In 2013, I was living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which, for those of you who don’t know, can only be described as a smaller, snowier, Dutcher Portland in the heart of the Midwest.
I’d just graduated from college with a B.A. in English literature, so, naturally, I was putting my degree to work as a part-time barista at a not-so-local coffee shop. I was making less than ten dollars an hour (plus tips), sharing a fifteen-year-old mini-van with my sister (which, by the way, still runs), and living in an 18th century, Heritage Hill home with between three and eight other people (depending on the night).
My parents called my lifestyle “bohemian,” wondering, I’m sure, what percentage of my meager paycheck was going towards plane tickets and body modifications and booze. In their defense, I’ll readily admit that my situation was, in the most lovely of ways, decidedly precarious, something I’ll look back on as a hedonistic “gap year” of sorts. Even then, I understood that it was a transitional time, and, like a summer love, it’s undeniable finitude made it all the more sweet.
In May of 2014, I was accepted into a graduate program in Memphis, TN, and moved ten hours south and ten years back in time to earn my Master’s in Urban Education through a residency program called MTR, an organization whose mission is to end racism by providing a quality public education to all students, regardless of their race or income level. My mission, I’m ashamed to say, had more to do with spending the next four years getting paid to read and talk about books.
It’s not that I didn’t care about racism. I did. I just cared in a very passive way. I cared about racism in the same way I care about those little Indian children with the distended stomachs: enough to feel a twinge of guilt, but not enough to do anything about it. I think that’s probably how most white people feel. They think, “Hey, I voted for Obama. I have a black friend. I don’t use the “n” word. I’m not a racist.” That’s how I used to think, anyway.
In July, I was assigned to teach 11th grade ELA at a charter school in Midtown, Memphis. On my first day, my supervising teacher took me on a tour of the facilities.
“This will be your morning duty post,” she told me, unlocking what had once been a concession stand, “We can’t let the students have their backpacks on them during the day.”
“What do I do?” I asked, looking around.
“You take the backpack, stick a tag on it, and put it over there,” she pointed to a corner of the room, “We usually do it assembly line-style.”
The room was disgusting. On the floor were two 5” x 11” glue traps, both filled to occupancy with at least six species of insect (and one rodent). The sink was crusted over with ketchup and mustard. An old jar of mayonnaise lay haphazardly next to an industrial-sized box of straws. A half-used carton of blue-raspberry flavored floss sugar sat on top of a defunct, electric stovetop. Near the back of the room, a small cupboard was stocked with no-name canned goods, expired olives and kidney beans, ancient boxes of rice pilaf, a can of Kroger-brand tuna. A cassette tape labeled “PHISH LIVE 1998” sat forgotten on the counter.
“Please tell me no one cooks in here,” I breathed.
My co-teacher laughed, “Not since we moved in. We inherited this building a few years ago. It was a public school that got shut down. Bad test scores. Bought it off the county for cheap.” She looked around furtively, then whispered, “Rumor has it, it would take millions to bring this place up to code. Apparently there’s some grandfather clause that excuses nonprofits from the regulations.” She winked at me.
“Why doesn’t anyone clean it up?” I asked, a look of apparent concern on my face.
“I guess no one really feels like it’s their mess. I mean, the people who trashed the place are long gone. And everyone here is so busy. I suppose we just go about our business and try our best not to look at the mess.”
That room, the concession stand that time forgot, became a symbol of my first year in Memphis.
That day, I met four hundred students with names I’d never heard before and couldn’t pronounce.
“Ja’Queshia?” I asked, helplessly, attempting to tag an expensive-looking taupe and gold bookbag.
“No. Ja’Lecia. JA-LEE-SEE-AH.”
“You like Louis Vuitton?” I smiled, eyeing the trademark logo. She rolled her eyes and shook her head. No answer.
I discovered quickly that black students have a learned suspicion of young, white teachers, people who stick around for two years and consider their short-lived stint in low-income schools as a “resume builder,” a notch in the proverbial belt, something to clear their conscious of the guilt associated with white privilege before they submerge themselves in the American Dream.
When we read “The Great Gatsby,” I asked my students what they thought it meant to live the “American Dream.”
“You mean the white American Dream? Or the black American Dream?” one student asked, “Because Miss V, I’m just trying to make it.”
Before I moved to Memphis, I’d hear the words “white privilege” before, but the term didn’t become a reality until I was living in a city where segregation is still very real. I teach at a school where 99% of the students are black, and 99 percent of the student body receives free or reduced lunch.
Every day, I hear a new statistic about the number of black men in prison, the number of unemployed or underemployed minorities. I’m discovering every day that the “mess,” the residual effects of slavery and oppression, is bigger and more pervasive than I could have ever imagined.
And the worst part is that there’s no one alive left to own it. There’s no scapegoat, no one to take the fall. Like the PTO parents who abandoned their posts in the concession stand, the slave traders and plantation owners are long gone, dead and buried, their descendants oblivious, reluctant to lay claim to their legacies.
And here I am, a Canadian-American, a socialist, a northerner, an immigrant, a Democrat. Here I am, standing in the backpack room, wondering whose job it is to clean it up, and realizing that the mess is no one's. But if I’m here, the mess is mine.
