‘Put your hair away or you can’t have lunch!’ I remember being yelled at by my German teacher as I came down into the lunch room with my Afro out. Me being me, a person full of query,
did not put it away because, well first of all, how does one put their hair away?
I asked her about Lauren, and why was Lauren allowed to have her hair out, with no hairband or braids and have lunch but I couldn’t. The questioning and refusal to comply (I couldn’t comply anyway, I didn’t have a hair band and was not about to braid my hair) gained me some ‘thinking time’ outside the headteacher’s office.
Now one could argue that I deserved isolation and punishment for not following instructions and that was 16 years ago, times have changed! Fast forward to 2014 and my sister gets sent home for wearing her Afro out and being told by the head teacher himself that she should ‘do something with that mess’. Again, one could say that this was six years ago, but only a couple of years ago, I had a young man in my tutor group who was sent to isolation for having the ‘wrong haircut’. All of these incidents led to loss of learning time, which I’ve heard so many schools say are paramount to pupil progress. You could argue and say ‘why didn’t you just wear your hair in an appropriate style?’ Putting the onus on the child, but instead why not ask why is our natural hair not appropriate?
I’ve been hearing recently that our MPs think the UK is not racist and in fact it is one of the best places to be if you’re black; if this is so, why is it that a school with mostly black students says in their handbook ‘your Afro must not be higher than 2 inches’? It seems to me that just as limits have been placed on our children’s hair, so too has there been on their holistic development in schools. As a teacher, I stand by my profession and all the hard work that we put in; we are changing lives and influencing the next generation! This is why I think it’s so important to address the issue of systemic racism in our schools.
Let’s look at some positives, black students are doing better than they have before, they’re doing harder subjects, they’re going to university, taken from the lips of our PM, and I believe he is right due to the hard work some black teachers and parents have been doing behind the scenes to fight for our babies to get an equal footing in the human right of education! However, they are still one of the worst performing groups academically and when it comes to employment, they are less likely to get jobs regardless of their qualifications. Black students need to work ‘twice as hard’, a message that is ingrained in them from the home, yet they are fighting and working against some teachers who look at them as ‘thugs’, ‘intimidating’, having an ‘attitude’, ‘wild’ ‘unruly’, ‘arrogant’ and these are just adjectives used to their faces. Let’s not go into what is said behind their backs. There are so many reports out there highlighting the unequal and unfair treatment of Black students, and it being justified by some saying that we should not expect anything less from black students just because they’re black, this headteacher was obviously missing the point. Black boys in particular get harsher punishments for minor incidences, they’re most likely to be excluded or ‘managed moved’ which is a clever way schools have come up with to keep their exclusion numbers down. Black students are more likely to be sent to isolation or given detention for issues that could be better resolved with a conversation. I’ve seen teachers size up to black boys simply because their ego was bruised, they may be big and have deep voices, but they are still children! They need love, nurturing and care more so than they need punishment. They’re still growing, despite them sounding grown or trying to act grown, they don’t know better. Now I’m not saying that black kids are perfect and innocent, I know my buttons have certainly been pushed as a teacher, but I have found that trying to understand my students as individuals works way better than being the authoritarian punisher. The world is tough enough, I don’t want to be an additional cause for trauma they have to heal from later on down the line.
As a new mum I now look at my students in an even brighter light, I think about how I’d want teachers to talk to my child, how I’d want her to be uplifted, encouraged and inspired at all times and try to implement this towards my students.
Words are powerful and if you’re going to constantly be telling children that they are thugs, gangsters and should be lucky to be living in a country that has working computers; of course these words are going to affect their performance and overall experience in school.
Some teachers have never interacted with black people before they got into teaching and now they’re faced with essentially raising these black ‘wild’ kids, they go off of what they see on the news or shows and project those stereotypes on the kids.
To the black parents reading this, do take that into consideration and armour your kids with self belief, self confidence, self love and self respect, for if you respect yourself you should automatically respect others. Teach your children to stick up for themselves in an assertive manner and have an open dialogue so you know exactly what is going on in those six or seven hours when they are not with you. As much as MPs and school leaders say they’ve put this policy and that policy in place to ensure equality, teachers are still human and they have failings, stereotypes and prejudice just like the rest of us. The danger is that they are in the field shaping the next generation.
I know so many successful black people from the millennial generation, and we have to be mindful and active to ensure this success grows and flourishes in the generation and generations to come.
Raising Tori 