No Title Is Appropriate

I had come back from a great day at school, where I had taught three new classes with a reasonable amount of success. I even have students already saying "hi" to me in the hall and in the lunchroom. It's mahvelous.

I pointed out to him how unbelievable it is to me that I only have, thus far, maybe two, three white students. On the other hand, the majority of the high school teachers are white, many of them being placed there by the bizarre placement system France uses for their recently-certified teachers.

The kids have already started joking about race and their personal backgrounds. They're so amazingly diverse, I can't wait for some of the discussions we'll have. In our activity, I asked how many people speak two or more languages fluently. In each class, there are maybe one or two students who only speak French; the rest make up a rainbow of languages, Arabic being the dominant one but also a lot of Creole, Lingala, and Wolof as well. (I would like to point out that spell-check doesn�t recognize Lingala or Wolof).

Anyhow, I was blabbering on about how great the kids are, how excited I am because they all seem pretty motivated to learn, yada, yada, and The Boy said, "Yeah, but it's all sort of pointless."

"What is?" I asked.

"Well, what are they going to do with their studies? Do you think they're off to get doctorates? You may be excited about those kids and their futures, but I think they're pretty dim."

That was quite a blow, but I braced myself for the storm that was obviously coming. The Boy argues that France, and maybe even all white people, have set up a system that purposefully excludes non-whites, and that because this system makes up the foundation upon which everyone functions, it's not going to change. As soon as someone sees that a job candidate's name is Halima or Salim, they're going to be less likely to hire them, regardless of experience. These kids aren't going to be in positions to use their English, and, if they do get jobs which require English, they're going to have to take further classes because their level is obviously not up to par yet.

I started to protest when he said, "How many non-white students are in your classes at the Sorbonne?"

I thought for a moment and said, "God, not a lot."

"Right," he said, "There are hardly any. So where do you think these kids you're teaching go to after they graduate? They're not going to university. They're not coming into the city. They're going to stay in their little poor, isolated community and work at some low-paying job because once they even attempt to get a job or further their studies, they're going to come up against a system that makes everything as difficult for them as possible. Life is going to be a constant swim upstream for them, just because they're black or Arab or Vietnamese or whatever, and because their names betray that fact. Maybe one, maybe two of them may find greener pastures, but most will just continue living the way they always have. Minorities are meant to stay in the ghetto. Forever. That's just the way things have been set up."

"Maybe," I said, "But you made it out."

"Yeah," he shot back, "But it nearly killed me. And I fight every day. And I was fortunate enough to not have anything else to fall back on. No family in France, nowhere to go. I could only do things for myself, which served as motivation. And anyway, you saw for yourself how hard it is for me to rent a respectable apartment. Those who have control just don't want to open the doors to a black man with a funny last name, regardless of his professional status. Everywhere I go, I'm the only black man. At school, there were only a few once you got past the first year or two. At work, there aren't any. How do you explain that? Where are all of those people who make up entire high schools of diverse students? Really, where are they? Where? They don't just disappear, but they are conveniently kept out of sight."

I don't know why I'm babbling about this. I guess because I�m realizing that I�ve never been confronted with issues of race so directly. I�m not so na�ve as to think these problems don�t exist, but I can say I�ve never lived through them myself. Sure, my high school was racially diverse, and yeah, we had racial awareness stuff and Martin Luther King assemblies and crap, but the fact of the matter is that the town I grew up in is a fairly well-off little community. People are educated there, there�s no real ghetto. Blacks and whites and Asians and Arabs live reasonably peacefully side-by-side, probably because on a socio-economic level, we�re all pretty much the same. And I guess I�m just thinking that in France, or in Paris, anyhow, that�s just not the case. The gorge separating the economic classes is growing, and it�s clearly divided along color lines (although this is, granted, a chicken-or-the-egg situation). How else can you explain that I may be the only white girl on my train to work, whereas my boyfriend may be the only black man on his? Maybe I'm seeing things as too black-and-white (no pun intended), but the more time I spend in France, the more people I talk to, the more I watch the way things tick around here... I don't know...the more I think The Boy is right.

And I guess I just have this sort of mother hen reflex now with my students. Damn, I really want the best for them. I hate to think that some of the kids in my classes � especially the quiet, shy, hardworking ones - are up against something that may intimidate them out of being successful. It bothers me that not only have I always had the luxury of living in a place with reasonably good schools, of having parents who could afford to pay for my education, etc, but also with the unspoken luxury of being white, whereas my students have everything working against them: poor living conditions, crappy schools, racial injustice. Pulling yourself out of the economic factors working against you is hard enough; it crushes me to think that someone may dismiss those kids who manage to do so just because their last name sounds too African or suspiciously Arab. The emotion I feel is not pity; it�s anger and outrage and frustration. I want these kids to arm themselves with whatever sort of artillery they may need to go out there and fight - be that some type of knowledge, a particular skill, or just a shit ton of inspiration - because I'm pretty sure they're going to need it.

Unfortunately, I don't have the slightest idea how to give that to them. I haven�t been through it myself. Life, by comparison, has pretty much been served to me on a shiny, silver platter. So I'll just give them the best I can, and hope. But that feels so terribly, dreadfully insufficient, because it is.