I didn’t know his name at first. He hunched in the back of my community college classroom, with the hood pulled over his head. He was Haitian, like about a third of my Florida students, so I didn’t expect him to speak up much during official class time. (Another third of the class was Cuban, very vocal, drowning out a lot of the others.) I had learned, though, to open up discussion online when class ended. And he was amazing; thoughtful, insightful, a real leader. I had just begun a second teaching career in Florida (from Michigan) and was trying to be sensitive to differences. And boy were there differences!
Hoodie got a B plus that term. The first night of the next term I was amazed to see him sitting in the first row of another of my classes. We began with a discussion of Columbus, and immediately he drew his 6-foot plus body up and gave me an argument: “Why do we honor that racist?” We were off. He became one of my most thoughtful students ever. And like the rest of the class, I learned a bit more about the Haitian perspective.
The Trayvon Martin story is a decade old, but should still be informing us. It wasn’t long afterward that I watched Trayvon Martin’s girlfriend testify about him. She looked at the floor, mumbled a bit...and a few of my culturally-ignorant friends criticized her. I jumped. “Listen and learn.” (We are a bit like a Tiffany Lamp. We must learn to look through different lenses at the light.)
Flashback! A decade before that I was in a “concealed weapons” class. The (NRA) instructor explained how he and his nephew would go to Detroit on a Saturday night, armed and ready “There were always criminals wandering around.” Remind you of Martin? Or Aubury? It has been going on for a very long time. We are just a bit more conscious of it now. But Martin’s murderer is still free (although he’s had a couple other felony charges since then.)
Flashback 2: I am good friends with a phenomenal teacher who once helped Michael Brown. She described him as “a big, lovable dork.” She truly loves kids like that. Society killed him. But she could see his light through a different lens, and mourned him in a very poignant way.
What have we learned in the 10 years since Trayvon was killed for carrying Skittles? Or the 20 since I was forced to listen to an NRA-gun wielding racist?? Well, perhaps we will put someone like Sybrina Fulton on the Supreme Court, to help that body see our society through different lenses.