by Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman
07/03/13
I cannot get over a conversation that my wife and I had, just last week, with our daughter-in-law, Alexis. During a recent visit, she shared with us that her son, our grandson, had been assigned an “F-grade,” and had been consigned to failure, by his young, white, female, public school teacher in Inglewood, California.
That teacher had, in fact, pointed that child's desk, which was already in the corner, to face the window, instead of the front of the class! She had already classified him as “mentally deficient” and “uneducable”; “typical of the other black boys in her class,” she said. To say that I was shocked beyond measure, and livid, is an understatement! I was also dumb-founded! So was Alexis, who tearfully described this encounter with us.
Alexis, is an award-winning school teacher in Los Angeles, who had been graduated with top honors from Howard University. Her child's public school teacher did not even know his mother's background. So she was quite surprised, when Alexis asked this young “teacher” to see the baseline determinants, upon which she had based such dismal prognostications. She had none! Her assessment had been wholly subjective.
Say what? Panting in disbelief, I shook my head and wiped away tears.
Alexis then told her that she was a teacher. “You are?” gasped that teacher! After stammering and stuttering her way to a hasty conclusion of that embarrassing conference about that 7-year old's “progress,” that teacher promised to reassess that child and to re-position his seat away from the back of the class and the window!
Subsequent conferences, revealed—amazingly--that that same “mentally deficient” and “uneducable” child was now making startling progress, that teacher reported.
Go figure.
I told Alexis to report that very teacher to the proper authorities, in order to save some other mother, or father, not blessed with her background, from such trauma, and to save some other child from such racist and arbitrary condemnation.
If this were not true, I would not share it with you! Be on your guard! Ten-thousand foes arise!
This profoundly disturbing and deeply personal report was prompted by—compelled by--my contemporaneous reading of “Not 'Waiting for Superman,” a chapter in the book, THE BRILLIANCE OF BLACK CHILDREN IN MATHEMATICS: Beyond the Numbers and Toward A New Discourse, pp. 96-97 (Information Age Publishing, Inc., Charlotte, NC: 2013), Jacqueline Leonard and Danny B. Martin, Editors.
Our black boys (and girls) are in grave danger, as this testimony attests, even in 2013, even if they are just 7 years old. Be zealous for them and solicitous of all of them! Let them know that they were born into an unfinished FREEDOM WAR, which began in 1619 in Jamestown, Virginia through 1865 in Appomattox to the present. Tell them that they are also on the very front lines, and because of that vulnerable spot, they too must fight the good fight of faith, by being: aware, attentive, cooperative, inventive, adaptive, collaborative, brave, obedient, studious, curious, clever, and communicative.
Onward Christian soldiers!
