One time I was an actual substitute teacher (rather than doing my Life in Early America schtick) and had a kid tell me he couldn’t do something because he was black. “You white folks know blacks are dumb.” (This was long before Barrack Obama burst on the scene.) I told him I wanted a report “tomorrow” on Hiram Revels. “Who he?” I informed him this was what was known as research; go look it up. Another kid snickered, so I turned around and assigned him another person to do a report on. And then I just went down the list and gave all twenty of them research subjects. And there wasn’t a “gimme” in the lot. The saddest thing was that two of the people I assigned – Parrin Mitchell and Matthew Hinson – are Marylanders, and these kids had no idea who they were.
All of them had their reports the next day, and one young man told me his mom was surprised when she helped him look up Garrett Morgan. “I guess we’re not so dumb after all.”
One time I was an actual substitute teacher (rather than doing my Life in Early America schtick) and had a kid tell me he couldn’t do something because he was black. “You white folks know blacks are dumb.” (This was long before Barrack Obama burst on the scene.) I told him I wanted a report “tomorrow” on Hiram Revels. “Who he?” I informed him this was what was known as research; go look it up. Another kid snickered, so I turned around and assigned him another person to do a report on. And then I just went down the list and gave all twenty of them research subjects. And there wasn’t a “gimme” in the lot. The saddest thing was that two of the people I assigned – Parrin Mitchell and Matthew Hinson – are Marylanders, and these kids had no idea who they were.
All of them had their reports the next day, and one young man told me his mom was surprised when she helped him look up Garrett Morgan. “I guess we’re not so dumb after all.”