Safe Spaces
“White’s blindness to race clouds their ability to notice what children are really saying about themselves and their identities. Safe spaces rarely exist in schools for adults or children to explore race, especially when Whites — who tend not to think of race all that often — determine the agendas, and teachers from other backgrounds become used to the absence of talk about race, or are convinced they will not be heard.” —Kathe Jervis (1996) "How Come There Are No Brothers on That List?: Hearing the Hard Questions All Children Ask.” Harvard Educational Review: September 1996, Vol. 66, No. 3, pp. 546-577.
photo by Liam Edwards
When I returned to graduate school in the late nineties to obtain a high school English certificate, I had been teaching in various college settings for over a decade. My demographics ranged from a class of Haitian immigrants, mainly men, who were trying to pass a basic English exam to continue their free education through the City University of New York, to unemployed Londoners of various ages and professions to the largely White, wealthy students at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. The class that introduced me to the pitfalls and triumphs of being allowed to have honest conversations, or to at least listen as my students spoke, was an English Composition class I taught in the South Bronx. In 1992 the area appeared to my eyes as drug infested, gun filled, and abandoned by most, a bit like the setting for a scene from a Mad Max. However, I had run a tutoring program in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and Bed-Stuy had been just as scary if not worse. In fact, the South Bronx was on a slight upswing as the community had finally decided they had had enough.
“The 41st Police Precinct headquarters on Simpson Street, near 167th Street, which became known as Fort Apache when the only signs of life at night were packs of wild dogs roaming the deserted streets and charred shells of burned-out apartment buildings, looks the same — seedy and somehow fitting for one of the world's most dangerous neighborhoods.”
There was a movie made about the area starring Paul Newman called Fort Apache, the Bronx, that was in that genre of New York City as the Hellmouth. The College of New Rochelle was located at 378 East 151st Street. I took two subways from my apartment on the Upper West Side and walked down the main street lined with bodegas. Smoke shops, video stores, bars, and lots of drug transactions until I reached the building. I was an adjunct without an office, but the classroom was adequate. Because most of my students had jobs that ended at five, they rarely came early to see me or stayed afterwards. Despite this, we were a close-knit group. They were mostly middle-aged women, one younger guy, all Black or Hispanic, all returning to college, or attending for the first time. As their teacher I was younger, white, and compared to them had no fashion sense at all. It was my post-hippie, broke girl in NYC wardrobe which consisted of clogs, wrinkly cotton shirts and jeans. My hair was nearly always pulled back in a scrunchie and I mostly forgot to wear makeup.
They refused to call me by my first name and while I encouraged open discussions, they always raised their hands. Politically they seemed quite conservative to me, church going, and very angry about the state of their neighborhood which they blamed on the ‘junkies’, the ‘pimps’ and the president, Ronald Reagan. Even my gentrified neighborhood on the Upper West Side had been deeply affected by mental health cuts that released many psychiatric patients from care which resulted in an uptick in homelessness and crime. Honestly, I can’t remember exactly what we were reading but given my usual syllabi at that time it was likely essays I had selected as excellent models for writing, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Annie Dillard, possibly Joan Didion, all copied from my own books, photocopied, stapled, and distributed. The class was full of excellent readers and that is how we often began our classes. First of all, I was aware these women had families, jobs, and very little free time so reading the essay aloud ensured everyone was at least familiar with the content. Also, I liked to stop the reader occasionally and point out a particularly good sentence or paragraph or detail.
Rodney King had been on parole and led the LA police on a high-speed chase. When they caught him and pulled him from his car he was beaten, kicked, and hit with batons by White police officers for over 15 minutes. A dozen other cops stood and watched. But someone caught this incident on camera and the four officers were indicted with felony assault and other charges. On April 29th, 1992 all four officers were acquitted by an all white jury in a white suburb of LA. This verdict provoked the LA riots.
On April 29th, 1992, I was walking down the main street of the South Bronx, clogs, jeans, hair in a scrunchie, and White, when the verdict was announced. Every street radio was tuned to the news that the four cops that had beaten King nearly to death were being released. I was aware of what had happened, horrified by the videotape which I could not completely watch but did not expect the jury to have taken a mere week to reach a verdict. Gradually I began to hear a murmur and then the murmurs turned into shouting. The stores emptied into the streets and for the first time in my life I was alone in my skin color. There were angry looks directed at me and someone called me a honky bitch. I looked behind me and several young men were following me, one was holding something that looked like a blackjack. I was terrified.
At that moment I felt an arm around me and one my students, wearing a very impressive hat linked her elbow with mine. She smiled at me, but since I wasn’t breathing smiling was a challenge.
“You’re all right,” she said quietly. “You’re with me.”
A young man approached but before he could speak, she stopped and looked him in the eye.
“What you want Lawrence? I know your mama from church. This is my teacher. You walk away.”
Lawrence stood there and as we passed, he muttered something. My student wheeled around to face him which meant she also faced the small group of mainly men that had been following me.
“Listen you fools,” she said. “I’m not playing. You want to go burn down another burned down building, go ahead. This my teacher, she comes up here to help us write better and you all need to walk away.”
We were outside the college building and there were several security guards standing by the door.
“Come on baby girl,” she said. “Let’s go learn something.”
In the elevator I started to cry, and when I apologized to her, not for the tears but for everything she shook her head. “Stop that,” she said.
I did. The class was full, and the students looked anxious and angry.
“Can we just talk about this?” I asked, tears welling up again.
Someone handed me a Kleenex and for the next two hours they told me things. Crossing the Mason-Dixon Line on a road trip and the family becoming silent and afraid. Having a server at Cracker Barrel ignore their table until they had to leave, hungry. Being chased, shot at, run down. Unpaid. Treated by children rudely and by their parents with hatred. My moment of terror on the street was a miniscule taste of their lives as Black women, their fears for their children, their husbands, and the police. Yes, they were afraid of the police because justice in this country is unequal and for so many of them and their ancestors consisted of punishments doled out to the victim instead of the guilty. I felt their exhaustion and yes, anger but it wasn’t rage, it wasn’t hatred and it wasn’t about revenge. They were tired of asking for a place at the table, a seat on the bus, a job, service, and respect. They were tired.
It grew dark. The sound of police sirens filled the air. The one male in the class insisted on bringing me to the subway. My students each touched my hand as they left in their beautiful hats, their dignity and courage. Walking back to the subway my mouth filled with a sour taste, the memory of being alone, of being despised for the color of my skin, of being afraid of fellow humans and not knowing how to explain that yes, I was White, but I wasn’t a racist. I was just a teacher.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach