Some incredibly upsetting news is coming out of St. Paul, Minnesota. In the past, we’ve heard reports of white teachers holding mock slave auctions, kids being taught slave songs, and an 11-year-old being arrested after refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. It’s a mind-boggling trend. Lack of self-awareness? Privilege that colors judgment? Insidious motivations? I can’t explain it, but yet again, another video is going viral that depicts explicit racism in a school. This time, a teacher in St. Paul literally referred to her black students using the N-word.
“I just walk around the room and I just pick on them,” Wendy Brilowski, who teaches social studies at Highland Park Middle School, is heard saying on the video. “‘Cause they’re black and they’re the only f-----g n----rs doing any work.”
Audible gasps follow from what appears to be a mix of students and faculty in the hallway with Brilowski. “That’s what you’ve been saying,” the person who is recording the video replies.
The teacher says, “I’m sorry.” There’s no real context for what came before or after. The video is blurry and runs about 20 seconds, so it’s hard to decipher who is who.
Black Lives Matter St. Paul shared the video on Facebook, and it went viral fast.
Minneapolis NBC affiliate KARE11 interviewed students and parents about the incident. One student said, “She was saying that she targets black people and that she’s calling out … ‘effing n-words.’” The student also alleged that the teacher had called black students “negroes” in the past.
The student’s mother, Brandy Coleman, said, “To know that I send her out every day to be safe somewhere that she’s not, to know that she’s being badgered and being targeted and no one was there to advocate for her, it breaks my heart.”
The teacher has been placed on administrative leave. The superintendent of St. Paul Public Schools, Joe Gothard, released a statement on Thursday.
Here’s the video:
“The words and actions recorded in this video have caused harm to our black students, their families, and our entire school community,” he states. “We will not be silent in the face of racist language in our schools—and we cannot perpetuate it. We will not make excuses for actions that hurt the students that we as educators have dedicated our lives to serve.”
Gothard also said that the teacher’s racist language “has no place in St. Paul public schools.”