The Secret Power of Karens, Black Joy, & CRT
NSFS: Not Safe for School, your snark-filled antidote to racism and corruption in education. Follow @postphdtheblog on Twitter and @allisonharbin_postphd on Instagram
This week I’m thinking about Black joy and my own damn white privilege. Lemme explain…
Dear friends and fam,
On Friday, I snuck into the public school graduation of my former students. The school itself, as well as the principals and (most of) the faculty, was the first place I ever felt a sense of professional belonging. After a mostly traumatic exodus from academia, involving riding the high of a whistle blower, and then the low low of a whistle blower’s life once everyone stops looking, and then a string of dead-end soulless jobs that barely even kept me living in Brooklyn, this school was the first place that welcomed me with open arms, saw what I was doing with the curriculum (mostly throwing it out and replacing it with Critical Race Theory (CRT)-based Black and brown literature and art), and loved it.
I sat with the cool kids in the back, nearly all of whom I had had in my classroom before, they graduated last year, with no graduation ceremony, and had come to cheer on their friends. As the graduation ceremony wore on (Jesus, are they long), I talked with one former student about his classes at community college, how he tried but just couldn’t learn anything with online classes, and I felt that weird teacher instinct to tell him to avoid for-profit colleges (if you want to know why, Tessie McMillan Cottom’s book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy will learn you rul gud).
And then, as my former students began walking across that stage, I tried to fight back tears so the cool kids wouldn’t see me. I knew what each of them, individually, had been through to get to walk across that stage, the trauma of poverty in pandemic, the trauma of dysfunctional education where counsellors wouldn’t do their job (I suspect because they didn’t know how, but the students have more harsh sentiments towards the reasons behind college counsellor’s ineffectuality).
Finally, it came to the valedictorian’s speech, who happened to also be one of my former students who is as academically hard working as she is talented in dancing. As this nerd supreme began to speak, I thought about how much she had grown and evolved since the last time I had her in the classroom, and I (not for the first time) marveled at how much adolescent brains are capable of changing and growing in such a short amount of time.
The waterworks (thankfully concealed behind my sunglasses) really began when she gave me a shout-out in her speech. She turned to me, asked me to stand, and said, “Thank you for teaching us how think and how to write. We all learned so much from you, you even taught us how to cheat.”
At this point, I playfully put my fingers to my lips, only vaguely worried that everyone in the school thought I taught kids how to cheat. I racked my brain, had I? You see, I was born with a whole lot of educational privilege. I was one of those kids that, had they not performed well academically, calls would have been made to ensure my success. I know how the educational world works, after all. So, in my teaching, I did my best to tell BIPOC kids how to “act” privileged, what short cuts white suburban kids inherently knew about that were completely foreign to my students. I did my best to attend to the “learning gap” between white kids and BIPOC kids by teaching them to fight for their right to a good education.
For instance, one of my students got into a SUNY (State University of New York) which is a BFD for them and the school, but she was $7,000 shy of being able to afford it. As in, all the FAFSA, grants, etc she got left her with about $7,000 to cover in tuition. That’s it. And that would have completely thwarted her ability to go to that school, because her mother (and rightfully so) was terrified of having her saddled with student loan debt and refused to let her go.
Absolutely not would a measly $7,000 stop my student from going. So, I harnessed the power of the Karen and called up the Educational Opportunities Program (EOP-- to help kids from the hood succeed in college), and asked what they could possibly do about this funding shortage.
I told the concerned white official on the other end, “I know you work for EOP, but you really have no idea how hard it has been just to even apply this year in the chaos of the pandemic at an already dysfunctional system, she fought tooth and nail to get in and desperately wants to go, but will not be able to attend if she does not get more funding.”
He told me understood, and that he would speak to his boss and “see what they could do.” After the call, I called up my student and explained to her what I had just done, adding, “Never, ever be afraid to ask for more money, more help, whatever. White people inherently feel they are owed this, and so should you-- this is the secret power of the Karen white lady. Say what you will about Karens, that attitude often gets you what you want.”
And then we waited. After a few days, I hadn’t heard back, and I made a pitch to my student about FAFSA and federal student loans. I thought about doing a GoFundMe with you all, just in case it was too late to get loans for the first semester. Hell, I was more or less ready to pitch in significantly if it meant getting her there for the fall semester. After all, when I began teaching, I set a huge goal for myself: help as many as I can along their way, teach them the beauty and resilience of their own cultures, and help at least one get to college.
Two weeks later, my student texted me a screenshot of a scholarship she had just been awarded through the university, asking me what it meant. And there, in the email, was her full scholarship, room and board included. She couldn’t believe it, and was convinced there was a catch. I asked her to forward me the whole email (kids these days and their screenshots ammi right), and then told her that the only catch was that she had to take a minimum of 12 credit hours per semester, and that she could not take time off unless risk losing the scholarship altogether. I told her I actually liked this stipulation because now college was her full time job, and that it would help her stay on track to graduate and then go on to law school (her goal).
So I guess in this meandering story, my main take aways are: CRT is just teaching the real, full history of the world and of art and literature so as to work against the dominating notion that whites are superior and that sometimes, the power of Karen can be harnessed for good.
Reparation Opportunity for the Melanin-Deficient:
I’m obsessed with her views on CRT, Black joy, empowerment, and of course, education. She is a good one to follow just to get a sense of how to make meaning on the Republican’s sudden “discovery” of CRT and just why it is integral, if too often ignored, for real education. For ALL races, btw.
xoxo,
allison aka karen-er 4 gud
P.S. Story behind why I had to leave NY public school for the charter school world:
When the NY DOE denied me my teaching license because the word “English” wasn’t in any of my three degrees, despite the fact I had 8 years of teaching college writing and literature, I was heartbroken. It meant that if I chose to stay, I would only make a day wage of a substitute teacher, with no benefits. At 33 and never having made more than 35k in a year (yay academia), I couldn’t live off that. So I made the devastating announcement I would have to leave the school, and even though students created a petition to have me stay, the truth was that even the principal’s hands were tied. She could not hire me full time because of the union and DOE’s asinine requirements.
So, until I could complete 18 credit hours in Education at a partner university with the NY DOE, I would have to fend for myself in the wilds of charter school worlds. (I completed 6 grad credit hours the rona semester of 2020, and when I say the class was absolutely worthless, I really do mean it. The instructor was a near-retirement age white woman who was a high school English teacher by day. I truly feel for her high school students, because if I learned anything in that class, it was that her high schoolers weren’t learning shit either, but that’s a different story).
And we all know what happened when I went into charter schools. To make a traumatic story short, the whole time I was there I was terrified of getting fired for teaching with CRT, for empowering students, and for siding with them against the dysfunctional dictatorship model of governance charter schools nearly ubiquitously adopt.
Until next time,
A
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This is why I love Black futurism, or Afrofuturism: It allows an honest inspection of the past in order to re-imagine the future. Afrofuturism evaluates the past and future to create better conditions for the present generation of Black people through the use of technology, art, music, and literature.