Fear is black

Summer school offers school administrators an opportunity to see prospective hires do model lessons. A candidate for a teaching position may look great on paper, they may interview very well, but until you've seen them in an actual classroom setting, you're missing an important piece of the bigger picture.

Enter Ms. Herman. We're looking for someone to teach 7th grade language arts next year, and as my summer position is teaching 6th and 7th grade language arts, she did a model lesson in my class this morning to demonstrate her teaching skills.

I will be mercifully quiet about my own evaluation of those skills. However, I have some commentary.

She was asking kids to make a poem using similes and metaphors about how they feel (yeah, I know, *yawn*). Her sample poem was about fear. For the poem's first line, she was asking kids to compare the emotion to a color. "What color do you think of when you think of fear? What color is fear?" she inquired of my ultra-quiet class. Moments of silence passed, as I knew it would. I wondered what kids would say. When R. raised his hand, I was sure what would come out of his mouth, bracing myself for it, and I was right.

"Fear is black," he said.

Are you thinking what I was thinking?

Ok, ok, ok... I know, I know... You might think I'm being too politically correct, etc., etc. But this is one of those teachable moments that you just can't pass up. This was a moment to talk to the class about the innate racism of language (how white is pure and clean and black is evil and dirty, for example). This was a moment to talk about why R. thought of the color black when he thought of fear - and, to be fair, probably a lot of people would think the same thing. You have to understand also, though, that in my summer school class there is one black kid. Just one. And in the entire middle school, grades 6 through 8, he is 1 of 2. And when he came to my school in the middle of the year, a school that is 95% Latino, he went through hell just for being black (his classmates called him dirty, they called him smelly, etc.). And here he was, after surviving 5 months of this treatment at our school (which, by the way, it is absolutely shameful that we as a school community allowed it to happen), sitting in his summer school classroom and hearing "fear is black." What would you imagine went through his mind?

Maybe nothing. Maybe he didn't think of it that way. Maybe he didn't wince, as I did, as Ms. Herman repeated the line "fear is black" several times over the next few minutes. But maybe he did.