"No one's going to get offended, are they?"

My lunch routine is very consistent from day to day while I'm at school. I settle my class down and then walk them quietly, in a line, on the right hand side of the hall down three flights of stairs to our basement destination. The cafeteria in our school is, well, interesting. The food is served in the hallway, and then students walk into a cafeteria which isn't much more than another hallway. The cafeteria is long and narrow and the students are divided up by grade across three lunch periods where they eat lunches that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. I find it a little disturbing that the same company that provides food services to prison systems also works in school systems.

Back to my routine. After I drop the kids off to line up for their lunches in the basement hallways, and bang a sharp left and walk down the hallway past the kindergartners (who are always looking for hugs) and the music room before arriving at our large teacher's lounge. On a typical day, I sit with the same group of teachers, a group of both the younger teachers and the teachers who teach the same students. You can learn a lot through observing lounge cafeterias. Who is there and who prefers to eat in their rooms?, Who sits together?, etc. Typically the seating arrangement tends to be similar to the way students tend to sit. White students sit together, white teachers sit together, black students sit together, black teachers sit together, latino/a students sit together, latino/a teachers sit together. I suppose it is maybe a lofty wish that this wasn't the case, but I have found it to be true in every school and every staff and every group of students I have worked with. Even in putting students (or teachers) into groups in class or in workshops, I always make sure that I am in charge of making the groups to mix things up a little bit. I think it is a lot harder for an individual to hold bigoted ideals if they have exposure to and relationships with people of different ethnicities and backgrounds. I've gotten a bit off track, but the central focus of this post was intended to be bigotry and ignorance.

One day, as I began to each my lunch, one of the few male teachers at the school joined our table and was talking about all of these picture text messages he had been receiving. I only remember one in my mind that he showed everyone at our (all white) table after saying "no one's going to get offended, are they?". It was an image of a black man in a watermelon patch holding two watermelons with the caption "I'z in heaven!" He continued to show a few other images his friend had sent him that were equally ignorant, offensive, and racist. The people at the table chuckled at the images - well - more than chuckled, more like cackled, as they looked at the image. Stuff like that is not funny to me. I don't understand why someone would a) have that on their phone, and b) show it to their coworkers. It brought up a number of issues for me, including coworker relationships, friendships, racism, and what it means to be white in America and the position of being a white teacher in a school with very few white students.

Where should boundaries be between colleagues? I can't really look at the teacher referenced above in the same way at this point. It makes me questions his motives and his character. I don't want to have to do that - but is it better for me to know these things? I am overreacting? Maybe. I hate feeling like I am an involuntary member of this "secret white club." I feel that lately, more so than before, I have been questioning the motives of middle class to upper class white people who work in this type of environment. Let it be noted that I include myself in that group, and am constantly questioning my motives behind what I do. I feel like I have tended to view my own motives as pure while analyzing and critiquing those of others in similar situations. I have been privileged my whole life, and now I work with a group of people who are underprivileged and who are considered minorities in this state & country. Have I been swallowed into this strange cliched cycle of events that I see day in day out in the news and in the movies? "Middle Class White Person Works With Poor Students of Color and Feels Better About Self." Perhaps I'm being a bit harsh but I definitely worry, and I certainly feel that a lot of people in this field and in similar fields get stuck in this same story - working hard, achieving some sense of fulfillment and then either moving on to a white suburban school or sticking it out in the city, not making many drastic changes, and driving back to the safety of their home 20-40 minutes away from their place of employment each and every day.

I care about my students and I like my job. I just want to have more of an impact and I worry that even if I am the best I can be, I won't ever get to where I want to be.