Christopher Emdin: For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood

 I dislike teaching movies in general, and especially those of the "inspiring teacher reaches ghetto students" variety.  For one thing, they universally fail to represent teaching even close to accurately.  I wonder if nurses and police feel the same way about the many shows and movies that attempt to reflect their realities.  What is more egregious, however, is how frequently and unabashedly they play into the White Savior trope.  For one thing, the assumption that poor students who happen to have some melanin need saved is insulting and arrogant.  More to the point, it has been my experience that teachers in general, and white teachers in particular, wouldn't have the tools to do so even if it were needed. 

Which is probably why I approached this book with a great deal of skepticism, leaving it in my "To Read" stack for at least a year before I grew tired of looking at its accusatory title. It certainly didn't help that it was given to me, unprompted, by my brother, who has a sizable white savior complex himself.  As it turns out, however, I was looking at this book wrongly.  It was not analogous to a "feel-good-unless-you're-an-actual-teacher" movie.  It was more like attending a teaching conference, in which not everything was useful or relevant, but enough was that I came away with a bit of juice for the coming year.

My favorite thing about this book was how it successfully distilled something I feel very strongly into words: "The ideology of the Carlisle School [an infamous school founded 'to tame the wild Indian'] is alive and well in contemporary urban school policies" (6).  As he goes on to iterate the characteristics of the administration, teachers, and students of that indigenous reeducation program, he scarcely needs to mention that the exact same descriptions apply to modern urban public schools.  I was reminded of an announcement that our students are subjected to every morning: "No hoods, hats, do-rags, or bonnets."  Could it be more of a racially coded dog-whistle?  This policy and others like it are designed with a specific vision of black student success: to join the middle class and become "respectable".  This paradigm, which originates with white perspectives, but is reinforced by administrators with melanin, devalues and denigrates the students' lived experience in their communities, assuming that a more "civilized" life is preferable.  Emdin's coinage of the term "neoindigenous" to highlight these parallels irks me semantically, but cannot be faulted.

Which is not to say that all of his suggestions are practical or possible in my classroom.  Such is always the case at teaching seminars; one takes away what one can reasonably apply, and endures the rest for the complimentary breakfast.  The ratio of useful--inspiring even--to forgettable in Emdin's "seminar", however, is far better than what could be hoped for and I, for one, came away from it determined not only to share it with my coworkers, but to live in the knowledge that ultimately the paradigm a teacher adopts "boils down to whether one chooses to do damage to the system or to the students" (206).