Do you have any specific examples?

Mrs. Gray: Um, yeah. So normally every Monday we do community forum where we all get together as a community and kids perform and do things, you know, teachers talk and we go over things about the week or whatever. And normally during black history month, a lot of the music teachers always focus on, um, black heroes and black musicians that have, you know, affected our history, highlight them, the kids do speeches and learn their music and all that other stuff. Well, um, after a while, I started to feel uncomfortable. Um, at first, I never felt uncomfortable in the building, I always felt a part of them, a part of the school, a part of the community and, um, more and more, I just didn’t. It started feeling like I was an outsider or even an imposter. One year about three years ago, we had a new music teacher, um, who was black. She was young, she had just got out of college and she, she was up there, she spoke for like 25 minutes and I felt disgusting (pause). She, she made me feel like a bad person. She made me feel horrible, by what she was saying about white people and how we all are. Q: What was she saying?

Mrs. Gray: She, um, she was like, she was kind of, and I guess, maybe this was my philosophy cause I look at people, I try to look at people and the fact that, you know, there are good and bad people no matter what color you are, you’re a good seed or a bad seed. And she was kind of making the assumption that white people are just bad seeds. And um, she was talking about white and black and was basically kind of like ‘don't believe what they say, you don’t need to embrace them or embrace their lies.’ I'm sorry, I don't remember everything because it was a few years ago and I may not remember everything, I don't know for sure exactly what she said and I don’t want to say the wrong thing right now, but, um, I do know that I felt very uncomfortable. She talked about white people in such nasty generalizations and um, I remember that people were nodding their head as she spoke. Right in front of me, you know. I, it just made me feel so uncomfortable, like I didn’t belong there. I felt really guilty, like I almost needed to apologize for being white.

Mrs. Gray’s experience of feeling white, of feeling like the racial other, typified the experiences of many of my other conversational partners, who, in similar fashion, attributed their feelings of discomfort to whiteness and the way it was symbolized within nonwhite racialized spaces. Already having recognized themselves as white – and oftentimes, finding themselves as the only white person in the room – the teachers I interviewed went into great detail about feeling “disgusting,” like “an outsider,” and how they otherwise “didn’t belong.” For Mrs. Gray, these feelings of racial otherness were sparked by what she deemed to be “nasty generalizations” about white people, espoused publicly by one of her black colleagues. Making matters worse for Mrs. Gray, was her observation that other adults in the room, the majority of whom were black, evidenced their support of said generalizations by nodding their heads in agreement, showing zero regard for her feelings or even her presence.

Beyond their black students, the teachers I interviewed spent a considerable amount of time talking about their interactions with black parents. Although they spent considerably more time interacting with students, for my conversational partners – and even with relatively limited contact – parents were just as likely to engender feelings of racialized discomfort. Of particular concern for parents was what they perceived to be a cultural mismatch between teachers and students, one that arose from having a predominantly white faculty at a school serving

predominantly black students. That is, in the eyes of many black parents, whiteness – constructed in the form of white teachers – represented a fundamental lack of understanding of black

students, black communities, and black culture as a whole. Compounding matters further was the willingness of black parents to express this sentiment at inopportune times, such as in front of students or even entire classrooms. According to my conversational partners, the cultural

incongruity between teachers and students, as openly expressed by black parents, not only made them feel insecure as teachers, but uncomfortable as people, as well.

Kate Meredith, a middle school English teacher, epitomized this process by recalling a litany of experiences that had accumulated over two-plus decades of teaching in predominantly black schools. A veteran of over 30 years – all within urban schools – Mrs. Meredith had reached the point in her career where she was starting to give serious consideration to retirement. Still, even after all this time, Mrs. Meredith remembers, in vivid detail, the very first time a parent questioned her ability to effectively teach black students. As Mrs. Meredith described this

particular experience, she became emotional and began to cry. I asked her if she wanted to take a break or stop the interview altogether, but she insisted on continuing. I cite our conversation at length.

Q: You mentioned that parents have made you feel uncomfortable because of