In this episode, The Shameless Berg talks about his experience as a white teacher in a predominantly black inner-city school, and why he's tired of pretending not to notice his black students. He also talks about a recent story that went viral on Reddit, about a white high school teacher who discovers some things about his Black students and decides to do something about it.
00:01:47.000Local inner-city schools had been advertising turnaround initiatives and I decided to give it a go as the school I was at had successfully completed a turnaround initiative started when I had first arrived.
00:01:59.000The two schools were very similar with one major difference.
00:02:05.000The proportion of students who were listed as economically disadvantaged parenthetical poverty was the same at both schools, but I was leaving primarily Hispanic to go to primarily black.
00:02:22.000The entire year was a complete disaster from beginning to end.
00:02:26.000I could probably write an entire book about the shit I saw there, but I'm just going to give you the highlights starting from least to most serious.
00:03:41.000The same little bitch also have a speech to the school board or gave a speech to.
00:03:42.000There are some typos in this person's story.
00:03:43.000Gave a speech to the school board about the institutional forces that keep black people down.
00:03:48.000Before you accuse me of having shitty classroom management, I tried talking to my AP and my principal about what to do because I had never experienced anything like this.
00:04:01.000And some of us are, you know, have. We've known about it for a while, but you know, it's nice for one of you to find out every now and then.
00:04:25.000And they told me something I was going to hear repeatedly throughout the year.
00:05:04.000Like by implication, it matters far more how they're feeling than how I'm feeling about anything.
00:05:09.000Let them, you know, impose upon me completely, impose upon my environment, impose upon my culture, you know, but I better tolerate all of that shit because wouldn't want to upset them and their culture.
00:05:22.000Nobody justifies why we should be putting up with any of this stuff.
00:05:26.000Nobody can explain you have to respect.
00:06:15.000Now, you know, the white man has to accommodate all of them and just be like, yep, yep, totally normal, totally on par with the way that we think and behave as white people.
00:06:24.000Exactly the same should get the exact same results and output because we have to keep playing, playing along, playing pretend for this nonsense.
00:06:33.000The black female principal with a Ph.D. in education told me it's just their culture.
00:06:56.000I had a handful of good kids and coincidentally, I'm sure they were almost all African immigrants.
00:07:03.000Now, I mean, you know, you'll commonly hear that some of the fresh off the boat Africans from certain parts of Africa, I think in particular, Somalia, not Somalia, God forbid, sorry.
00:07:13.000Um, Ethiopia, like you, you will have some come here and to be honest with you will live kind of peaceable, normal lives and work pretty hard.
00:07:22.000I can't actually completely deny that because I've seen it.
00:07:47.000Um, yeah, so African immigrants, he's saying, you know, they were doing pretty well.
00:07:55.000And, you know, compared to African Americans, one boy from Rwanda was accepted to Stanford.
00:08:02.000Um, now I've got to say there, of course, still going to have been given some advantages, like under the racial dynamic, the affirmative action, all of these policies, they will still have been given some, some favor.
00:08:32.000Uh, the college counselor trying to pressure him to change his mind and go to fucking grambling instead said he was turning his back on his community by going to Stanford.
00:08:53.000I mean, and I've seen this before, you know, I've seen plenty of examples and you can hear lots of stories from some of the more successful, educated black people that will tell of some of the hardship that they dealt with when they had ambitions a little bit too high for, uh, for the ghetto.
00:09:11.000You know, a little bit too high for their homies in the struggle.
00:09:34.000I mean, you know, even when you have exceptions, you just, you know, when you have exceptionally intelligent ones, exceptionally hardworking, exceptionally resourceful, you, you know, pick them to pieces and expect them to kind of lower themselves to the level of your tribe.
00:10:01.000So, but I'm sure that like differences in outcomes can still, in the end, be blamed on white people.
00:10:10.000Like that person could go to Stanford, but like, you know, their community wants them to go over here instead.
00:10:16.000Their life outcome would have been different if they'd gone to Stanford.
00:10:21.000And since it will be a less prosperous outcome with grambling, it, it then leaves them the opportunity to just blame, blame it on white people.
00:10:35.000I'm so tired of listening to all their pissing and moaning and whining and complaining that when I see something like this, my mind starts to go, I wonder what kind of bullshit sort of logic they could come up with.
00:10:47.000What sort of mental gymnastics could they use to blame this on white people somehow?