I’m not entirely sure what brought this memory to surface, but when I look back at it, I feel like it deserves a bit of contribution to shaping who I am today. Meaning that someone was once harshly abrasive towards me with racist undertones, contributing towards making me the person who is astute to racist issues while laughing at them at the same time.
When I was in the fifth grade, I remember being pulled out of class, and taken to the office. Back in elementary school, I was a pretty non-descript unpopular fat kid (can’t really say that much has changed) who mostly kept quiet, so this occurrence was puzzling to me, as well as concerning as getting pulled into the office would be for any grade school kid. The lady that pulled me out of class was one of the ESL teachers; I have always spoken English, being born in the states, so this was doubly puzzling.
Anyway, I was sat down in one of the cushy office chairs in the waiting area, and the woman stood in front of me and with a narrowing of the eyes, and the finger of accusation pointed at my face, began tearing into me.
“Where are your parents from??”
“Do you know what they’ve gone through??”
But then came the words “How DARE you??” and I knew that I was being accused of something. What it was, I don’t really know, because frankly I don’t recall to having done a single thing wrong in this particular instance. The bottom line is that I don’t recall all of the specific words, but it was clear that this was a race-related issue at hand, because it was the ESL teacher (who was white, by the way), who naturally by nature of her job, dealt with all of the foreign-born students to whom English was not their native language.
The thing was though, she was approaching this lecture to me in what I thought was the absolute worst approach ever; by disciplining racism with well, racism. Her scathing reprimand on me targeted my parents, my Korean heritage, and there were a lot of undertones insinuating that my being Korean was somewhat of a pejorative. I sat there kind of leaned back, trying to get away from her finger point of righteous American justice, during her entire maniacal tirade, completely baffled out of my mind to why this was going on.
Although I had no idea what this lady was ripping me apart for, I look back at the whole situation and think I can made an educated guess. Back in the fifth grade, I was a transfer student from another zone, since my family had moved in the middle of a school year. In my new fifth grade class, there was a white kid named Daniel. Due to the nature of assigned seating, he was seated next to this Indian girl named Manpreet, who spoke next to no English at all. Needless to say, Daniel didn’t like Manpreet very much for reasons unknown, although it’s probably easiest to chalk it up to the “someone who doesn’t speak English and is different than me” mentality. So Daniel would verbally abuse her all the time, and make fun of her every chance he got. I even remember an instance where Manpreet was just sitting there, looking ahead, while Daniel was practically speaking directly into her ear about how much he hated her and couldn’t stand her, and how he thought she was stupid and useless.
Since Manpreet didn’t speak much English, naturally she took ESL, which meant she was whisked away to ESL classes that coincided with the fluff activities for the rest of the class. If I had to guess, it was during one of these ESL sessions that Manpreet probably came out to the teacher that she was being bullied. I don’t think she was any smarter or dumber than any other kid in the fifth grade, and considering there are people that just simply aren’t “good with names,” I’m guessing there was a mix up between the Danny and the Daniel in her class, or something along that nature, that concluded with the ESL teacher of justice to essentially look at Manpreet’s class roster to search out the culprit.
Either Manpreet outed “Danny” as the bully, or the teacher took it upon herself to analyze the class roster, and decided the transfer student with the Asian last name was probably the best culprit, or perhaps a combination of both.
The bottom line is that I got lit into for something I’m fairly certain I didn’t do. But the fact that the teacher took such an abrasive and inappropriate course of action as reprimand, I like to think that it was a moment in my life that helped shape me to the race-card wielding bell ringer that I sometimes can be today, when I think I’m seeing racial hypocrisy or bullshit.
This is the part where I’d say that one of these days I’m up in Virginia again, I’d like to go back to my old elementary school and see if this teacher is still there, so I could have a chat with her. No, I wouldn’t verbally rip her apart or threaten her in any way shape or form, but I would like to tell her that what she did was wrong, and clearly the fact that I still remember it to this day goes to show that it had left a mark on me in some fashion all these years. But the likelihood of that happening is pretty minimal, and if I did go, she’d probably have retired or been fired for bad teaching, long ago.
