I coach teachers in an extremely urban, inner-city area of Los Angeles. I travel between schools and do small units, so I'm rarely in one place for more than a couple weeks. Wednesday morning, I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about Barack Obama with a first period, seventh-grade English class before we got into working on our ongoing project. The discussion was fascinating, and ended up taking the whole period.
Keep in mind: every kid in the class is Latino, maybe all of them Mexican (not sure if that's 100%) and a lot of them are actually from Mexico. I got such an insight into their view of race relations, and it really emphasized how complicated America actually is.
First off, I wasn't sure if my students had even followed the election, or if they supported one candidate over the other. But the first thing the kids said to me when I got there in the morning was that Obama won, and they asked me who I voted for. So they were into it!
We started talking about it, and they were all clearly for Obama, so I asked why. They said the most surprising things! "McCain is a racist, he wants to send all the immigrants back/to war.." etc. One kid even claimed quite confidently that McCain had literally said he hated all Mexicans. I said, no, he didn't say that, and asked why they thought that. None of them really knew. I was so alarmed! This was not where I was expecting this go. I'm no fan of John McCain, but this was too much!
The students said that McCain is racist because he's white, and I pointed out that I am white, am I racist? They all shouted no, it's different. I asked why, and they said because he's a man. I pointed out that they must have teachers who are white men who they've liked, and they all agreed that they had. So I pointed out that it couldn't be that… someone said because McCain is a Republican, and they all agreed with that, and said that Republicans are all rich and white. I pointed out, though, that there are black and Latino Republicans, even though probably not too many around our urban, liberal area. Finally I said that I didn't think McCain is racist, just that maybe his policies don't favor immigration or concerns that my students' or their parents may have. That went over okay, although they may have just accepted because they were having trouble holding up their straight racism theory and didn't want to defend it anymore. (The irony, of course, is that what almost lost McCain the Republican primary is the fact that he was liberal on immigration. But then he shifted after he won, and now these kids think he's racist. Can't win 'em all..)
So then we started talking about if they felt like more things were possible for them because an African American was elected president. They said that Mexicans couldn't be president. I asked why and someone said because Mexicans don't have papers. I agreed that you do have to be born here, and then that same kid even said he was; I guess he just associates Mexicans and the people he knows with not having papers. Suddenly, the conversation turned to the difference between blacks and Latinos. These kids didn't like black people. Black people "think they're hard" and "call us beaners" and stuff like that. They said that black people always tell them to go back to Mexico, and they were all yelling, "Go back to Africa!" It was amazing. They had, only moments earlier, been supportive of a black president because the other candidate was "racist" and now they're miles away from black people, too. They didn't even remotely see the incongruity there. One kid said that this election made no difference for them because it was an African American and not a Mexican who had won, and then this other girl pointed out that now that Obama was elected, it will be easier for a Mexican to be elected. (It was as if I had cued her with that response.) I called for a vote, and most of the class said they agreed with that statement, although I think it was the first time they had thought of it; only two disagreed. I tried to get them to say if they saw similarities in the discrimination against them and the discrimination against African Americans, and they said no. We talked about the details of it for a few minutes and they just thought it was basically unrelated.
I pointed out that both of those groups have had problems with each other and may not like each other, but they've both had problems with white people and that's something they have in common. One boy, who's quite vocal, said, "I never thought of it like that." If he said it out loud, I know other kids were thinking that. They were all pretty quiet and listening (which, let me tell you, is rare). Class was coming to an end, and I really emphasized that this is the first time ever that the president has not been a white male. I don't think that they understood the gravity of moment. I said that this is the first time ever that someone is president who is NOT white, out of 44 people in over 200 years. I said they'd tell their grandchildren about this moment. Some kids at the beginning had resisted talking about the election, because it's "boring," but by the end they were all fully engaged.
It really drives home for me how much there is left to do. I'm concerned that the U.S. (as represented by the media) is viewing Obama's election as an endpoint, and that's a dangerous way to look at it. We have to keep this in mind, that racial struggles are not over by any means, especially in the inner-city. Major steps have been made this week; but we can't stop working for real equality.