As a white, cisgendered woman entering a classroom with students of many backgrounds, I find it important to find ways to represent and honor the myriad racial and cultural differences of my students. I do this by introducing poetry from writers of diverse backgrounds, as well as bringing intriguing objects that might spark curiosity, connection, and conversation. Amongst my treasures that I brought to one visit at Drachman K-8 this past semester was a palm-sized bust of what appeared to be an African queen carved from ivory that I found in a random collection of figurines belonging to my then-partner. The beauty of this statue felt like a small but thoughtful way of honoring the identity of the single Black child in the class.
But much to my concern, when I asked students what the statue reminded them of, another boy immediately started describing the features of the statue in such a way that felt slightly derogatory.
This student had, on an earlier visit, identified himself as the “class clown.” He did have pretty good comic timing and seemed used to and motivated by getting a laugh from his peers for everything he said.
Since I'm in the habit of listening to kids sharing even their silly thoughts, I didn't say to him, “Hey, your description of the statue seems potentially unkind.” Though he peppered in “ugly,” mostly he’d used more objective descriptions like “wide nostrils'' and “a hole in the teeth.” Taken all together, delivered in a comedically-timed way that elicited the usual chorus of giggles, there were no obvious slurs.
Yet it was very uncomfortable for me to hear.
On one hand, I want to honor students’ ways of communicating and accept most of the approaches they take to express themselves, but on the other hand, I'm committed to not publishing writing that is going to be seen by the larger community as derogatory or disparaging towards any particular group of people or persons.
So instead of condemning such descriptions outright, I sought to validate and uplift the Black child, who also seemed motivated to get a giggle from peers. I quieted the group as he began to share his own description of his little brother, who he referred to as “Blacker than outer space.”
The rest of the kids in the group gasped and tittered at this, and the class clown declared, “That's racist.” To which I replied, “What's racist about saying someone is Black? Black is beautiful.”
I asked all the kids to repeat after me, “Black is beautiful.”
The poem that Sai’Jzay wrote that day ended up being one of my favorite poems of the entire residency. He called it “Black Flowers.”
Black Flowers
By Sai’Jzay H.
My brother is six.
He is very, very black, but not like me.
He’s blacker than my mom.
My brother always tries to hide from me with my other brother Ja’zai,
he’s blacker than outer space, he’s blacker than the world
and he always gets my mom black flowers
and her favorite color is pink,
but he doesn’t want her to have pink flowers
so he always gives her black.
Just like adults, kids don't always understand the nuances of what they're saying. Simply saying that someone is Black or describing how Black someone is isn't necessarily racist, especially if someone of African descent is describing themselves as Black. Yet at least one child in the room seemed to think that even mentioning blackness is racist, possibly because anti-Black mentalities are so prevalent in our culture that to claim one’s own blackness – even positively, or descriptively, as I believe Sai’Jzay was doing – can be heard as automatically negative or disparaging. Yet, I’d had to listen carefully to what could be uplifting versus not uplifting in someone’s intentions, such as when a child seemed to mock African facial features.
Similarly, there was another student who, when she described a desert animal, referred to it as “ugly” and then in another line, “gay.” When I asked her and the other students, “Are we being friendly in our description of someone as ‘gay’?” the students all vigorously nodded, “Oh, yeah, we are.”
But I wasn’t convinced. I sensed the students were savvy enough to know the social expectations around not bullying. Most schools promote to kids that we're nice to everyone. We're nice to all people. But I still had this uncomfortable sense that even though they said they’re being friendly, it doesn't feel friendly. And of course, our class clown pointed out that he heard “gay people go to hell,” to which I could only seem to muster the reply, “Well, not everyone thinks that.”
During the editing process, I had conversations with kids one-on-one about their poems. To the second grader who had “gay” in her poem about a desert animal, I said, “I wonder how you would feel about us removing the references to ‘gay’ in this poem. Because it doesn't really feel like you're saying it in a way that's friendly.” I explained that she also had the word “ugly” and the phrase “I don’t like him” in the same stanza, so that when she referred to the animal as “gay,” it felt connected to the somewhat unfriendly tone of the other lines. Ultimately, she agreed we could take out the references to “gay.” But I still felt unsatisfied with my explanations. I wasn’t confident that I explained exactly how it seemed unfriendly from a craft perspective, and yet I knew I wouldn’t be able to publish the poem without my suggested changes.
It also nagged in the back of my mind that maybe this reference to a “gay” animal was this student’s way of trying to claim visibility for herself, without knowing how to do it in a loving and self-accepting way. I didn’t want her to experience my suggestion of “taking out gay” as a form of erasure of something she was not yet able to articulate in more positive tones. Still, I had to trust my intuition that her “he’s gay” line didn't particularly feel like a “Black is beautiful” moment.
The last day of the residency, when I mentioned to the students we would be publishing our poems, our class clown must have remembered the giggles he’d gotten from sharing his questionable (to me) one about the statue when he piped up, “Oh, I want to put in the African Man poem.”
Immediately, I replied, “Sorry, no, we're not going to be able to publish that one.” I couldn’t figure out how to sensitively explain why not. Later, when I was asking him about his other poems, including one about his brother that also made fun of appearances, he surprised me by refusing, “No, I don't want to put that one in.” I asked him why not. (The baby brother-hazing had seemed slightly more permissible to me as being in the genre of a disgruntled sibling poem.) His “class clown” mask now fallen to the side, he explained, “I don't want to publish a poem that's mean towards anyone.” I was touched. Together, we discussed his ideas for changes to his poem. Yet, when the process of revision had ended, what we’d gained in palatability and politics, we’d also unfortunately lost in spontaneity, concrete details, and amusing descriptions.
I felt torn. I want to honor the rawness and the freshness of student expressions, honor the fact that in writing, they're making sense of their world, and sometimes they're going to say things that aren't 100% politically correct. Yet, while I fully accept my responsibility as a teaching artist to carefully draw lines between “feistiness” and socially harmful speech, I found myself yearning for much better explanations of the nuances guiding these distinctions to kids. I felt lacking in capacity to make it make sense to them so they would continue to feel empowered to describe their world through spontaneous, emotive language and feelings, but without perpetuating social harms.
Yet, a recent dream of mine reminded me that perhaps I do better with such explanations than I give myself credit for:
An altercation between two young girls over a toy starts, so I hurry over to intervene and try to redirect the trajectory of this situation. I am using all my powers of helpful and compassionate explanation to support the young girls’ understanding. As I complete my efforts and get ready to leave just as the wedding ceremony begins, I overhear a couple of people, including a twelfth grader, admiringly comment to one another about my talent in explaining difficult topics to young people. I overhear this compliment by accident, but it fills me with a warm sense of pride at being witnessed for my gifts, and I'm happy I stayed to explain it to her.
In light of this dream, I try to remember that on one day that school year, a group of multi-racial kids chanted in unison, “Black is beautiful,” and asked to hear Sai’Jzay’s poem read aloud again.
Taylor Johnson was born in Washington, DC, raised in Western Maryland, and transplanted to the Sonoran Desert in 2002. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry from the University of Arizona in 2007, and then went on to teach English to high schoolers for the next 15 years. In May 2022, she stepped away from full-time teaching to pursue a solopreneur venture as a nightly dreamworker and freelance educator. She began her career as a visiting poet in 2005 when she was still a young mom, wearing her infant in a rainbow sling while teaching poetry lessons to young elementary students through a Poetry Center residency, and then later as a graduate student working with high school students at Cholla and Desert View. Currently, she is focused on writing down her dreams and sorting through way too many old journals, mining for hidden gems. Website: symbodythedream.com.