I never really felt white white until I found myself standing up in front of a tenth-grade world history class in Washington, D.C., with twenty Black students and four students from El Salvador, talking about the transatlantic slave trade.
“So why did they think they could enslave the Africans, then, Dayvon?” I asked one of my students, a hefty kid with large, kind eyes, an easy smile, and a script that was nearly impossible to decipher.
“Because they were white,” he said. Then his eyes fell, his face flushed. “Oh, I mean, I’m sorry, Mr. Dr. Woods. I didn’t mean that.”
I wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for.
“Because they were Caucasian,” he said, correcting himself.
It was a small charter school in a rickety old brick factory building with irregular plumbing and uneven floors in southeast Washington, D.C., a few blocks off Pennsylvania Avenue, in the shadow of the Capitol. It was a rapidly changing neighborhood in a gentrifying city, but the delineations were still rough. The housing projects across from the school sat in an uneasy truce with million-dollar mansions.
We had roughly four hundred students at the school, and around three hundred of them were Black. The other hundred were Salvadoran. There were two white kids, twins, which reinforced the kids’ joke that all white people look alike. Most of the teachers were white, and students regularly mistook me for other white teachers maybe because we were all just instruments of authority or maybe because, to them, we really did all look alike.
I’d ended up there in the whitest way imaginable. Paul, the washtub bass player in the band I’d put together, taught English at the school and had booked us to play at their faculty talent show. Wearing cowboy hats and playing archaic instruments, we were kind of like a honky-tonk minstrel show, performing an exaggerated whiteness to a nonwhite audience.
But the kids were going kind of crazy for it, clapping along to the beat, mock square-dancing, jumping, cheering. The applause seemed genuine, but part of me felt the appreciation must have either been ironic or coerced. I would never have cheered for any of my teachers in high school. But when I saw the way they approached Paul afterward, it was clear there was some real affection. “Yo, Mr. B!” they exclaimed. It felt important, like in those feel-good TV shows with the inspirational teacher who changes lives with a white savior complex.
By the time we were packing up our gear that night, I was asking Paul about working there. I had just finished writing my dissertation—about how people unwittingly become bad—and didn’t want to pursue an academic career. At least not at the moment. I’d gotten no job offers my first year on the market, and Nicole was working on her dissertation, and she was a much more serious academic than I. I loved teaching, but I really wanted to write fiction, and I was done with scholarship on ancient philosophy. So I applied at the school and started the next fall, teaching history to tenth graders and philosophy to juniors and seniors.
“It’s OK, white is not a bad word,” I said to Dayvon, and laughed. “It’s better than Caucasian.”
I wasn’t really sure why white was better than Caucasian to me, but Caucasian felt old, outdated, and not the way I’d ever thought of myself. But white, I realized, had been the word on the signs at segregated schools. How could we still use the word white at all, with that apartheid history attached to it?
“Do white people really eat bugs?” Dayvon asked.
The class exploded in laughter, slapping their palms against their desks, and filled the room with the enthusiastic hooting high school kids use to prolong a lawless moment, the wild freedom of being off topic.
“No, for real,” Dayvon said, looking concerned. “I don’t mean no disrespect, and I’m not trying to be funny. But I saw this news report about how white people eat bugs.”
“Yeah, I saw that too,” another student exclaimed.
“Eww, gross!” a chorus of kids followed.
I had seen it too. The previous year, the area had been swarmed by billions of cicadas, which had come up out of the ground in a seventeen-year cycle, and several different news outlets had run stories about cooking the singing crustaceans.
“Not normally,” I said. “But they are a good source of protein.”
“Eww,” the kids cried out again.
“But back to you, Dayvon,” I said. “Why would being white make the Europeans think they could enslave the Africans?”
He looked down, embarrassed. I looked around the room for another student to call on, and they were all suddenly deeply engrossed in their notebooks. Teaching these students about the slave trade was the first time I had ever seriously thought about slavery myself. In philosophy there was Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic” and Nietzsche’s “slave morality,” but it was all metaphorical and abstract—as if the slave trade hadn’t been an actual fact during their lives. But now, preparing to teach, I read about the horrors of the Middle Passage and the plantation work camps, and I realized that my family had played a role in this horror that was morally no less repugnant than the Holocaust. But the response of the descendants of those perpetrators was so different. I recalled how Grandmother Woods had truly believed that her forebears had been kind and that the people they had enslaved had loved them. We pass down illusions to our children, the things we want to believe, and they never grow out of them but carry these distorted images into adulthood and on to the future.
I started seriously reading Black literature for the first time that year. When I read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, as I rode the Metro for an hour each day from my Greenbelt home into the city, I realized that, in the prologue, it is not just that white people can’t see the Black narrator—as white people, we are also invisible to ourselves. Whiteness was everywhere. But because it was presented as the norm, as the standard, as the universal, it was nowhere. This dialectic of whiteness made it almost impossible for white people to really see ourselves in the way everyone else saw us.
The Black students could see us clearly—but they were scared of telling the truth, at least to us. They were as uncomfortable talking about whiteness as their white teachers were. We all talked about Blackness all the time, about civil rights and the achievement gap. We weren’t uncomfortable talking about race. We were uncomfortable talking about whiteness. Race, we thought, was a Black thing.
It was 2005, at the height of No Child Left Behind and the school reform movement. The achievement gap between Black and white children was, thousands of us all around the country told ourselves, the civil rights fight of our time. That sense of urgency, along with the logistical reach of Teach for America, brought the “best and brightest” young white kids from the Ivy League colleges to places like the school where I taught, where nearly 70 percent of the kids received free or reduced-price lunches and about the same number read significantly below their grade level, according to the standardized tests with which our success would be measured.
At thirty-three, I was a good decade older than many of the other new teachers and had never been to an Ivy League school, but as we started our classes on the first day, we were all faced with the same choice, one that was new to most of us: we had to decide how we would play our whiteness.
What kind of white person will you be?
We didn’t talk about it that way, of course. We talked about “classroom management” and teaching style and authority—but we had to figure out how to deploy the power we represented.
There were a few basic options. There was the White Best Friend. Many of the new teachers, and especially the ones who were only a few years older than the students, tried to make their whiteness as invisible to the kids as it was to them, acting like the differences in both age and race were minor or even nonexistent. “Yo, did you hear that new Lil Wayne song? It’s dope,” a blond math teacher said one day at the beginning of a class I happened to be observing. The students erupted in laughter.
Closely related to that was the White Parent, the role whereby white teachers wanted to be surrogate parents for their students. Most afternoons you could find them with a crying student sitting in their classrooms, complaining about a boyfriend or another teacher.
To me it seemed like both these approaches were more about the feelings of the white teacher than the success of the Black students. So I took a third approach—the White Drill Sergeant. I had been an antiauthoritarian anarchist for most of my adult life, but when I took the job at the school, I decided that I was going to be a stern disciplinarian. It was part of the rhetoric of reform and charter schools—we owed it to these kids to eliminate the achievement gap and make sure they were performing as well as white kids on standardized tests designed for white kids.
But even though I wanted my students to be treated the same as white kids, I did not consider that, as a white kid, I had slept my way all through school with no stern disciplinarians setting me straight.
I didn’t see how the system had been set up to cushion my mistakes. But I thought of my own experience and knew that I would not be the kind of teacher who would look the other way when a kid was screwing up because it was easier. I was going to care enough to be tough.
Instead of trying to be down, I adopted the goofiest white persona I could, wearing suspenders and a tool belt with detention slips in it. And rather than ripping off the kids’ slang, as so many of the teachers did, I used archaic words—skulduggery, rapscallion, spiffy—and was thrilled when I heard them creep into the students’ speech. I loved the job and felt electrified every time I walked into my classroom. I was popular with the students precisely because I did not pander to them.
The academic teachers were mostly white, but there was a disciplinary staff made up of four Black men, two of whom had been students at the school two years before. Mr. Marlowe, the vice principal in charge of this staff, was a bulky Black man with his short hair cropped high above his ears and a mustache so thin that it almost seemed drawn on. He was a towering moral presence within the school. He did not argue with students or pander to them either. He enforced the rules and he enforced them strictly, but without emotion or anger. Cause and effect, he said, was what they needed to learn. When the teachers were inconsistent, when they acted out of emotion, the kids never learned anything. “You might not think it’s fair to send them out of the class or for us to suspend them,” he said. “But it’s not fair to the other students to let them disrupt the learning time.”
Again and again, the Black “discipline staff” rescued the white teachers from seemingly insoluble conflict with Black students.
I admired the authority with which Mr. Marlowe carried himself among both the kids and the teachers, and I began to model my own disciplinary style after him—with my own flourishes. I loved goofy tactics, pranks, and puns to break up the series of expectations a school day brings. When the school began calling detention “reflection,” I started carrying a mirror in my tool belt and would whip it out like a cowboy and flash the kids with their own reflections in order to signal a detention, hoping the absurdity of the gesture would offset the initial negative reaction—but, whatever we called it, it was still detention.
I might have had good intentions, but I also had an extraordinary amount of power over these students—as all teachers do—and that power amplified any mistakes I made.
About a week into my first year there, the academic dean approached my door with a student. Because of spotty school attendance in Baltimore, from where he’d recently moved, the school hadn’t known in what grade to put the kid, whose name was Aaron. So even though there was no record he had completed the ninth grade, or even the eighth, it had decided, based on his age, that he would be a tenth grader and put him in my class.
He had light skin and a kind of smashed pug nose and hazel eyes that were almost green. He was new to the school and spent the first class looking sadly off into the distance, pretending to do the work I asked for, hoping not to be noticed.
The next day, I wanted to make a point of engaging him and making him feel welcome, and so I called on him early in class.
“So, Aaron, why is it called the triangle trade?” I asked, pointing at a world map hanging on the wall.
He just looked at his desk.
“Aaron,” I said.
My booming voice was an asset in the classroom. It was one of the things I liked about teaching—it turned something that had always seemed like a flaw, something I could not control, into an advantage. Sometimes my volume and cadence kept students captivated. I tried to be entertaining. But it could also really annoy teenage students when they were tired. And it annoyed Aaron then.
“Man, why you keep bothering me?” he asked.
“Because that’s what education is,” I said. “Did you do the reading?”
He was silent.
“Aaron,” I said.
“God!” he said, and sprang up from behind his desk and stormed out of the class.
A few minutes later, my door opened, and Marlowe stuck his head in and motioned me to come out.
“OK, read the next section,” I said, and stepped out into the hallway, which was lined with orange lockers reflecting the fluorescent light.
“What happened with Aaron?” Marlowe asked.
“I don’t know. I just called on him and he yelled back and then jumped out of his chair and lunged at me and then ran out of the door,” I said.
I wasn’t scared when Aaron had leaped up, but my account emphasized a sense of danger, adding the word lunged, for instance, and highlighted the racial threat presented by the student, perhaps in order to cover any of my failures that may have contributed to his desire to escape.
Describing events in a way that favored me had long been one of my worst flaws, but it was so natural to me, so essential to the white culture in which I had been raised, that I hardly realized I was doing it. I experienced the world in terms of what was good for me and what was bad for me. My reality was dominated by the desire to seem right rather than the desire to be right.
When I was in school, I’d argued endlessly with my teachers, I’d exaggerated and escalated, making every slight against me into a major affront while minimizing each of my errors. Such behavior from a student is annoying but mainly harmless because the student lacks the authority to enshrine this version as truth. But in the reverse situation, where there was a complete imbalance of power, where I was the authority, such an instinctual exaggeration could be detrimental and even deadly.
Marlowe, who was not one to make exceptions, graciously ignored my overstatement to make the case for an unaccustomed leniency for the kid.
“He’s a tough case,” Marlowe said. “He moved here from Baltimore because his dad was murdered. He’s torn up. In a lot of pain and he’s confused. He only reads at a third-grade level. But he’s a Golden Gloves boxer. Supertalented. He’s a good kid.”
After that, Aaron and I started to get along. I couldn’t imagine how someone could make it to the tenth grade reading at what standardized tests told me was a third-grade level. How many teachers had simply passed him on, overlooked him, made him someone else’s problem? I was not going to do that. I pushed him academically, and it seemed he responded, and he started attending school more regularly.
One day, at the end of class, I mentioned something about South Carolina. “Oh, you know, South Cackalacky,” he said, using a slang phrase that later became popular but at that point I’d never heard outside the state, as the bell rang and the room exploded into motion. We both laughed.
“My family comes from Beaufort,” he said, standing beside my desk as the class filed out into the hall.
“You know, public education began in Beaufort,” I said. “With Robert Smalls, a Black congressman, during Reconstruction.”
“The guy who stole the boat, right?” he said.
“Exactly,” I said, delighted that we both knew the story of Smalls, who had captured the Confederate ship he worked on and brought it over to the Union and later served five terms in Congress. “So if he can do it—”
“See you tomorrow, Dr. Woods,” he said with a little smirk, cutting me off as he turned and walked out past the group of students filing in.
“Stay spiffy,” I said, and followed him out.
Between classes there was the chaotic energy of four hundred bodies passing in different directions through the narrow hallways of the school building, which had uneven wooden floors and unreliable toilets and had not been built for this kind of traffic.
Many teachers remained in their classrooms, waiting for the students to come to them, but I prided myself on prowling the halls, feeling that energy, and engaging with the students.
This proactive approach was rewarded. During my second year at the school, I had three leadership positions. I was a department chair, a mentor teacher, and the teacher representative of the four-person management team that made the major decisions for the school. But I didn’t represent the teachers so much as manage them.
Armed with this new sense of responsibility, not only did I patrol the halls looking for student misconduct, I also looked into classrooms to make sure teachers were following the ever-more-prescriptive lesson plans we were working with consultants to develop.
There was very little money at the school, but during my second year there, through a grant I got sixty copies of Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel depicting the Holocaust through the experiences of Spiegelman’s father, who was reluctant to talk about it with his son.
The students at our school struggled greatly with reading, and I hoped that the illustrations could help provide the context that would lead to understanding.
“So why are the Jews depicted as mice?” I asked the class, standing in front of them, my voice booming.
“Dang, Mr. Dr. Woods, why you got to be so loud?” Bree said, off to the side. Other students laughed.
“Because it’s important,” I said. “So why?”
“Because the Germans are cats and they kill mice,” Bree answered.
“Good,” I said. “And Aaron, what are the Americans represented as?”
“Dogs,” he said.
“And why?” I asked.
“Well, hold up. What I don’t get. They were Jewish but German too, right? And he, Artie or whatever, is an American but also a Jew. But they are mice. But how are Black people and Caucasians both dogs?”
“White people,” I reminded him. “It’s OK to say ‘white people.’”
“How are Black people and white people both dogs, then?”
A wave of nervous laughter rippled through the class.
“Because we are all Americans,” I said.
“But wasn’t this when y’all was using dogs on us?”
“It was,” I said, feeling uneasy about the pronoun y’all, which included me in the group of oppressors. “And you’re right that there are very real parallels between the way that segregation worked here and what Art’s father is telling him.”
In preparing for that class, I’d read that the Nazis had modeled the racist Nuremberg Laws on American laws—but that the Jim Crow system, which had benefited my family at the expense of Aaron’s, had been deemed too extreme even by the Nazis. There was a direct connection between the schools my parents had gone to and Aaron’s academic limitations. Aaron’s struggles and my successes were both part of the world my parents had been born and raised into, the world that my grandparents had perpetuated, and that my parents had never seemed to question.
Inspired by Art Spiegelman’s conversations with his father in Maus about his experience in the Holocaust, the next time I was talking with Dad on the phone, I brought up school segregation. But where Spiegelman’s father had been a victim, I knew that mine had been, at best, a bystander.
“What was it like going to a segregated school?” I asked him on my cell phone as I walked through D.C. one bright afternoon, making my way from school to the Metro.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I didn’t know then because I didn’t know anything different. Did you know that the case that started the whole integration push was in Clarendon County, Briggs v. Elliott?”
“No,” I said.
“I think it was in 1947, shortly after I was born, and some Black families sued because they couldn’t get school buses, so they said that separate but equal didn’t hold,” he said. “It became part of the famous Brown v. Board of Education case and was decided in the midfifties. But South Carolina schools didn’t actually integrate until shortly before you were born, and so I never knew anything different.”
“When Brown happened, were people worried about integration?” I asked, standing now outside the Eastern Market Metro station waiting to go underground so I wouldn’t lose my signal. “White people?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “And there were riots in Darlington once it finally happened. I think they tipped over a school bus.”
“And Grandmother was a teacher,” I said. “Was she at all-white schools?”
“Definitely,” he said. “But later she had some Black students too.”
“I’ve been teaching about the Nazis and the Holocaust, and the German writers of your generation are so mad at their parents,” I said. “Weren’t you furious when it turned out you’d been raised in this system that was so wildly unfair?”
“It wasn’t so bad,” he said. “Like I said, I didn’t know anything different. But I didn’t benefit from it anyway. And a lot of people were pissed off about that. By the time I was really on the job market, after the Coast Guard, women and Blacks could have pretty much any job that I could and were often favored over someone like me, without a college degree, so when people say I was advantaged it’s really not true. Even growing up, we were the only white family on our street, and we were as poor as most of them.”
“I mean, sure,” I said. “But whether or not your family made good use of it, the system was set up to be really unfair—in your favor. And when you realized that, it didn’t piss you off?”
“I’m walking into the grocery store now,” he said. “I’ve got to go.”
“All right,” I said and stepped on the escalator and began descending underground.
I was mad at him for refusing to see what seemed so evident to me, for refusing to admit it, because, whatever the legal situation, my experience teaching made it feel obvious that we still had segregated schools, and I wanted to know how his refusal to look at what his life had really been like, at his school, in his town of Manning, had made my Washington, D.C., school the way it was.
I knew that when the government forced integration, white people had created segregation academies for white kids, private schools where they had the “best” educations—and as a result had attempted to destroy public education. And I knew that the challenges my students faced somehow resulted from that move. And it made me angry.
As I felt the whoosh of the approaching subway echoing against the tiles of the arched underground ceiling, I felt as if the entire Republican idea that Dad espoused so fervently was just an attempt to go back to that segregated world in which he was infinitely privileged while considering himself as disadvantaged as his Black neighbors who’d had to fight for thirty-four years just for the right to school buses. The doors opened and I got on the train, furious and disgusted at what I saw as a willful lack of courage, an abrogation of reality.
As I rode the train out into the county, I noticed one of my students, a short Black girl with dyed red hair, on the same car. It had become more common to see the kids commuting into the city for school as they got priced out of D.C. Washington is divided into eight wards, and I’d hear them jokingly call the surrounding county, where it was much cheaper, Ward Nine. I pulled out my book—Toni Morrison’s Beloved—and tried not to notice that the student likely did not live in the city anymore.
Even though I had cast myself as a stern disciplinarian, I was not going to snitch on a student who still wanted to come to our school even though gentrification had forced her family to the county, which was pretty much the same thing Mom had done when she lied about our address when we moved to Greenville. Running such a small school meant every day presented a new crisis, and I had no time to police where the kids lived.
Weekends in those days had that brief sense of relief you get when you are driving in a furious rainstorm and pass under a bridge and it is quiet for just a minute before you rush again into the roar. And that was just for the teachers. Some of the students were dealing with lives that were far more complicated than ours, and sometimes they would just quit showing up for a while.
That’s what happened with Aaron. I’d call the roll each day, looking out and hoping to see his hazel eyes challenging me from his seat. But each day I was disappointed. Eventually I asked Roberto, one of Aaron’s friends, if he had any idea where he was.
“I think he’s, uh, working,” Roberto said.
“Where?” I said.
“Come on,” he said.
“What?” I said.
“Come on, Mr. Dr. Woods,” he said.
“He’s dealing drugs?” I asked.
Roberto said nothing. But he looked me in the eyes and gave a little nod before walking away.
I went to ask Mr. Marlowe if he’d heard anything about Aaron, and he said they had been calling but hadn’t been able to get in touch.
“I’ll try again today and let you know if I hear anything,” he said, towering above me in the door of his office.
I was starting to consider leaving the school. I loved it from the minute my feet hit the floors in the morning until I went to bed. I was obsessed. But I also wanted to have a life outside the school. I woke up at four every morning to try to write fiction, but it wasn’t going well, and I was starting to feel the strain. Nicole told me I needed to decide between being a high school teacher and being a writer, and we had started saving up money so I could take time off and try to write a book. She had just gotten a job in Baltimore County, and if I wasn’t working in D.C. anymore, then we thought we might be able to move to Baltimore and live in a real city, and as I walked away from Marlowe’s office wondering what kind of good I was doing, the idea of leaving the school seemed more appealing than ever.
That spring, I walked out into the small lobby on my way to the deli around the corner to buy a sandwich for lunch, and I saw Aaron sitting there on a bench by the metal detectors.
“Aaron, where have you been?” I asked, feigning severity, tilting my brows and narrowing my eyes, but I was happy to see him.
“I’m leaving,” he said without really looking at me.
“What do you mean?”
“Leaving school,” he said. “My mom’s in there with Marlowe and them now.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Come on.”
“You know, you can do this,” I said. “I can help you and you can do it.”
“And then what?” he said, looking up at me. “College? You’ve seen how I read. Seriously, Dr. Woods, what am I going to do? What kind of job is waiting for me? I am making more money now than I could ever make in any job I get no matter how hard I work. And we are fucking broke—”
I raised my eyebrow.
“Sorry. We are gosh-darned broke,” he said, causing us both to laugh, despite ourselves.
“Yeah, but,” I said, looking at him as seriously as I could, “you know where that leads.”
His hazel eyes glimmered with curiosity—I don’t think he was curious about what I would say but about whether I would really say it.
He raised his eyebrows, urging me on.
“A bullet in the head,” I said.
He shook his head. It was fucked up to say—we both knew I was playing what had happened to his dad against him.
“OK, tell me how you’re going to help me,” he said. “What is your plan for me? If I follow your route, where will I be in ten years?”
I could not answer. It was racist to believe that in ten years Aaron couldn’t be on the same path I was on, to believe he could not do anything I could do. That was the path we offered to our students, the same path I had rejected at his age: work hard, go to college, get a good job, be happy. But it was equally racist to use that path as a cheap answer for someone like Aaron who lacked almost all the support I had and who was, at that moment, in an existential crisis.
“Yeah,” he said, and smirked a little. “That’s what I thought.”
Standing there, by the metal detector in front of the open door, I saw that he had known that I had been lying to him this entire time. He’d known it and I hadn’t. I’d thought I had the answers, and it turned out that I didn’t have any. I didn’t even know the right questions.
He left school that day and I never saw him again.
My cohort of teachers and I thought we needed to learn about the historical and socioeconomic limitations of our Black students so that we could educate them, fix them. But it was not they who were broken. We failed them because we could not see the historical and socioeconomic limitations of our whiteness. Aaron’s family in Beaufort hadn’t just lacked resources—their resources had been stolen by the likes of my family. When we, the white teachers, wondered why our students lacked skills and resources, we needed look no further than the mirror I carried in my tool belt.