my career in white schools, in white spaces. They are all I know. I am a product of a good American education, I teach at “good schools,” and am also very much a cog in this gear of a broken education system.
Growing up, I remember watching countless renditions of teacher-centered film and television: Boy Meets World, Dead Poets Society, Dawson’s Creek, Mr. Holland’s Opus, among many others, and the white teachers of those shows and movies seemed to be the idealization of what education looked like. It didn’t look like me, and I never saw myself. On the contrary, Black education has often been portrayed by struggle: Lean on Me, Dangerous Minds, Freedom Writers. The problem is that if you continue to only show Black people in education as one thing, that is what people believe.
But what if America could see all that Black teachers can do? What if, instead of portraying the same stereotypes of Black education and Black students in film and television, you showed Blackness as central to the success of these students? What if these shows celebrated race without being defined by it? Through film and television, I knew some great Black teachers: Mr. Hightower (The Steve Harvey Show), Mr. Cooper (Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper) and Sister Mary Clarence (Sister Act).
Their race is part of the narrative but it’s never the driving force
That shift is happening now, specifically, the depiction of Black schools and Black educators in the award-winning series, Abbott Elementary. These characters, Janine Teagues (Quinta Brunson), Gregeory Eddie (Tyler James Williams), Barbara Howard (Sheryl Lee Ralph), and Ava Coleman (Janelle James) are Black educators who are not defined by their Blackness. Their race is part of the narrative but it’s never the driving force. And this is what Black kids need; I’d argue this is what all of us need. We need to see Black educators in schools, positively portrayed in schools. We need to see that Black schools, like the fictional Abbott Elementary in Philadelphia, can be great schools.
Abbott Elementary proves that schools serving majority Black and brown student populations not only deserve the best teachers, but also that those teachers have an important story to tell. Quinta Brunson, a product of the public school system in Philadelphia, defies the genre of American comedy by avoiding the racial and socio-economic stereotypes. Brunson recognizes place: Abbott Elementary is loudly and proudly Philadelphian, as is Brunson herself; She honors its people, like Philly-proud Melissa Schemmenti (Lisa Ann Walter), and she renders the very real experiences of being a teacher with humor and authenticity: parent-teacher conferences, field trips, the PTO, classroom management, the board of education—and never does she ever exploit stereotypes for a laugh. On the contrary; she leans in, doubling down on storytelling that is both Black but is also universal. She grounds her characters in their humanity. I believe her nuanced writing will create more teachers, much like Glee did.
I see the ghost of myself sitting in a chair in the back of the classroom
I’ve been in a classroom for most of my life. As both a teacher and a student, I have felt both invisible and hyper visible because of the color of my skin. I have been challenged and have battled with my race since I was a boy and still as a man. Even though I have been teaching for over a decade, I am still looking for representation in education. I do not have a Black colleague in my school, but I do have Gregory Eddie in Abbott Elementary, which helps me feel seen, especially as a Black male teacher. Gregory Eddie is epitome of what a teacher should be, what kind of teacher I want to be, one that is just driven by a love for simply teaching kids. All of which has nothing to do with Mr. Eddie’s Blackness, and yet, seeing a Black man in this role, fiction or nonfiction, will be paramount in some boys’ sense of self.
Sometimes when I’m in front of my students, I see the ghost of myself sitting in a chair in the back of the classroom. I see that kid I was, a teenager with a head of zig-zagging cornrows, a pair of baggy jeans, a FUBU jersey, Timberland boots. I see a kid who stood out because he was different but how he tried to hide but couldn’t. I see him sitting there and how he pretends to listen but isn’t, how he avoids my stare when I ask for a volunteer to answer a question. I see this boy, and I can tell he’s angry and wants to tell someone something, but he doesn’t. His eyes connect with mine, but then he looks away because he knows saying it isn’t worth it; he knows that no one will listen. I want to stop my lesson—lecturing on Of Mice and Men, on how Crooks was really the hero—and tell him that everything will be okay, that I’ll listen. I’ll care, even if other teachers don’t. I’ll tell him that despite the guidance counselor who told him not to apply to college, that despite the bodies that he bruised, and that bruised him when those kids called him the n-word; despite the classes he failed and all the times he was called down to the vice principal’s office, even though he barely is going to graduate high school, he will return to this place to be the teacher he never had.
