It was the best of White privilege, it was the worst of White privilege, it was the power of White privilege, it was the blindness of White privilege, it was the age of White privilege, it was the age of anti-White privilege….
I open this post with this pastiche of Dickens’ immortal words because it has been an interesting couple of weeks in education here in my adopted home town of Baltimore. One public district had students and teachers alike frozen out of their virtual schools by a ransomware attack. The City Schools have insisted on reopening even as the state reports a record-shattering rise in COVID-19 cases (3,792) and the positive rate state-wide climbs ever closer to 8%. The Archdiocesan schools, meanwhile, continue to remain fully open as they have since the start of the school year, and many of the area independent schools keeping pivoting back and forth between virtual and hybrid like a weathervane in a hurricane.
It is an incidence of this latter that leads me to write the current post because it has led to an unseen battle of White privilege (almost my title for this!) that has left me a little more bemused and disillusioned than usual by how totally un-self-aware and clueless so many people can be who otherwise appear intelligent and well educated. I have written elsewhere about the dangers of ignorance and our society’s almost narcissitic individualism, and as my regular readers know, I have been hammering away at the issue of white privilege for some time now.
But recently, I have witnessed a battle between factions of White privilege, where both sides don’t even seem to recognize that it is their own respective White privilege that is causing the fight, and it just has me shaking my head. What has happened is that my school has made the decision to return to hybrid learning starting Monday for the two weeks leading up to the winter break—in spite of the fact that we only returned to virtual about three weeks ago because the pandemic numbers had started to rise (and were actually not as bad as today) and in spite of the inevitable impact of the Thanksgiving holiday on the spread of the disease. This decision has led to the predictable blowback from the faculty about the safety of virtual over hybrid and accusations about the administration failing to acknowledge their decision’s potential impact on the health of the community.
What has inflamed the argument the most, though, has been the potential impact the return to hybrid might have on our children of color. Of our families that have chosen to remain virtual even when we are in hybrid mode, a disproportionate number of them are our families of color, and having experienced hybrid mode, I will be the first to acknowledge how challenging it has been to incorporate any of my students remaining virtual into the in-person classroom. The human brain is hardwired to pay attention to the people directly in front of the visual cortex and remembering the child over there on the screen is difficult. But it is not impossible, and because of the incredibly positive impact in-person has had for my children of color who have chosen to come to school—especially the ones whose wi-fi situation at home makes attempts at virtual learning immensely problematic at best—I find myself questioning the cogency of this particular argument on the part of my fellow faculty.
The bottom line is that I think they are legitimately concerned about the risks of in-person teaching under the current circumstances, but they want to use their own White privilege of being able to work remotely from the safety of their homes to remain in virtual mode for their classes. It is essentially the exact same argument that their unionized public school colleagues have made since the start of the school year, and the sad irony is that this insistence by teachers to work remotely from the safety of their homes has only exacerbated the negative impacts of the digital divide our students of color were already experiencing when it comes to education (see Maybe It’s Pie After All and COVID-19 and the Digital Divide). Talk about White privilege! The consequences of the digital divide for the disadvantaged children in our community is precisely why superintendent Dr. Sonja Santelises has insisted on opening at least certain Baltimore City schools in the face of surging COVID-19 cases, and it is why I have I have written recently about my own belief that if I’m going to ask the clerk I know at my local grocery store to put on a mask to risk serving me, then I damn well better be prepared to put on a mask to risk teaching my clerk’s—or anyone else’s—children.
And it is why I will go into school on Monday and back to hybrid mode. I made the decision a long time ago to work in the private sector of education in this country, knowing full well that I would be working for White privilege incarnate, and I made that deliberate choice following my many years in public education for two reasons: one was that all children need caring adults in their lives, and the other was that the most effective way to dismantle a system is from within it. I have been chipping away at my students’ ignorance, hidden bias, and general cluelessness now for over two decades, and while I have in no way single-handedly changed society, I do know that I have opened a mind or two because I have seen the results in their adult lives and choices. Hence, I will keep chipping.
Which brings me to my last head-shaking thought from this recent battle. I think it is disheartening enough that many of my colleagues seem blind to the reality that simply because they teach at a relatively socially progress private school does not mean they do not teach at a private school, with all the White privilege that that is going to entail by definition. But to push so vehemently back against our school’s use of that White privilege to go back to hybrid by employing their own White privilege and to not see that that is precisely what they are doing….
I shake my head because all that energy could have been put to more productive use, including, ironically, my colleagues’ own health. The immune system requires a tremendous amount of energy to function properly, and we’re all about to return to a situation potentially requiring a very functional immune system: all that angry energy spent over whose White privilege should have priority might come in handy during the next two weeks.
References
Bowie, L. (Nov. 10, 2020) Baltimore City School Will Scale Back Reopening of Schools in Face of Rising Coronavirus Cases. https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-coronavirus-city-schools-reopening-20201111-sgyf33l5ybdzposcidskfbns7u-story.html.
Leonard, B. (Dec. 5, 2020). State Shatters Record for Daily COVID-19 Cases. The Baltimore Sun. https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-covid-daily-numbers-dec-4-deaths-cases-maryland-20201204-duqp3wykg5bp5kk33feydqv2ly-story.html.
Light a Candle 