White Like Me. Tim Wise

      BY MIDDLE SCHOOL, my closeness to my black friends had translated into a remarkable ability to code-switch, meaning an ability to shift between so-called “standard” English, and what some call “Black English,” and to do it naturally, fluidly, and without pretense. Although my parents never minded this, even when I would forget to switch back, thereby remaining in black cadence and dialect around the house, there were others who found it mightily disturbing. Teachers were none too happy with the way they would hear me speaking in the halls to my friends. It was one thing for an actual black person to speak that way, but for a white child to do so was one step over the racial line, and one about which they were hardly pleased.

      Adding to the general unease that some white folks seemed to feel because of my growing proximity to blackness, there was my musical taste, which included a growing affinity for funk and hip-hop, the latter of which was just then beginning to emerge on the national scene. I had long had strangely eclectic musical tastes, so although I was a huge KISS fanatic, I went to bed every night listening to WVOL, Nashville’s so-called urban station, always making a point not to go to sleep until I had heard Parliament’s “Theme From the Black Hole,” or something, anything, by Kurtis Blow.

      I had actually been the first person in my school, white or black, to memorize every word to the fourteen-minute version of “Rapper’s Delight” (the first major rap hit, though purists dispute the legitimacy of its pedigree and performers, the Sugar Hill Gang). My friends and I would have rap battles to see who could get through the latest song without forgetting any of the words. I usually won these rather handily.

      But all this cross-cultural competence didn’t endear me to the white teachers, many of whom had been teaching long enough to remember (and prefer) the days when white faces were the only ones in front of them; and by God those white folks had known what it meant to be white—and what it surely didn’t mean was beatboxing.

      One teacher in particular quite clearly despised me. Mrs. Crownover, who was my teacher for Language Arts (literature and English class), spoke to me in a voice that barely concealed her contempt, and looked at me with an expression similar to that which one makes around rotting food. When she gave me a D in the class for the second grading period of fifth grade, my mother was stunned. Given that it was a reading class and I had been reading since before I was three, it made little sense that I would have done so poorly. Frankly, I hadn’t been doing my best work. I found the class boring and her lessons tedious, so I knew I wouldn’t be getting a good grade; but a D seemed extreme, even with my lackadaisical effort.

      When my mother went to meet with Mrs. Crownover to discuss my grade and find out if there was anything she needed to be worried about in terms of my own effort, focus, or reading skills, it became clear that the grade had been largely unrelated to my effort or ability; rather, it was principally connected to how she felt about my social circle. As Mrs. Crownover told my mom, “Any white parent who sends their child to public schools nowadays should have their heads examined.”

      As it turns out, this would prove to be a not-so-incredibly bright career move on Mrs. Crownover’s part. Standing up for my friendships and her own principles, my mother took action, getting together with a few other parents and demanding a sit-down with the principal. Within a matter of weeks, Mrs. Crownover had mysteriously and quite unceremoniously disappeared, at first to be replaced by a series of substitute teachers, and finally, the next year, by someone else altogether. An extended sabbatical, and I believe an early retirement (though not early enough), was to be her much deserved fate.

      On the one hand, an act of antiracist resistance such as this is worthy of praise. My mom did what she should have done, and what any white parent in that situation should do. But there is an interesting aspect to this story that is equally worthy of attention, and which demonstrates that even in our acts of allyship we sometimes miss the larger issues. Yes, my mother had resolved to get the individual racist teacher in this instance removed. So far so good. No longer would she be free to work out her own personal damage on children. There would be one less teacher at Stokes carrying around the deep-seated conviction that black children were inferior to the white children she apparently felt should have all fled to private schools at the first sign of integration.

      But with that excision accomplished, there remained a far more dangerous institutional cancer operating in the heart of the school that I shared with those black friends of mine. When I returned to class after Mrs. Crownover’s removal, I was still attending a school system that was giving the message every day that blacks were inferior. The school had never needed this one teacher to impart that lesson; it was implicit in the way the school system had been tracking students for five years by then, placing blacks almost exclusively in remedial or standard level tracks while placing most all white students in advanced tracks, or so-called “enrichment” programs, as if those with privilege needed to be made richer in terms of our opportunities. And neither my mother nor I, with all those close friends, had said anything about that racism.

      Even in sixth grade, when the racialized nature of tracking became blatant, I wouldn’t catch it. My primary teacher that year, Mrs. Belote, would literally wave her hand, about mid-way through fifth period, signaling to the white kids that it was time for our V.E. class (which stood for, I kid you not, “Very Exceptional”) down the hall. We would quietly rise and depart the integrated classroom like