A Beaumont, Texas, high school teacher was arrested last week after video emerged online of her smacking a student. Here’s the video:
KHOU reports:
The Jefferson County Sheriff's Office confirmed that Mary
Hastings, a teacher at Ozen High School near Beaumont, was arrested Friday on an assault charge.
According to a statement from Beaumont ISD obtained by KHOU sister station KBMT, the conduct was substantiated by video viewed by BISD police and administrators.
The fact of the matter is this: we do not know what preceded this action. Probably this kid acting up or not listening—some kind of conflict between this student and this teacher that has happened before, thus the video being captured, anticipating something. The students laugh and the kid smiles but this isn’t because it’s all good and well. There is a humiliation going on here, a teacher who cannot control her emotions and clearly doesn’t have a handle on her confidence in her classroom, and a student who may or may not be problem.
Before we feel bad for this woman who is probably not all bad herself, and was captured at her worst moment, remember this: if that kid wasn’t a smiling type of kid, and if that kid was a foot larger and 30 pounds heavier, do you think she would have been smacking him like that? Why not? Being a bully, no matter how frustrated you are, is just being a bully. It’s taking something from someone else because you can. You may not mean it to be the that, but that is exactly what it is.
The Black Lives Matter movement is also an anti-bully movement. Racism is a power dynamic mixed with bigotry. It feeds itself with misperceptions from well-meaning people, like the idea that black kids are “older” and “less innocent” of things as white kids.