
Here is another paper I turned in for one of my graduate classes earlier this summer. Thoughts and comments are welcomed and encouraged below.
Dressed within the Cloak of Privilege
Throughout my life I’ve seen that it is uncommon for black men to receive their bachelors degree, hold self-sustaining employment, pursue a graduate degree, and understand their culture in a way that pushes them to give back in a focused and direct way to their community. Being a special
education teacher for a high school with a 55% Black and 45% Latino
student body, I see younger versions of myself each day. It’s
empowering and devastating all in the same breathe. My students
come to me older than the average high school freshman. Most enter
my school as freshman at 16 years old, two years behind their age
peers, many years behind academically, and are expected to earn
their high school diploma at 20/21 years old. Approximately 50% of
our students have Individual Education Plans (IEP’s). Most students
I have come across present as learning disabled, emotionally
disturbed, and many struggle to maintain regular attendance.
The
student I chose to focus on for this project is the son of Jamaican
immigrants, and moved to this country himself at a young age. I’ve
taught Keanon each trimester this school year and have been
frustrated, disheartened, amazed, inspired, and humbled by his
ability to make a fortified stand in various situations. The once
standoffish young man has come into his own and begun to play with
knowledge and academics in front of my eyes. I see Keanon anywhere
from 1-3 times each day throughout the week, so I benefit from
getting to observe him frequently and often.
Growing up in the midwestern version of the Cosby house in
Chicago’s south suburbs afforded me countless opportunities that my
peers didn’t have. My father, is a retired Illinois State Police
Officer, part-time community college professor, two-time small
business owner, and nonprofit volunteer. I fondly remember watching
my mother, a devoted Illinois Department of Children and Services
social worker, sit glued to the dining room table into the wee
hours of the morning where she completed schoolwork toward her two
masters degrees in Social Work and Education. Being first
generation college students completely shifted the trajectory of my
parents’ lives, and resultantly the lives for my sister and I.
Growing up I was told I was going to college. This expectation, so
heavily ingrained in my adolescence, makes me feel unaccomplished
even today. Earning my first graduate degree serves as the first
major accolade I will have conceived and achieved on my own accord.
Understanding how class, sometimes known as
privilege, can unfairly shift one’s trajectory of life is a common
realization in the black community. It is apparent to the
individuals that find successful ways to enter and flourish through
class mobilization, the family members they leave behind, and most
importantly both groups’ children, which is where I myself
fall.
I’m from South Central,
LA, a place that’s historically impoverished and pretty
marginalized. I come from a low-income family, I’m a
first-generation college student, and I’ve kind of seen how just by
the fact that I left for school, in another neighborhood, I got
access to all these other opportunities, and just sort of had had a
different trajectory. And I’ve known that both, from on the ground
level and becoming a researcher and understanding the policy level,
sort of the higher level. That there’s sort of a system that’s in
place that works against what it is that you would want everybody
to be able to obtain, which is success. So, the way that I’ve kind
of framed success for my own personal use is the ability to
influence and impact that system from a lot of different vantage
points. (Gordon, 2013)
The
blazing contrast between my childhood, neighborhood, and education
compared to those of my cousins is etched in my memory. Each time I
went to visit family members we departed on an hour-long excursion
out of the suburbs, past the large ominous rows of government
housing (projects) as they cast down shadows on the expressway to my family
members’ homes. That exit out of, and entrance into – always
triggered my senses in a way that was foreign from my suburban
haven.
I cannot guess what goes on in Keanon’s
head. However, he is a proud Jamaican, first, and American second,
if at all. He describes Jamaica as 3rd world, but pulls strength
and energy from his heritage. It is a badge of honor for him; and
it empowers him socially, which helps him push for achievement
academically. Keanon, as many of my other students, doesn’t believe
he can trust people. In fact most of my males felt as though they
couldn’t trust people. Growing up, I never knew a world where I
didn’t feel safe, largely because everynight I went to sleep with a police car parked infront of my house. The privilege of growing up in the middle class
has in many ways blinded me to the strife and challenges the
many black young men must overcome to succeed. This thought
repeatedly plays in my mind as I create my teaching identity.
I am the product of gifted/honors/and AP
program at my school. It was there that I was exposed to class disparities in education. Obvious to me then were inequalities in
rigor, expectations, and the resulting productivity of general
education classes as compared to more challenging courses. I was one of
the few Black representatives from 4th grade, and watched
subconsciously as each year fewer minorities filled the classes
with me. One of my most memorable experiences occurred during my
9th and 10th grade years in high school. I decided, as a young
adult, that I didn’t feel like doing math homework every night
anymore – a staple in the honors math courses. My unrelenting
rebellion caused me to fail Honors Algebra my freshman year, and
half of my sophomore school year. The administration and my parents
moved me to a general education algebra class. I was shocked at the
culture of low expectations, rowdy behavior, and slow pace of the
class. Here, I sat, having bought into my label as talented and
bright and I still struggled to pass a general education course
several times less rigorous and structured than my otherwise full load
of advanced classes. I ended up going to summer school to earn my
math credit through an insultingly elementary computer program.

Keanon like many of my students has low math
computation skills. At 17, he again like many others, struggles
with his basic times tables, mental math, number sense, and
confidence with identifying and applying key pieces of information.
My co-teacher and I try to keep an orderly classroom, but our more
expressive students work their magic and ignite nonstop
disturbances that must be managed and extinguished throughout
instruction and independent practice. I can imagine this having a
negative effect on Keanon and his peers. This trimester we have
covered factoring, factoring and graphing, trigonometry, area,
perimeter, and volume. Keanon is one of two students set to pass
the course this cycle. However, deficiencies in his basic
arithmetic are still present, and are being addressed in a separate
computer math course that I also teach for Keanon.
As I develop my teacher identity I rejoiced at having
built a connection with a student like Keanon. His strength,
curiosity, steadfastness, and nobility emit from him each and
everyday. Earning his acceptance has made me feel validated within
my own self. He and I both respect what it took to grow our
relationship to where it is. I am older, but I view Keanon as my
partner and equal. In my mind we are currently in a space where we
share knowledge and beliefs with one another. Keanon has begun
sharing why his Rastafarian spirituality is so important to him. He
allows me to respectfully receive his message, which in turn seems
to make him even more comfortable being himself, and testing his
own skin.
There must be a
meeting of the minds if educators are to play an influential role
in the development of their adolescent students. This meeting can
occur around formal social interactions, depending on the goals for
the “meeting.” They key is that the educators’ thinking be made as
transparent as possible in order for students to access and connect
with it or for them to contest and reject it in an informed manner.
(Nakkula & Toshalis, 2010)
However, I can’t be blinded by Keanon’s social
transformation in the school. His math skills still require serious
development for him to enter this world fully suited to succeed. As
a teacher it’s disheartening to know that throughout the school
year we never created the opportunity to develop many of our
student’s subpar foundational skills on top of their functional
skills. Framing this positively, I feel empowered knowing I can use
these growth areas to develop more specialized understanding of my
craft including new and targeted instructional methods for next school year.
My parents made sure that I grew up with a strong
foundation in humility and servitude. We understood that we
experienced privilege. However, there are many people who do not,
like my family members, many of my peers, and the foster children and families
my mother often exposed us to. The fact that it is a rarity of
African Americans to have consistent exposure to supportive
educational, social, and class privileges such as these is
mortifying to my soul. This serves as the primary motivation
driving why I must always try to build others as long as I’m able.
To many, this may seem disconnected, unrealistic, or too kumbaya as I like to describe. However, for me it is the foundation for why I am an educator, and the doubts serve to reinforce my fortitude for the craft. My life experiences have brought
me to a place where I am knowledgeable, both theoretically and
experientially, about privilege as a member of the minority group
in observation. Through school and work experiences I can guess how
those more closely positioned to the dominant class experience and are
blinded by privilege. I know first hand how difficult it can be
with and without a solid education for minorities that are expected
to navigate their way, successfully, through institutions that
fortify such privileges by luck, grit, and pulled up bootstraps. I
try not to judge, but I do wonder how others, more heavily layered
in privilege come to develop their own understanding of this issue,
and whether it festers within their souls as it does mine.

Now, as an educator, a huge chunk of my
identity is tied into my own experiences and benefits from
privilege. I therefore see and weigh a lot more of my performance
with my students based on the person I am to them and for them, on
top of the role I play as their academic and social educator over
the next few years. In many ways, as is evident with Keanon, I’ve
learned that I have focused more so on my students’ social
development, than their academic development. Keanon himself has
shown that even with his natural gifts for leadership, compromise,
and inquisition, he still needs the basic academic skills to
navigate the modern world, successfully, and out of harms way. As
with Keanon, my own identities often shift between student of
education, professional educator, and that same little black boy
that absorbed so much inherently from my surroundings in
Chicago.
Currently, I feel like I must show all
of my students and peers that I/we can accomplish anything we set
our minds to. I frequently identify the links between them as high
school students, and myself as a graduate student. I show them my
frustration and unconditional love for them in the classroom. I let
them know when they’re letting me down and vice versa. I show them
what difficult assignments and work looks like for me, and discuss
why its important that they persevere through their own complaints
about scribing as little as a paragraph. I explain how my job and
life intertwines with theirs’ and how the 10 years they view, as a
separation in age is more of a proximity that should be explored
and utilized to their advantage. I definitely use them to foster my
own growth and knowledge development.
This
summer, my challenge is to strengthen how I stimulate and support
my students academically. Similar to Keanon, I enjoy the feeling of
being roused into action. I enjoy the idea of constantly polishing
myself into an even better teacher. This year I’ve seen Keanon go
from being extremely closed-minded to being prophetic about the
importance of school, teachers, and learning. I’ve tried to make
the connection for my students that they are role models for their
younger brothers, sisters, and cousins as I undoubtedly am trying
to be for them.
My students are creating and
experiencing foundational events that shape their adolescence and
will guide their adulthood. I am no different, even at the current
stage of my life as a young professional. As students and teachers,
we are co-creating our identities. Interestingly, I view myself as
the student, or rather, feel that even as a teacher, I have a need
to be educated and nurtured by experienced veterans and mentors. I
am a teacher, and I teach everyday as my profession, but my role in
life is that of the student. Like Keanon, I am challenging
assumptions and learning how to create an image of myself that most
closely represents my idea of self.
In short, adolescents [and adults] are
in a near constant state of constructing their lives. Far from
assuming or growing into a particular stage of development or
simply adapting to an environment that determines development
possibilities for them, [people] are actively creating development
itself. It is largely this process of creating [oneself] and the
worlds [we] inhabit that we call the construction of [life]…
Ultimately the meaning [you] make of [your] experiences is [yours],
regardless of how it may match or conflict with ours… Given the
magnitude of the consequences involved in self-construction,
especially as [you] come to be realized in schools, the
constructionist perspective is anything but academic or abstract.
It is, rather the real-life heart and soul of [life] itself.
(Nakkula & Toshalis, 2010)
Works Cited
Gordon, J. (Producer) (2013). Side conversations with Jullien The Innerviewer Gordon and non-profit manager education consultant [Web]. Retrieved from http://insidehustla.com/side-conversations/
Nakkula, M. J., & Toshalis, E. (2010). Understanding youth – adolescent development for educators. (3rd ed., p. 05, and pp. 8-9). Cambridge: Harvard Education Press.
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– We often focus on our challenges, but have you taken a second to think about your privilege(s) and how they shape your view of the world?
– Privilege is just that… a privilege, something that not everyone is privy to. I’m not saying you should feel bad for the privileges you’ve attained or been born into. But, I do believe that it’s our duty to create a space for other people to benefit from the “access” our privileges have afforded us.
Be purposeful with your privilege(s), pay that shit forward!
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