I am a middle school teacher in an urban school district. My school is extremely diverse -- racially, academically, linguistically, socioeconomically, any other way you can think of. Like any similar school anywhere in the country, we have had occasional instances of racial conflict. In the years I have been at the school, these incidents have been rare, and the ones I've heard about have not involved intimations of white supremacy. They have more typically been between different groups of Asian and/or Latino immigrants.
We have in place strong behavioral expectations and enforcement processes, particularly in the area of respecting one another and avoiding harassment and bullying.
But this year is different. It is as though I've been transported 30+ years back in time. Words and phrases that none of us adults have ever heard or seen at our school are showing up -- in grafitti in the stairwells, in student journals, in conversations heard in hallways. Phrases like "f***ing n****r." Like "dirty f***ing Mexican." "Jokes" about lynching.
12-year-old boys with whom I have positive relationships, with whom I often kid around -- kids I interact with for an hour every day -- are standing around in clumps laughing at jokes about lynching.
My God.
I cannot stress enough how uncharacteristic this all is compared to prior years. As we've sat in staff meetings this week listening to administrators' reports about recent student interactions, I have looked around the room and seen shock written across my colleagues' faces. There is a general sense of "I thought we were beyond all that."
Chalk up one more victory for the Teabaggers.
I've spent much of the past year in a Mike-Malloyesque screaming rage at the stupidity and ugliness of the wingnuts. But now the rage has reached a new level, beyond the screaming, to a calm, white-hot heat smoldering inside me.
They're messing with my kids.
Of course I can't prove that there is any direct connection between the Teabaggers' actions and what I'm seeing among my students. I can't prove that a summer filled with TV images of people screaming their ignorant and intolerant hatred, or the proliferation of signs portraying our African-American president in a turban or witch doctor apparel, or as a chimp, has directly led to my 7th-grade students acting like Klan wannabes.
I also can't prove that the woman I know as my mother actually gave birth to me, or that Dick Cheney had people tortured to get false confessions to fraudulently justify war in Iraq. But . . . I know what I believe.