Liberal Forum

Teaching white guilt to kids who have nothing to be ashamed of.

She was reprimanded for teaching a book on race. Then she tried again. (msn.com)

CHAPIN, S.C. — Mary Wood walked between the desks in her AP English Language and Composition classroom, handing out copies of the book she was already punished once for teaching. Twenty-six students, all but two of them White, looked down at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a memoir that dissects what it means to be Black in America — and which drew calls for Wood's firing when she tried to teach it last year in her mostly White, conservative town. Wood crossed to a lectern and placed her hands on either side of a turquoise notebook, open to two pages of bullet points explaining why she wanted to teach Coates’s work.
Her students reported her. “That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand. ”Wood stared at her class. She tried to make eye contact with every teenager. Anyone, she reminded herself, might be secretly recording her — or planning to report her. Last spring, two students in that year’s English class had complained to the schoolboard, alleging that “Between the World and Me,” which contends racism is embedded in American society, made them ashamed to be White.
The Republican Party demanded her punishment or termination. Wood, 47, who grew up in Chapin and attended the school where she teaches, felt like an outsider in her hometown. But this year, she was determined things would be different.
She told her class they would spend the next few days listening to a recording of the book, not reading the book, while each student took notes.  She readied herself to press play.
Most teens in Chapin — a wealthy town where the median income is above $100,000 and large homes line pretty Lake Murray — had never read anything like Coates’s searing account of growing up Black in Baltimore. They had not spent their childhood, as Coates wrote he did, “naked … before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease.” They had never memorized “a list of prohibited blocks,” unsafe due to guns and violence.
“I announced to my class that anyone who wanted to could opt out if they so desired,” she said. "No one would consider them cowardly, privileged colonizers." “This is appalling,” posted Christina Carter, a mother of two in the Lexington-Richland district. “I certainly hope that the state superintendent and board take action.” Carter, 38, said in an interview that she wants a state investigation into Wood and Chapin High. She read about Wood’s case before she and her family moved to Chapin this summer, attracted in part by the town’s conservative values. When she arrived, Carter was shocked to learn Wood was still employed. She doesn’t think Wood’s teaching has a place in Chapin. "She is supposed to be teaching English composition, not pushing a racial agenda." Carter said.