Race in the classroom

During the spring of my rookie teaching year, one of my high school students taped a small paper version of the Confederate flag to the back wall of my classroom. Another student ripped down the flag and tossed it in the trash. The next day, a larger version of the flag appeared, this time in the student lounge. And another student ripped it down. Then some students started putting stickers of the flag on the outside of their lockers and on their school books and folders. This precipitated an even angrier conflict as more students, white and black, entered the fray. As far as I could tell, the administrators stayed out of the conflict.

I took the proliferation of Confederate flags — and growing dissent, albeit in the minority — as my first teachable moment inspired by events outside the curriculum. I asked my students to write formal “business” letters to the head of school following the flow of a classical argument. The question: Whether the flag should be permitted to be displayed in school. The confirmation and summation paragraphs needed to defend or criticize the actions of their peers. The letter, however, needed to contain a concession paragraph.

The concession part was key — the instructional equivalent of Harper Lee’s admonition in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” where Atticus Finch says to Scout, his daughter: “You can never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

At the outset of our class discussion, I asked students to start by sharing their concessions. Later, I let all students argue their original positions. Luckily, by that time in the school year, I had managed to build up a certain amount of trust, transplanted Yankee that I was. I only entered the discussion to nudge it along, and I kept my opinions mostly to myself.

Many students argued the flag symbolized Southern pride, tradition and heritage, but conceded black students (and some white students) might be offended when confronted with the flag in public. Some students argued the flag symbolized racism and bigotry, which no amount of clarification or redefinition can erase, but conceded that white students, at least some of them, may not intend racism or bigotry when displaying the flag in public.

One white student went further and argued the flag was also offensive to the school’s one black teacher. Then this student asked, somewhat rhetorically — in a footnote in her letter to the head of school — why the school employed only one non-white teacher but predominantly black cafeteria and busing staff. This is what you get from time to time as a teacher: A voice that displays an intellectual acumen and conviction years ahead of its time.

Eventually, the flags were removed from school, not by an opposing group or by the administration, but by the students who originally displayed them. These students, most of them white, privileged and deeply conservative, demonstrated empathy by “walking around” in another person’s “skin.” They considered the issue from all sides and ultimately determined that citizens have an obligation as an educated people not only to tolerate the beliefs of their peers, but also to make sure not to offend their peers’ dignity.

As one student put it in his letter — which I managed to keep all these years — “I may not understand exactly how the Confederate flag affects the dignity of black people, but I think their need to remove the symbol from school is more important and justifiable than our desire to rally around it. Take the flag down and tack it to your bedroom wall. That’s loyalty enough.”