White Women’s Work is Never Done
Teaching is a Monoculture
At my first teacher job I was hired by an all-white committee made up of educators and administrators.
It was surprising to me that in LA, even twenty-five years ago, there existed an all-white anything. But the principal, a computer teacher, a coordinator, and a general ed teacher all met together one afternoon to size me up and decide on my vocational future.
Happily, they approved of me. All four also then proved to be lovely people as well as dedicated professionals whom I learned a lot from.
What struck me most as I walked into the principal’s office that day was that all four sat scrunched together as they laughed uproariously at something that had been said moments before I entered the room. I remember thinking that I definitely wanted to work at a school site where staff members freely laughed alongside their boss. I took their merriment as a sign of a healthy work environment.
The committee hired me, and I became their colleague for the next decade.
One of the committee members was Ms. H.
Ms. H was a tough, no-nonsense third-grade educator. Sardonic, with an interesting life story that included some time spent in Spain as a nanny, she was a knowledgeable and veteran educator possessed of a very sharp wit.
Toward the end of my time at the school Ms. H. began to suffer a cascading series of health issues. Her physical well-being deteriorated to the point of her needing to use a walker along with having to keep on-hand one of the few, precious elevator keys at the school.
At the time of her frailty, I was an out-of-classroom teacher. One day the parents of a student in her class lodged a complaint against her. The principal and I held a meeting with the parents and Ms. H in order to help resolve whatever the issue was.
At the meeting, the parents were very upset at Ms. H, but they wouldn’t name any specific reason why they were so upset. They just kept saying that she was a “bad teacher” and that they wanted their child moved out of her classroom.
I personally suspected they wanted their child transferred out of the classroom simply because Ms. H. was ill. But they didn’t want to admit such a prejudice so they just kept repeating the vague charge of her being a “bad teacher, bad teacher.”
They were immigrants and spoke in a heavily-accented English. They could’ve spoke Spanish if they wanted to because both the principal and I spoke Spanish, but for some reason the father insisted on using English to accuse the teacher. The most they could offer as examples of the teacher’s “badness” was that she raised her voice often at her students. I knew this was true because I had often heard Ms. H. use her booming voice to control her classroom. But that was not unusual at our school (or in most schools, for that matter). There were very few teachers who don’t raise their voice at one time or another.
The meeting kept going around in circles, and when the parents didn’t seem to be getting what they wanted, the father starting raising his own voice, getting more agitated, and even pointing his finger into Ms. H’s face, accusing her of being a “bad teacher!”
This woman, who I had always experienced as funny and proud and self-possessed, soon enough slumped in her seat and trembled with incomprehension. “What did I do? What did I do?” she kept repeating, her voice getting higher and higher, until she finally broke down in tears.
She was sick and weak and, admittedly, was probably not engaged in the best teaching of her career due to her ailments. She began to weep. And when she did the principal, finally, ended the meeting and stopped the attack. We all disbanded. The child was transferred. The parents had received what they came for.
Those two experiences, the hiring committee’s interview of me and the meeting with the disgruntled parents, bookended my time at A. Elementary. They were stark symbols of how the laughing, joke-laden school I had started with had degraded into something unfunny and troubled.
I received a reminder of this dynamic a couple of weeks ago. A troll decided to comment negatively on one of my social media posts. Who the troll is doesn’t really matter because at one point in my career I had an entire school angry at me and trying to get me fired (future post).
But what connects Ms. H’s story with the current post for me is how my career was dominated by white women who were sometimes my champions but more often than not were my biggest detractors. What Ms. H experienced in that awful meeting with those highly-reactive Latino parents was something I experienced often from my white women colleagues.
For twenty years I did white women’s work. (Nationwide 80% of teachers are white and 89% of elementary school teachers are women).
I took up space in a corner of the labor market that has been dominated since its inception by white women (who were initially selected as a morally appropriate source of cheap labor for the task of educating children).
In my profession I stuck out like a gay, brown sore thumb at trainings, grade level meetings, workshops, and at the lunch table. Often, on one end of the spectrum I was held in a benign curiosity, at the other end I was held in suspicion and disapproval.
Admittedly, my smart mouth and my belief that many of my colleagues were mediocre and even soft bigots usually made things worse. I rubbed many teachers, the women especially, the wrong way. I was more than once accused of misogyny, rudeness, unprofessionalism, and “meanness.”
To be fair, many of these charges were not too far of the mark. In terms of misogyny, I know for a fact that the default misogyny of our society inevitably embeds itself in the best of us. Even I recognize that I’m usually more inclined to honk at a woman driving badly than a man driving badly not because I believe that women are worse drivers but because a man is more likely to take out a gun and shoot you.
I’m also admittedly not very nice (as an English major I know that nice originally meant stupid). Nice is word often reserved for people whom are non-threatening, mediocre, and irrelevant. You never want to be described as nice. Instead, I subscribe to the idea that another recent social media post highlighted, “I’m a good person not a nice one.”
There is a certain popular expectation that male elementary school teachers be polite, “nice” eunuchs who sport bow ties and cardigans a la Mr. Rogers. The entire joke of the 90s movie Kindergarten Cop was that manly-man Arnold Schwarzenegger found himself misplaced in the childish, feminine world of kindergarten.
As a teacher I was a strapping young queer boy with fade and a mustache in the shape of a permanent frown. Some students and parents were initially either suspicious or afraid of me from our very first meeting. I had to work much harder to receive the acceptance and grace white women received just by being themselves. But I refused to fall into the trap of pretending to be agreeable and nice.
I accomplished this by being a competent pedagogue especially in my delivery of language curricula, by being transparent in my management, and by forging strong relationships with parents. But I never did it by being “nice” to children or parents or colleagues.
The truth was I was on mission, not to be liked by everyone, but to deliver the next generation of revolutionaries their ABCs and 123s.
I engaged in a style that often included such unorthodox strategies of management as letting boys (and girls, too) roughhouse, allowing them to make messes and destroy things, allowing them to play with water guns and slingshots (so much fun!), and even encouraging some children to stand up for themselves.
I also deliberately didn’t talk down to the children. I despise “baby talk.” I don’t treat young children as babies because they are not babies. I never goo goo-ed and gaa gaa-ed my way through the day.
My teaching tone was one of droll sarcasm which usually went over most of the heads of the small children. Often the sole gifted kid in my class would get my jokes.
And, honestly, I often wielded an exaggerated loud baritone to get my kids in line or quiet them down.
It was a fe-fi-fo-fum get-in-line boom boom command voice that I’m sure many women didn’t appreciate despite the cacophony of shrill and shrieks coming from all the other staff members from the red-faced lady principal railing on a student who had pulled the fire alarm to the yard lady screaming at the kids to stop throwing food at each other.
I wasn’t nice because nice means stupid and my teaching wasn’t stupid.