From a prior student of mine...

Upon thinking about diversity and what it means to be and to work with and for the "Other", I asked an old student of mine, now attending Harvard University, to reflect upon her experiences growing up in MPS and going to the most diverse school in the state. I thought this may be useful to you, as future teachers. Here's her response...

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It's sort of difficult for me to describe clearly how important it was to go to school in an incredibly diverse and open environment, because up through high school I'd never really known anything else. The student population at every school I went to in Milwaukee was tilted heavily towards the "other" with respect to race, income, and family background, so I didn't see the environment at King as any different from the schools I'd previously attended. Now that I'm at Harvard, though, I miss King's environment. Although the most obvious difference is that Harvard is much, much whiter than King, I think the more salient feature is that there's just so much privilege here. The first week of my freshman year, I was sitting around talking with a few people on our floor. Two kids got into an argument as to who was less spoiled, and they started giving examples of just how difficult their lives were. The first said, "I have to pump my own gas!" (Never mind that his dad bought the car and paid his credit card bills.) The second said, "I have to clean the pool!" That was probably my first "What the fuck am I doing here?" moment, and one of the first times I realized just how different my environment is here in Cambridge than it was back home in Milwaukee.The other reason I have difficulty talking about what King's environment went to me is because I don't fit perfectly on either side of the dividing line between the privileged and the marginalized. (Of course, I don't believe that it makes any sense to sort people out into the Man and the Other - but that seems to be the way a lot of people talk about privilege and marginalization.) On the one hand, I'm privileged to be white/Asian, to be upper-middle-class, to have educated parents, to be in good health, to have a two-parent family, and so on - so maybe I'm the Man. On the other hand, I'm female, I'm gay, I'm not-quite-white - so maybe I'm the Other. But from both perspectives, I think King was a good place to be. The diversity is good for people who don't fit the straight-white-Christian-male model, I think. I came out in high school, and although there were only a few out students (especially women), I found it a pretty accepting place to be out - especially compared to some of my friends from more homogeneous areas. I almost never felt that I was second-guessed because I was a woman, although I've felt that way in other settings (for instance, the national debate circuit). On the other hand, the diversity is also good for privileged people - I think that a lot of the passive racism and sexism and classism and heterosexism I see here at Harvard can be directly explained by the fact that a lot of people were simply never exposed to an environment that disrupted their assumptions about race, or gender, or class, or sexuality. It's hard to buy into stereotypes about black folks when your school is 65% African-American; it's hard to keep using "gay" as an epithet when you know that someone else in the room is gay. This is also where anti-oppressive education comes in. Not every classroom is going to have a gay student who's willing or able to call out other students for homophobic behavior, and in those classrooms, it's especially important that the teacher, as the authority figure and the adult, play an active role. I didn't entirely realize that I was gay when I started high school, but it was still incredibly reassuring when Amy, on the first day of her ninth-grade English class, laid out an explicit rule that it wasn't acceptable to use terms like "gay" in a derogatory manner. When you're in a position of privilege, it can be difficult to remember that not everyone is as comfortable in their own skin as you are; being in any kind of minority can often add to the already intense social pressure and stress that most kids experience during high school. So a good teacher, I think, goes out of his or her way to establish that it's not acceptable to pick on people because of their race or gender or class or sexuality. This is really, really tough, because it requires you to admit your own privilege - and a lot of us white upper-middle-class liberals feel awfully guilty about that. It's very difficult for me, as a white/Chinese woman, to admit that black students might someday see me as the oppressor, even though my intentions are good; I've been angry about white racism since the day my first-grade teacher told me about Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement, and admitting that I might be some small and well-meaning part of the problem is not only embarassing; it also calls into question a part of my self-understanding that's very important to me. But the best teachers I've had have recognized that and gotten over it. While it's legitimately uncomfortable to admit that you don't know everything about working with black students, it is infinitely more uncomfortable for your black students if you're not willing to get over yourself and figure out how to make your classroom safe for them.