by Donna Foote
The first playdate of his life didn’t occur until he was in middle school; his mother dropped him off at a skating rink and then picked him up at the precise time the playdate was over. Though Phillip got his driver’s license, the keys to the car did not come along with it. He had to wait. When he was finally given the car, he used it only to go to work—he had no friends he wanted to hang out with. By the time he was actually able to form real friendships, he wasn’t sure he wanted them. They weigh me down. I don’t have time for this.
He learned early on that his father was not someone he could rely upon. His father wasn’t a real presence in his life, but Phillip felt lucky to know him. Most of the other kids at school didn’t have dads at all. When Phillip started playing soccer as a boy, his mother, who loved the game, mentioned that his father had played professionally. His father ended up giving Phillip the occasional pointer. But the son wasn’t the aggressive soccer player his father had been. In fact, that’s what Phillip liked about the game: soccer was more about strategy and teamwork than male aggression.
When he did see his father, Phillip recognized much of himself in him. It wasn’t just that they shared first and last names; they had the same complexion, the same hair, and, in some sense, the same personality. His father was so blunt that he often offended people. Over the years, more than one person had told Phillip that he was a bit harsh in his dealings with people. Phillip didn’t see it that way. When asked his opinion, he gave it. Sometimes the truth hurt.
Though Phillip’s father was a truck driver, his financial support was as inconsistent as his parenting. So Eunice worked full-time to make sure she and her son had food on the table and enough money to meet their needs. When she got laid off from Smith & Wesson, she went to school to learn computing skills and took temporary jobs. She eventually landed a permanent job on the seven-to-seven shift making envelopes in a factory. Her schedule was three days on and two days off. She was still working there when Phillip left for Los Angeles to Teach For America.
Phillip’s mother raised him with morals. And he knew he would disappoint her if he strayed from them. He didn’t feel the need to experiment with drugs or alcohol, and he had never dated. But he did feel driven to succeed at school. That came from his teachers, who seemed to take a special interest in his education. Neither of his parents had attended college.
The mentoring started in second grade with Miss Alice Ross. In middle school, he had his first African American math teacher, Miss Johnson. Phillip was not strong at math, but Miss Johnson told him he could be the best in the class. “I expect it from you—nothing less,” she said. It was powerful. Other good teachers followed. When he got a D on his first essay assignment, his teacher worked with him every day after school; she was appalled at his writing but impressed by his determination. During his high school summers, Phillip attended a private boarding school, Northfield Mount Hermon, as part of an eight-week Upward Bound program for underserved kids. In eleventh grade he joined the school’s Teachers for Tomorrow club. He graduated from Springfield’s High School of Science and Technology with a 3.9 GPA.
Phillip came to believe that a lot of his teachers saw him as their child. After his acceptance at Connecticut College, it was his guidance counselor who personally intervened and got the financial aid office to pay 95 percent of the costs—the tuition alone was more than his mother made in a year. Another fan, his high school computer teacher, Denise Cardona, actually threw a party for his college graduation four years later. She went all out, and more than a hundred guests celebrated Phillip’s achievement.
It was at the graduation ceremony that Phillip’s parents finally realized what his teachers had recognized early on: he was a passionate, hardworking young man with great promise. Phillip had struggled to get through college. He was a terrible test taker, and a B student. He found college to be a truly elitist society, particularly at a predominantly white, wealthy institution like Connecticut. The work seemed so hard and so abstract that Phillip sometimes wondered, What is all this for?
But he persevered. And he became a campus activist. Teach For America recognized his prominence on campus and tapped him to be a campus campaign manager. He worked hard for TFA and managed to get more undergrads to TFA’s campus information sessions than ever before. While attending a weekend training retreat, he was moved to tears by what TFA’s largely white, middle-class, top college grads were doing to close the achievement gap. He decided that he wanted to join the movement when he graduated. If they are so successful, think what I, a single African American male, could do in the inner city!
By then he had built up an impressive résumé. He was a math mentor through the college’s office of community volunteers, and he was the chair of Intercultural Pride (I-Pride), an organization founded to encourage an appreciation of multiculturalism and multiracialism. The summer before his senior year, he interned at the Connecticut Department of Education, where he designed the Connecticut Mastery Test Handbook. At his graduation, all his efforts were rewarded. The dean of the college named Phillip the winner of the Anna Lord Strauss Medal, an annual commendation given to the graduating senior who had done “outstanding work in public or community service.” A copy of his bio—which listed his accomplishments and noted his “keen intellect,” “perseverance,” and effectiveness as a “visionary educator”—was included in the graduation program. When his name was announced, the crowd erupted into cheers. Eunice Cole was hugely proud. It was one of the most thrilling moments of Phillip’s life.
That night when they got home, Phillip packed his bags—eight of them in all. He stripped his room bare and stored the rest of his belongings in boxes to be shipped out west once he was settled. When Phillip first told Eunice that he’d been offered a spot by Teach For America in Los Angeles, she was devastated. Then she went into denial. They would talk, she would ask if he had accepted, and he would tell her he had. The next time the subject came up, it would go the same way. Phillip would say he was going, and his mother would pretend he wasn’t. Not until she saw his bags packed on graduation night did Eunice really understand that Phillip was actually leaving home for good.
As part of the TFA selection process on interview day, Phillip and the other applicants had to indicate which subjects and grade levels they wanted to teach, and what region they would like to be assigned to. As he was filling out the form, it struck Phillip that this was a life-changing moment. He was choosing his destiny. He made a pact with himself then and there. If he was accepted, he would not chicken out; he would join the movement. He was a spiritual person. He viewed Teach For America as another calling—like college.
San Francisco was his first choice. When the TFA packet came in the mail over the winter break, it was fat. Phillip knew he had made it. He thought: San Francisco, here I come! But he waited a few days before he opened the envelope, afraid. He reminded himself that wherever he had been placed was where God meant him to be; he would go where he was needed. Steeling himself, he opened the envelope. His eyes went immediately to the second line of the letter, where the words “Los Angeles” were printed in black ink. Crap! L.A.! Racial tensions, gang violence, bad school system. That’s not for me. Holy crap! He mulled over how to tell his mother, then resigned himself to his fate. He knew that wherever he was sent, he would be helping students like himself, students whose life circumstances were associated with low academic performance—students of color, of low socioeconomic status, students who were only sons of single moms and absent fathers. So he reframed the story: L.A. Land of the Stars. Sure. Why not?
With the Watts and Rodney King riots, Los Angeles had earned a reputation for racial tensions. On the East Coast, the racism was more insidious. And constant. He was reminded of it every time he went into a store and was approached by an anxious clerk asking if he needed help. Or when he was told the waiting time for a table at a good restaurant was half an hour even though the place was empty. What was particularly galling to Phillip was, the bigots didn�
�t want you to know they were being racist, so they would smile outwardly, while shooting you with daggers on the inside.
At Connecticut College there was no attempt to mask the racism. Two of his white roommates were openly contemptuous of minorities—though they never confronted Phillip face-to-face. A spate of hate crimes, directed at anyone who wasn’t white, wealthy, Anglo-Saxon, and heterosexual, plagued the school. As chair of I-Pride in his sophomore year, Phillip helped organize a hate crimes symposium at which top state officials spoke. The ugly e-mails and crank calls that I-Pride received didn’t seem to be targeted at him personally. But still, they stung.
Would it be more of the same in Los Angeles? What about Locke? Mindful that racial tensions could be a problem, Phillip purposely arranged his classroom desks in rows and drew up a chart with assigned seating. He decided that there would be no group work until he was sure he had his students under control. The strategy seemed to work. He didn’t have the racial conflict in his classroom that other teachers complained of—maybe because the kids knew that he wouldn’t stand for it.
Still, he noticed that kids—both blacks and Latinos—almost instinctively played the race card when challenged by a person in authority. During the fourth week of school, Phillip went head to head with a Mexican boy called Rafael who was constantly late for class. That day, Rafael walked in and slipped into the wrong seat. Phillip asked him to move to his assigned seat. The kid balked, but Phillip had already laid down the law. His students would do as he asked. Rafael refused. “What kind of a fucking class is this?” Rafael complained.
He kept it up. Phillip ignored him. Rafael raised his hand. Phillip continued the lesson. Then Rafael held up a sign that read: “Please help me, I have a question.” Finally he charged: “You don’t like me cuz I’m Mexican.”
Phillip ordered him out of the room. Out in the hallway, the battle of wills continued until Rafael threatened to vomit and went to the nurse’s office. Later, another teacher told Phillip Rafael’s story. It turned out that Rafael’s parents were in and out of his life, so he had been living with his sister and her boyfriend, a big-time gangbanger with clout. He had raped Rafael while his sister looked on—in silence. Just thinking about it made Phillip cry. Rafael’s aggressiveness had nothing to do with the fact that Rafael was brown and Phillip was black.
The truth was, in Los Angeles Phillip didn’t really think much about being black. He felt free of the racial baggage he’d carried around in the Northeast. The only time he was ever conscious of his color was when he was driving his silver Honda Accord and he happened to see a cop. He could almost read the officer’s mind: Here’s a black man in a nice car with his windows down listening to loud music… But so far, at least, Phillip had not been stopped. People were amazed. Even white TFAers had been pulled over when driving near Locke. For different reasons, of course.
“What are you doing in this area?” the officer would ask. And then:
“I’ll escort you out of here.”
Phillip may not have felt particularly black; many of the white teachers didn’t feel particularly white. During the first few days of summer school, Taylor had been acutely aware of her skin color. As the days and weeks went by, she rarely thought about it.
But the kids at Locke did think about race, and they were confounded by it. They grew up believing that the white man was the oppressor. Many of their teachers had reinforced the point, and their limited life experiences had confirmed it. In their neighborhoods, the only white person they ever saw was the occasional cop—and interactions with the police often ended unhappily. In their minds, to be white was to be powerful, usually wealthy, and undoubtedly racist.
So a white teacher—particularly a hardworking one who obviously enjoyed kids—was a conundrum. Oftentimes, the kids were in denial. They simply decided the teacher was not white.
When one of Taylor’s kids complained that a black teacher had cursed at her, she mused: “The white people here, I don’t know why white people want to be here.” Then she stopped. “Are you white?”
Taylor responded with a question. “What do you think?”
The child was nonplussed. “I don’t know.”
Hrag’s heritage was the source of heated debate among his students. More than once he had to break up an argument, only to discover that the kids were bickering over his identity.
“Hey, Mr. H,” said one black girl in the middle of a lesson about stem cells. “What’s your race?”
Hrag had been told Armenian gangs were active in Los Angeles. He knew Locke was a gang school. He didn’t want to put himself in any unnecessary danger because of his ethnicity. So he punted. “What’s my race?” he answered.
“You not white, right?” she said by way of explanation.
Someone argued that he was Hawaiian. What about me is Hawaiian?…Aah. Hamalian sounds like Hawaiian. Other kids guessed Irish or Norwegian. They couldn’t figure him out.
“Do you live in Beverly Hills?” asked one kid.
“Do you drive a Ferrari?” asked another.
“No, I don’t live in Beverly Hills and I don’t drive a Ferrari. I drive a Ford Focus,” he said to a chorus of derisive laughter.
So they figured he couldn’t be white—he didn’t act like a rich guy from Beverly Hills, and he didn’t look like a surfer dude. But he wasn’t Hispanic, even though he spoke fluent Spanish. So what was he?
At first, he couldn’t understand why his kids were so obsessed with his race. Then it dawned on him. They have no perception of what white is. On TV, all the white people drive nice cars. White for them is not a race. It’s more like a bunch of people who have no idea—-about who they are and how they live. They think I’m not white, because I’m here.
Even Phillip found himself being confused for the Man. When he refused to let a black kid go to the bathroom once, the kid charged: “It’s because I’m black. You’re a racist!”
“I’m as black as you are!” countered Phillip, incredulous.
“No, you’re not, your skin is white.” Phillip just looked at the kid and burst out laughing.
Rachelle’s pale complexion, light blue eyes, and long blond hair made it hard to mistake her for anything other than a stereotypical California girl. She found it was much harder for her kids to process her skin color than it was for her to process theirs. During TFA diversity seminars in the summer, recruits were urged to explore their own hidden biases and to begin “unpacking privilege,” a reference to a 1988 essay entitled “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” in which the author, Peggy McIntosh, refuted the myth of American meritocracy and exposed the unearned benefits and privileges attached to being identified as “white.” One of the texts for the summer institute curriculum had been devoted to the issue of diversity. In it, TFA urged its members to engage in the process of “knowing thyself”—of thinking critically about internalized and often unrealized biases, and to consider the ways in which identity-based status bestows unmerited advantages. A documentary film exploring racial biases called The Color of Fear was shown at a diversity session one night in Long Beach; recruits of color were resentful when many white CMs skipped the discussion afterward. For many recruits, the message telegraphed at institute was: whites were prejudiced—even if they didn’t realize it—just by virtue of their whiteness.
But Rachelle didn’t feel that way. When she walked into the classroom, she didn’t think, Oh, I’m teaching a black or a Latino kid. No. In her classroom, she didn’t see kids of color, she saw kids with problems—caused by the limitations imposed on them by their color and circumstances.
For her, race didn’t mean a great deal. It never had. But she found herself stepping back and imagining how other people—other white people—might see her kids. She knew how sweet and bright the girls on the soccer team were. But how would people in Beverly Hills perceive them if they were walking down Rodeo Drive? Darling or dangerous? There was no doubt: they would be dismissed at a glance as poor kids fro
m the ghetto. It was so frustrating, because Rachelle knew something the white folks on the West Side didn’t know. She knew for sure that her kids could do whatever their kids could do—if only they had the same zip codes.
She thought about her own life of privilege. She had grown up in Mission Hills, the historical section of San Diego that overlooks the harbor. Her parents were both attorneys. Her father, Allen, taught law at the University of San Diego; Rachelle had often played there as a child. Her mother, Lynne, was a prominent San Diego litigator who had been nominated to the federal bench during the Clinton administration.
Rachelle attended La Jolla High School, and through middle school had been enrolled in the seminar program, the San Diego school district’s academic track for students who tested into the gifted-and-talented program. Rachelle had hated high school. She wasn’t interested in her classes and couldn’t stand all the rules. By the time graduation rolled around, Rachelle couldn’t wait to get out of high school and away from home. Now she empathized with her students whose IEPs read “oppositional defiant disorder.” She had suffered from the same thing. Only in San Diego, it was called teenaged brattiness.
As difficult as it had seemed at the time, Rachelle now appreciated how carefree her adolescence had actually been. She had never been afraid to walk home from school. Nor did she ever have to worry about how she dressed. When she thought about clothes, it was in the context of what the boys would think, not whether the colors she picked could get her killed. Though both of her parents worked, one of them was always home at night to help with homework.
Rachelle wrestled with the issue of white privilege and internalized bias. On the one hand, she respected the racial identities of her kids and the barriers and limitations they faced. On the other hand, she didn’t care what anyone said: some of the behavior she saw in her classroom would be considered unacceptable in any culture.
The cursing was unbelievable, the use of the word “nigga” absolutely shocking. In fact, it might have been the most frequently used term in the Locke high schoolers’ vocabulary. Even some of the staff used it. One young boy came to Rachelle and complained that another teacher had called him a dumb-ass nigga. When Rachelle asked a veteran of Locke if that could be true, he explained, “Yes, it’s true. It’s because she’s black. Black people talk shit. All black people talk like that.”
