'Don't Make the Black Kids Angry': The hoax of black victimization and those who enable it.

by Colin Flaherty

  And besides, that was “curriculum” and that was not his specialty.

  O.K.

  Lots of teachers did not want any part of this training after learning what was in it.

  In Memphis, several white teachers objected to the Singleton’s race-based solutions, but “are scared to talk publicly because they are too scared to say anything for fear they will be fired or released.”[260]

  Another teacher chimes in with advice for teachers who are facing a Courageous Conversation for the first time:[261]

  “If your employer is sending you to this diversity training, he or she has already drank the Koolaid. Just go to the training. Participate in the line up. Accept that you are a bad person and a bad teacher and that you are a bigot.

  “Accept that there is no such thing as racism for Black people. Realize that you are a beneficiary of White privilege. Also, remember that the ultimate rejoinder will always be that you‘just don't get it.’

  “No matter what you say, this is what will be offered up. For example, you say that you think it's wrong that such and such happens and you actually want to have an honest debate about it: he or one of his acolytes will look at you head shaking, slightly amused and disappointed, and say‘you just don't get it.’

  “If you call attention to yourself, Glenn will quietly call the principal or whomever set up this professional development program. They--or he or she-- will be told by Glenn that they have a racist in their midst.

  “If you don't have tenure, you will be let go at the end of the year. It will seem to be for some other reason, but that is what will happen.”

  In Portland, some teachers were surprised to hear that Peanut Butter and Jelly was racist:[262]

  “A teacher in the district presented a lesson that included a reference to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Gutierrez says that by using sandwiches as an illustration, the teacher was engaged in a very subtle form of racism.

  “What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?”asked Gutierrez, according to Portland Tribune.“Another way would be to say:‘Americans eat peanut butter and jelly, do you have anything like that?’Let them tell you. Maybe they eat torta. Or pita.” [263]

  Sometimes Singleton is not even on the scene when school board members and parents spread his message: White teachers suck. (Even if, as white people go, teachers are just about the best of the bunch.)

  In July 2014, black preachers and community activists gathered at Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Fresno to demand the school board get rid of the white guy they hired to teach African American studies. If what he is teaching is valid, they have a point. [264]

  Think about it.

  In Elgin, Illinois, the black school board voted in March 2014 to stop hiring white teachers and hire more black teachers: [265]

  “It is important that students have teachers who look like them,”remarked Vilma Sept, chairwoman of the U46 African-American advisory council.

  Thomas Jackson who supports deliberately recruiting non-Whites, explained his reasoning;“when you have a minority teacher, every minority student can see that‘some day I can be the teacher, some day I can be a lawyer, I can be a doctor.”

  In June of 2014, Glenn Sullivan was just a few weeks out of a New Orleans High School when he wrote a column for the Washington Post explaining his educational deficiencies: “My school district hires too many white teachers.”

  He and his classmates often behaved poorly, did not study, and were disruptive in class, but only his black teachers knew how to handle that, he said.[266]

  The kid learned something, that’s for sure.

  In New York, a black principal “banished a veteran teacher to a book-storage closet” because he was “ruining his little black children,” said The Post. The principal, Antonio K’Tori, accused him of no longer being able to control his students and used that as a pretext for firing him, said the teacher.[267]

  No one is hiding anything: The topic of white teachers and black students is a favorite with some news sites. And most agree with Singleton: White teachers suck.

  In Los Angeles, black history teacher Spencer Smith was so down with the struggle that in May 2014 he posed “as Trayvon Martin in a yearbook photo, with hoodie and Skittles,” said the headline in the New York Daily News.[268]

  No cough syrup and grape drink?

  At the University of Maryland, a school official started out the Fall of 2013 with an email to students welcoming them back to campus, in a weird way: Fox News picked it up:

  "This year, we learned that it is legal to hunt down and kill American children in Florida," read the email, in a reference to the trial of George Zimmerman, who was cleared of all charges in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The email went out to all students in the Honors College. He then invited students to a lecture by Julian Bond. [269]

  Down in Prince George’s County, Florida, a jury awarded a white teacher $350,000 after it found he was subject to years of racial abuse. He accused his black principal of using racial slurs against him and of telling students that the “only reason a white teacher teaches in P.G. County is that they can’t get a job elsewhere.”[270]

  At Virginia State University, a guest lecturer talks about how people listen to “Fuck the Police” and “dare the police to pull us over.”

  After awhile, some parents and teachers actually get tired of this and say something. In San Leandro in 2009, after several years of Courageous Conversations, the teachers’ union gave its superintendent a vote of “no confidence” with a 90 percent majority. She left soon thereafter. Soon thereafter that, the State of California said the San Leandro school district was 140 out of 146 in closing the education gap.

  In Madison and Seattle, they stopped using Courageous Conversation materials. In Arizona, they kicked Singleton out of the entire state. The state legislature forbade race-based teaching and race-based affirmative action in schools. The liberals howled.

  The New York Times, of course, said that anyone who is against race-based teaching is a racist.[271]

  Whether Glenn Singleton is lashing teacher and administrators into shape or not, this much is true: Schools are the most hyper-racial institutions in the country.

  Teachers throughout the country are fighting back -- however meekly -- against this race-based education and discipline.

  They say black students are not just unruly. They don’t just have different learning styles. They are dangerous.

  Black violence Against Teachers

  A courageous conversation about relentless violence? Uh, no.

  "There is no Negro living in America who has not felt, simple, naked and unanswerable hatred; who has not wanted to smash any white face he may encounter in a day, to violate, out of motives of the cruelest vengeance, their women, to break the bodies of all white people and bring them low, as low as the dust to which he himself has been and is being trampled.”

  James Baldwin

  While Glenn Singleton preaches there is nothing wrong with black violence in schools that getting rid of white teachers won’t cure, black school officials throughout the country ignore black mayhem because they do not want to “criminalize” students. Trayvon Martin is the most famous example of that.

  Trayvon was caught with stolen goods and burglary tools but never arrested because of that policy. Jack Cashill wrote a great book about it that is the first, last and final word on the criminal history of St. Trayvon.[272]

  The secret of disproportionate levels of black violence in schools is no secret. It is the subject of frequent stories at black web sites including the TheGrio.com, Huffpo Black Voices, The Root.com, Ebony, Jet and others.

  Glenn Singleton is way past trying to deny it. But he does explain it:

  “White educators are prone to wondering why black and brown boys are prone to fighting in school,” he writes.

  “They question why violence is taught in homes of color. Missing from this analysis however is how these b
oys might be affected by growing up in a White-governed country which threatens young men of color at will, distrusts their ability to succeed and follow the law, and allows daily racial stress to mount in neighborhoods, schools and classrooms.”

  To quote the great poet: I did not know that.

  Let’s look at some of the hyper-violence Singleton explains away with such facility.

  In South Philadelphia High School, black students harassed, assaulted and tortured Asian students every day for years. The black principal said they did not alert police because they did not want to criminalize the students.

  For all the talk about the disparity in punishment black miscreants receive in school, no one was talking about the victims. The students who could not learn. The students who suffered the assaults.

  And the teachers from schools all over the country who every day try to create order out of constant chaos. Often at risk to their own safety. Including this teacher who recently decided to call it quits:

  I am a white teacher working in an almost exclusively black middle school. In May of 2012, I left my classroom in an ambulance after two fighting students ran around the room at full speed and plowed into me, knocking me to the ground.

  I sustained permanent back injuries and had a knee operation. This year, instead of remedial reading classes (I am a reading teacher), I was assigned full classes. From mid-September, I have been subjected to almost daily race baiting, racial and sexual taunts, threats, and attacks.

  Students chase me and each other around the room with table legs, threaten to kill my“three ugly little niggers”, follow me to my car in groups shouting racial epithets and“get in a white school, bitch”. Requests to sit in a seat are met with,“Oh, it’s cause I’m black”or“Why you hate black people?” I often hear,“Imma gonna slap this white bitch”, etc.

  On Oct 30, a 7th grade girl with a history of incidents against me had just returned from suspension (she had sprayed me in the face with perfume after telling me that I“smell like old white pussy”) and got angry when I changed her seat.

  She said,“Oh, this damn bitch is all up in my face startin’her shit. Imma gonna kick her fuckin’white ass”. She then got up and gave a long racially charged diatribe about how she“can do whatever I want to the white bitch and the school can’t do nothin’. It’s just a damn school and I’m about to kick this bitch’s white ass‘cuz I am DONE with the damn bitch”.

  She ended her rant by shoving past me and shoving me to the floor.

  Incidents such as these are written off as“poor instruction”or“poor planning”. When I discussed this situation with my (Black) principal, she said,“I doubt they even know you are white.” She also said,“I have to wonder if you are able to really to engage the young people–do they LIKE the work you give?”

  I know other teachers who are in similar situations who are also fed up.

  Many teacher beat-downs at the hands of black students are caught on video: Here’s one from Upper Darby from October 2013:More than 70 black students were fighting and when the teacher tried to break it up, the students turned on him. They fractured his skull.[273]

  Black student violence against teachers is a persistent and dangerous problem in Philadelphia schools. It is hard to start singling out more incidents when the problem exists every day in every school.

  And it has been happening for a long time. Let’s look at 2007:[274]

  Officials in the 185,000-student district reported 409 student assaults on teachers between September and January, up about 4 percent over those same five months in the 2005-06 school year.

  The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, which represents the district’s roughly 10,300 teachers, reports that a growing number of its members don’t feel safe in their classrooms.

  “The chief complaint that we hear is that there just isn’t enough adult supervision in many of these schools,”said Barbara Goodman, a spokeswoman for the American Federation of Teachers affiliate.“The environment in some of these schools is really hostile, with constant fights. There’s a level of physicality that is very disturbing.”

  In the worst incident, a 15-year-old male student at Germantown High in north Philadelphia broke mathematics teacher Frank Burd’s neck when he struck the teacher several times.

  How about flash forwarding four years to 2011:[275]“In the last school year, 690 teachers were assaulted; in the last five years, 4,000 were.”

  Veteran Philadelphia schoolteacher Lou Austin endured 40 minutes of terror as a 15-year-old ninth grader jabbed his index finger into Austin's temple and threatened to kill him while swinging a pair of scissors menacingly.

  Austin didn't even know the youth, who ransacked his classroom - flipping desks and attempting to set fire to books - at Lincoln High School in Mayfair on Valentine's Day. He'd merely asked him to step away from his classroom door and go to his own class when the youth exploded.

  As bad as those numbers are, the real numbers are far worse, said the head of the Philadelphia school police union in 2011.

  Teachers and union officials, meanwhile, spoke of constant pressure from senior administrators at the district and school level - sometimes subtle and unspoken, sometimes blatant - to hold down the reported numbers. At the same time Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman has been trumpeting a decrease in school violence.

  "My officers are very frustrated out there because they're being told not to report things and that everything must go through the principal," said Michael Lodise, president of the school police union. "If they don't want to report it, it doesn't get reported." [276]

  Milwaukee has the same problem. The headlines tell the same story: “Teachers assaulted by students.”[277]

  Punched, kicked, and injured, it's what Milwaukee Public School teachers report facing on a regular basis at the hands of students.

  CBS 58 News found dozens of claims of battery, assaults, and fights. One former staff member is speaking out to CBS 58's investigative team, saying bottom line, teachers are in danger.

  "They are in danger." Danger is the reason MPS teacher David Larson quit. He says MPS teachers are afraid to work and be put in the middle of out of control fights.

  Larson says, "I've been kicked, I've been hit, one kid almost stuck a pencil in my eye. I've been on the floor many times with kids breaking up fights."

  Two years ago Larson retired from Bay View High, he agreed to talk to CBS 58 News saying the public needs to know about the violence in the schools.

  "Teachers are in danger, their safety is in danger."

  Larson says he even got e-mailed death threats.

  What about Baltimore, one of the largest black school districts in America:[278]

  Out of 2,998 teachers surveyed, 80 percent had been victimized in the workplace. In the city of Baltimore alone, school employees filed more than 300 injury claims related to student assaults in 2013.

  In Baltimore, four teachers are assaulted every day. Many on video. [279]

  The local ABC news gang went to the head of the Baltimore Teachers Union, Marietta English -- who also does double duty as vice president of the American Federation of Teachers. She dutifully told the reporters how she did not like that, and how she was “surprised” the number of assaults is not even higher.

  Whoa..... Wait a minute. Isn’t she the same Marrieta English we just met? The one who showed up on CSPAN a few months later, talking about how white teachers don’t have a clue when it comes to teaching black kids?

  Yep, this is the WASSUP woman.

  Now you tell me: Watch the news story with videos of white teachers being assaulted by black students. Now listen to the lovely Ms. Marrieta English again. And now answer these three questions:

  1) Is she blaming white teachers because black students attacked them?

  2) Does she seem as if she cares?

  3) On a scale of 1-10, how crazy is Ms. English?

  Correct answers: 1) Yes. 2) No. 3) I give her a 15.

  In Boston, Phil
ip Chism killed his teacher in 2013. The following year he followed a female staffer into a bathroom of his youth detention facility. He tried to kill her too.[280]

  In Louisiana, a student stalks and plays the Knockout Game on an unsuspecting teacher. On campus. In the middle of the day. With one of his cronies filming it.[281]

  And it is not just big schools in inner city districts. This is from an article in the American Psychological Association Journal in 2014: [282]

  Teachers across the United States report alarmingly high rates of personally experiencing student violence and harassment while at school, according to an article published by the American Psychological Association that presents comprehensive recommendations to make schools safer for school personnel as well as students.

  “Understanding and Preventing Violence Directed Against Teachers: Recommendations for a National Research, Practice, and Policy Agenda,”was published online Jan. 7 in the APA’s flagship journal, American Psychologist.

  “Violence directed against teachers is a national crisis with far-reaching implications and deserves inclusion in the school violence equation,”said the article’s lead author, Dorothy Espelage, PhD, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

  A challenge: Find me some white students beating on teachers on video. Because there are a ton of examples of black students doing just that.

  Like this one from 2014 at Bennett High School in Buffalo, where of course it has been happening for a long time.[283]

  Last month, News 4 Investigates told you about Bennett teachers who had come forward asking for help because they felt unsafe. They had even appealed to the school board saying conditions had become chaotic with students fighting and roaming the halls.

  Now this vivid video describes just what they were talking about.

  In Detroit in 2014, a teacher was breaking up a classroom brawl with a broom. They fired her.[284]

  How about Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania? There, a teacher breaking up a large fight among black students was attacked and sent to the hospital.[285]