"I Am Not Your Negro" -A Documentary

“Black people in this country have been the victims of violence at the hands of the white man for 400 years” (I Am Not Your Negro)

“White people don’t think I’m human based on their conduct, they’ve become moral monsters” (I Am Not Your Negro)

    The quotes above stood out to me and were the ones I felt I needed to write down and think about. The quotes above are sickening, they are a result of the mistreatment of blacks in America. What I mean by sickening is that people of color should not feel that they aren't humans and black people in this country should not be "the victims of violence at the hands of the white men". Viewing this video made me really think about what people of color go through on a daily basis for years now. It leads me to the question of how I can help when I have not had to endure what they go through just because of the difference in skin color. This is what I work on and continue to work on as a future ELA educator who needs to educate children on this.

    As I watched the documentary, I told myself to view it as an ELA educator. I wanted to view the situations occurring as if I were to take them back to my classroom and teach my students how to stand up to racism, to use their voice and feel comfortable doing so. While I stopped the video multiple times to take in what I was hearing, I am choosing to speak on the woman going to pick up her child at school (44:41 in the video). The teacher is certain that the mother has the wrong room because in her own words, “I have no little colored children in my class”. The mother then sees her daughter who is white and the rest of the students immediately start to speak about Peola saying they did not know that “she was colored”. The girl is mortified that she is being seen with her mother and runs out of the room. My heart hurts that this is how Peola felt because of the fact that she is white and her mother is not.

    So what does this mean as a future educator? EVERYONE in my classroom will be treated equally and will treat others with respect. We will celebrate our different identities and my students will know that just because someone is white, that does not mean the parent needs to be white. People of color can also have children who are white and students should know this. Peola clearly does not feel safe in the classroom and that is a problem. Watching this scene made my heart hurt and opened my eyes to what I do not want to see happening in my classroom, especially something like this where the students are judging their peer based on skin color. How can we do better? In the classroom, we need to make it know that black lives matter. How do we do this? Well, some ways are the ones we as a class came up with and put into the chat in a previous class meeting. The curriculum plays a large role, identity work, classroom environment (the classroom walls for example), the list goes on. We have a lot of work to do and as future ELA educators and we must make our classrooms a space for everyone by tackling the above areas of curriculum, identity, and classroom environment.