ELA Snippet from "Nazi Alert": Section 9 of White Supremacy on Its Deathbed
Let's workshop a paragraph from section 9 of White Supremacy on its Deathbed, a paragraph that highlights the excesses of antiracist education in the middle schools of major cities throughout the US
ELA Snippet from “Nazi Alert”: Section 9 of White Supremacy on Its Deathbed
[White supremacy on its deathbed] could just sit back and revel in our world where it is not uncommon to find middle-school ELA courses throughout the country titled “Black Oppression in the Wake of Trayvon Martin”; ELA courses that begin each session with white students trying to hold their breath for eight minutes and forty-six seconds while the teacher reads passages from countless I-can’t-breathe books intending to highlight “Amerikkka’s total war against Black bodies”; ELA courses that require “video proof of active participation” in at least one local protest for black justice by the end of the year; ELA courses that carry out “privilege walks” after each major exam so that students develop “an informed compassion for peers who did not score as high”; ELA courses that have white students apologize to black students after reflecting on the ways they have participated in antiblack violence; ELA courses that end the final class with a die-in involving the students dropping to the floor while the teacher reads through a litany of black victims of white brutality; ELA courses that only assign learning materials vetted by sensitivity readers to ensure that the characters and settings are diverse, and that the cover art is inclusive, and that the current horrors of systemic racism are not underplayed, and that the dialogue is authentic and filled with inclusive language (“cuz,” “finna,” “boutta,” “lemme”), and that nonwhite stories are centered, and that nonwhite characters are not judged by white standards of beauty and white standards of intellect and white standards of conduct; ELA courses mandating that its sixth-graders read Lowery’s “They Can't Kill Us All” in tandem with the award-winning YA novel All American Boys, a novel that for “antiracist authenticity” has a white author for the white characters and a black author for the black characters and whose cringeworthy back matter reads as follows:
“Rashad is absent again today.” That’s the ominous sidewalk graffiti that started it all. . . . Well, no, actually, what started it all was a white lady in a hurry (and pulling rank). She bumped into Rashad at the bodega, causing him to drop his bag of chips. It didn’t matter what Rashad said next—that it was an accident, that he wasn’t stealing, that he was just finna get a snack before class.
No, it didn’t matter. He was a Black kid. So he must’ve been stealing. He was a Black kid. So he must’ve been trying to assault that white woman. He was a Black kid—a king, a threat. So he must’ve deserved to get his head pounded into unforgiving concrete by police fists of white power: his pleadings seen as nothing more than sass and defiance, his attempts to leave the bodega seen as nothing more than thuggish resistance, his automatic flinching from every crushing head punch seen as nothing more than subhuman refusal to stay still—his Blackness seen, ultimately, as nothing more than hypercriminality.
Rashad already knew that fatal equation. Each day on the news he witnessed Black kings falsely accused, assaulted, and executed in broad daylight by white cops. His un-American race, he knew well before the incident, would always discolor his all-American goodness: his focus on art, his dedication to becoming a military officer, his staying away from crime and drugs. The incident, then, was no surprise to him, really. All he could do, as he paid the pavement-pummeling price for his skin, was whisper the one desperate thought of countless fallen kings: “Please don’t kill me!”
Quinn, a white boy, saw the whole thing unfold that terrible afternoon. He saw his best friend’s older brother beating the daylights out of his classmate: Rashad, the ROTC kid with mad art skills. At first Quinn doesn’t tell a soul. He’s not even sure he understands what happened. His whiteness tells him one thing. His eyes and memory and heart tell him another. But when the school—and the nation—starts to divide on what went down, blame spreads like wildfire fed by ugly words like “racism” and “police brutality” and “white supremacy.” However much he might want to forget the whole ordeal, Quinn’s part of history. He just has to figure out what side of history that will be. Bystander or ally? Complicity or justice?"
Quinn can never understand what it is to be terrorized each day as a Black person. But will he stand? Will he stand against the unspeakable truth, the truth conveniently denied by the incessant gaslighting of whiteness: that racism has only grown stronger after the civil-rights movement? Will he realize—and confess—to his own white privilege: the privilege to be given the benefit of the doubt as a good person, the privilege not to have to battle constant aggressions and genocidal hate? Will he take the further step beyond awareness and actually break the code of whiteness, even though doing so could cost him his basketball scholarship and his friendships and even his life? Will he become an effective ally, someone who realizes that his disdain for whiteness does not all by itself absolve him from actively breaking its stranglehold with antiracist action? Will he oppose his own racist teacher? Will he call out the antiblackness implicated in her asking students—only one day after the beatdown—how much sense it makes for them to interrupt the study session with the chant “Fuck the police” when, in her very own insensitive words of invalidation, “(1) we don’t know the full story yet, (2) a bad apple doesn’t mean the whole barrel’s rotten, (3) there are more effective venues for this chant anyway.” Will he call out his own racist basketball coach for the violent assimilationism of his pre-game speech (“On this court we’re all one, we’re all Falcons!”), a supposed “pep talk” commanding a multicultural collection of athletes in a world where white is right to leave their differences at the door—in effect, to leave the uniqueness of their souls at the door—for the sake of some gray-goo unity (the team, the Falcons) concocted by white abstraction. Does he have the intellectual and moral strength to restrain the voracious appetites of his whiteness, condemning it while still staying in his lane? Does he have the fortitude to speak out against this disease infecting his people, his own mother?
There’s a future at stake, a future where someone will not have to keep their mouth shut just because they are Black; a future where Black kings and queens will not have to obey Eurocentric standards of language and fashion and behavior to stand a better chance of not being abused and beaten by whites; a future where no Black student will have to be absent for days on end because of the brutalities of whiteness. Rashad and Quinn—one Black, one white, both American—have to risk everything to make the indelible status quo less brutal.
Cuz that’s how it can end.
Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.