The other day I read an article about why a black woman does not discuss matters of race. The entire time I was reading the article, I found myself nodding because everything she said is what I have experienced in my own life. While I have become a master of avoiding getting too deep into a conversation about race, I realize that every moment I dodge the opportunity to call someone out, challenge them, or correct them, I'm not only validating their wrongness, but I'm doing a disservice to our children.

I'm currently in my third year of an alternative teaching program in Washington, DC. This program serves underprivileged and forgotten children. It serves the children that our system pushes to the side and grooms for a life of crime, imprisonment, and recidivism. While the mission of the program is great, I have some serious issues with the execution of the program (more on that later…). My biggest issue has to do with who they accept into the program. One would think that a program that's designed to help low income black and brown children would exhaustively recruit a body of teachers that are conscious, self aware, and committed to social justice, right? WRONG.

While our first week is filled with talks about how "we'll talk about race" in your classes…, it never comes up. Race is kind of like that ugly stepchild that no one loves. Bringing it up in public is often uncomfortable and has the potential to lead to embarrassment. Who wants that? I think that this program coddles its white members way too much. There are far too many of them sitting on their self claimed pedestals. One in particular, (let's refer to her as 'Sarah' from here on out…), has it in her mind that she is entitled to many things. Coupled with her whiteness, she comes from privilege and being spoiled. When white people hear the term white privilege, they automatically hear "you're racist." It's foolish to equate 'white privilege' to 'racist'. In fact, you might even actually be racist if you know what privilege is, but you make a decision to not recognize it or use that privilege in a way that'd prove to be useful for the rest of society. Long story short: I currently live in a world where white people are being trained to tame our black children while black members of the same program are either being pushed out or trained to become a more mild version of themselves (read as less aggressive if you will…)

I think that while alternative teaching programs like this start off at a good place, they became so obsessed with becoming the new household name that they end up doing a disservice to the very children that they set up to "help" in the first place. I think that this is something that we should expect to happen especially considering the fact that these problems… I mean programs- are created by white people for minority children. This is white people playing God, yet again. News flash: Jesus was black. So can we get a fubu teaching program out here? White people love putting on their cape and "helping" black children. They can go back to the their homes and lay their heads down without the fear of wondering when/where their next meal is coming from. They don't have to worry about getting pulled over by the police and not making it home. They don't have to worry about their 12 year old child getting gunned down because they look grown.

This, my friends, is white privilege.

alternative teaching programs

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