Chicago.
By Kass Minor
In this essay, I share with you the babyhood of my teacher life, my White teacher life. My presence in schools now was born from something that I once barely understood, that almost 20 years later, I’ve just begun to name. I share with you my understanding of this process; a slow, multiyear self-excavation, practical wisdom born from ongoing reverence for the communities I’ve met and continue to serve.
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On Chicago’s South Side, I entered the Hyde Park bubble with the same vibrant eagerness that many other 21-year-old White women had done before and after me as a tutoring program supervisor. My job was to advise school leaders, most of whom were Black women two and three times my age, with The University of Chicago as my promoter. I had just begun to work for UChicago’s Neighborhood Schools Program, a programmatic lukewarm apology for gentrifying the richness of Black life on the South Side.
It was 2004, and I had just broken off an engagement, literally called off a wedding a few short months before it was supposed to happen, and moved into an apartment with three strangers. The people who lived in this apartment–polyamorous, queer, vibrant, White–became my closest friends and confidants throughout my Chicago experience. The clinking of dirty dishes, meows of three cats, and music of The Magnetic Fields played the notes of our survival.
My survival in those days involved a series of decisions that bore almost no weight: what train to take, what food to buy, who to spend time with, what show to watch. I was protected in so many ways, buoyed by my family, my job, my friendships, my connection to the University. When I committed to this job and moved to this city, I had strong intentions to do more, to do better, to fix what I had read about in undergrad. But as I spent more time in schools and neighborhoods that surrounded Hyde Park, witnessing what I read about, the justice I sought to build became more foreign, less possible, and less fun. My daily comforts allowed me to do less, to participate in being bored.
What a privilege, I would learn, so many years later, it is to be bored.
My program director, a White man in his early 70s, handed me a copy of Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here and a list of 11 schools and three government offices. He instructed me to visit the sites, “see what they needed,” and send UChicago tutors to the sites based on my assessment. I also received a Metro pass.
I walked endlessly through the South Side. Circling schools, attempting to find a door that wasn’t locked, attempting to find a teacher or school leader who would talk to me long enough to help me understand what it was, exactly, they needed. This became an almost singular mission in my work.
Sometimes, I made it through a 90-minute trek on public transit only to get into a school, sit in the main office for 75 minutes, and leave because everyone was either too busy or too exhausted to notice my existence.
There were, however, a few places I could count on to always acknowledge my presence; mostly, I surmised, because I was a warm body that could keep children occupied. I remember one principal, an older Black woman, would see me every time I arrived and immediately send me to the same first grade classroom. This wasn’t supposed to be my job; I was supposed to deploy university students for this work, but I didn’t care. I latched on to any opportunity that allowed me to do any type of work in a school that involved something other than being dismissed.
I have crystal-clear memories of those first visits:
My first classroom visit in that space was October 2004. I walked in, counted 25 Black children and one Black teacher and became instantly aware of my pale, White self. Nonetheless, as part of my singular mission to advise and be helpful, I waited for a moment to gently ask the teacher how she might like me to assist her. The whole class sat in rows with basels on their desks. It was so quiet you could hear the sounds of breathing. After a few moments, the teacher pointed at three boys and told them loudly to “go with her.” They thunderously clapped their basels closed and followed me without question. (Nobody ever gave me any directions, they assumed that I knew what to do).
I had no real experience working with children–had never taught, had never tutored. But maybe because of my pseudo UChicago street cred or helpful White lady vibes, (or more likely, the lack of staffing), in that first-grade classroom, I was continuously sent to scoop the boys up and “help them read.”
We had no designated spot. The school, like many on the South Side in 2004, was old, cold, with many nooks and crannies, much like an unmagical Hogwarts. Our most coveted spot was the cold hallway floor about 10 feet from the classroom door. Mostly, the boys seemed happy to be allowed to leave the classroom for a bit, and they flattered me with what I now know are questions Black and Brown kids reserve for White people. First, the “Ms, what are you?” Then, the eye pointing. My blue eyes became one of the most popular conversation starters in our reading group. I learned that for the boys, blue eyes were unfamiliar in their lived experience. The boys would point, inquisitively. Not saying much, just nodding to the others, pointing directly at my eyes, and saying, “Look!”
The only thing I had to lean on was a sort of practical wisdom etched in my body from a lifetime of witnessing my grandparents and parents talk to me as a child. I approached the boys in the same way. I started with, “How are you?” which was met with squirming, laughing, rolling on the floor, and whispering that had nothing to do with my question.
I quickly stopped with the open-ended questions and thought to ask questions that were *probably* part of their lives. For example, “What did you have for breakfast this morning?” This type of stuff they responded to. Full-on conversation about cereal would commence, debating the merits of Cap’n Crunch over Fruit Loops, the meh-attitude toward Cheerios, the specialness of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
And then, in the bubble of chatter, one of the first-grade boys would blurt, in the same tone as a suggestion for which cereal to buy, something like, “Yo, my uncle got shot yesterday.” And then conversation would change shape entirely, and suddenly I was covering my shock, witnessing a group of first graders talk about the multiple times they’ve witnessed murder or other types of violence.
I continually reflect on this experience. At the paucity of thinking I would be able to contribute anything at all to this group of boys; to this group of schools; to this beautiful, rich community that the country looked at through a lens of failure. I was staring at something I did not understand, living in a space, I quickly began to learn, where no one was going to switch the light on for me.
And yet…
I was continually positioned as a knower, a fixer, an advisor, a boss. As a 21-year-old White woman, a prestigious university and service program nodded at me hard, beckoning me to go in and bring “new life and energy” into communities that had suffered a legacy of structural racism that I had only read about, that I had only witnessed through reading whiffs of Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities; my primary form of “practice” coming into fruition through writing assignments. My degree in sociology concentrated in educational inequality meant nothing to the experience I was living within school-based communities, and their communities at large, in the predominantly Black South Side of Chicago.
The only credentials that actually mattered to my work, to my life, at that point in time were the notes of practical wisdom unearthed to me through my family, through the multiple witnessings of life I had growing up in all types of different communities across the United States, though none were all Black. You’re wondering, I’m sure, how I responded to those first graders’ blaśe words toward death. It would have been easy to capitalize on the moment, engaging in a golden tone of White saviorism. You know, snap the shot of me and the Black kids, tagging it with a “look at me working with poor Black children talking about murder.” Had I been around a bunch of White colleagues, or White people in general, I might have returned home with a whole MySpace (it’s 2004, remember) page blanketed with White saviorisms and cloaked my conversations over the cereal dinners I shared with my roommates with, “You’ll never believe what I did today.” I could have elaborated on all the monstrosities small kids had to witness.
But I didn’t. Shortly after that first day of first-grade murder talk, I walked home, stopped at the Medici Cafe, bought a six dollar chococino, took a nap, listened to more Magnetic Fields, and probably watched an episode of Project Runway (the Tim Gunn/Heidi Klum version) with my roommates. I filed away my experience to deal with later, otherwise known as a version of White privilege that allows White people to compartmentalize hard parts of life that are witnessed but not necessarily experienced. White people have the opportunity to process this grief and hardship within the landscape of work, and in many cases, can “leave it on the table.” I was, and to an extent, still am, a recipient of this privilege.
In the dynamic of lone White person working in a sea of Black folx, there is absolutely no space for self-grandeur. There are only large swaths of space for introspection, self-excavation, deep listening, and trial and error on repeat. I didn’t know whether I was in Zamunda or Bel Air, but there I was, positioned as knower.
I learned that I couldn’t use my schema from previous experiences to figure out what to do in this lived experience. My pre-2004 schema for my White self talking to Black kids about anything was immersed in my childhood: an integrated, socialist version of diversity that came from years spent on Air Force bases. It was a militarized life in which a strange undercurrent of war and nuclear threat served as a warped connector for me and my friends, who looked like a Benetton ad, neighbors, whose parents, Black and White, Filipino and Puerto Rican, literally fought wars together. That was definitely not how the South Side operated. This was not a frame of reference I could draw from. My naivete was strong, but I knew enough to know that.
There was no training that UChicago sent me to, text I had read, or blueprint for “what to do next” that was able to guide me in those short moments immediately following utterances of death, and longer moments in years to come. Instead, I drew on something far more guttural and nebulous, something deep in my belly that gave me a glimpse, a notion, for what to do and how to act:
Midwestern Dirt: a page from my family’s playbook...when you don’t know how to do something, figure it out. Directions are not printed out for everything.
Elbow Grease: real work, right work, is not easy. I can almost hear my grandfather say to me, “Put some muscle to it!”
and
Engine Oil: essentially, sustenance; Literally, the rest, sleep, food, friends, and joy you feed yourself to keep going.
And then something new, but familiar:
Communal Reverence: something that came from how my parents always told me to acknowledge everyone with a smile or an affirmative glance and that I might learn something if I just listened.
Those are buckets I drew from every time I worked with the first-grade boys, every time I waited for someone to meet with me, every time I figured out a new route to a school all the way down the Dan Ryan Expressway. Pieces of me grew, and they grew because of that communal reverence mixed with hard work, diligent reflection, voracious study, and the most basic of self-care practices, almost all of which I learned outside the institution of school. I relied heavily on the influences of the community immediately surrounding me, but not necessarily communities I could call my own.