So hot right now: white people showing support for white cops who kill unarmed black people. The latest group to hop on this bandwagon is New York City public school teachers who, after expressly being told to refrain from wearing pro-cop shirts to the first days of school, are going to go ahead ahead and keep wearing NYPD shirts, anyway. The teachers’ “protest,” according to DNAInfo, comes on the heels of an anti-police brutality rally presided over by Al Sharpton. Sharpton, like most people who agree that death is an inappropriate punishment for suspicion of selling loosie cigarettes, thought that the death of Eric Garner in the hands of New York City police officers was kind of fucking terrible, and that maybe cops should be less murdery toward unarmed black people. Some teachers disagreed with the union’s support, swarming to pro-cop Facebook groups like Thank You NYPD.
Man, sometimes I can be SO naive. Here I’d been thinking that maybe teachers might be the one group of people who understand that the behavior they model has an impact on children. Given the current frayed, explosive racial climate in this country (especially when it comes to police brutality), I’d thought that the ONE group we might be able to count on to model moderation and respect would be teachers.
Yeah, about that….
I get that Whites (including teachers) in New York might lean towards supporting the NYPD when White cops shoot African-American teenagers for no discernible reason. Still, standing in front of a classroom wearing t-shirts openly supporting the NYPD seems a bit…disrespectful, to say the very least.
Critics of the teachers’ protest pointed out that a teacher wearing a pro-police shirt to a classroom full of public school children might send kids who had been victimized or seen victimization by police the message that what teachers really mean by the shirts is fuck you.
Gee…d’ya think??
I have to assume that each and every one of the teachers who wore t-shirts supporting the NYPD has African-Americans students. Evidently, they don’t think that to be astonishingly disrespectful of students not fortunate enough to be born White. In what world is it OK for teachers to wear something that stops just short of telling non-Whites to go fornicate themselves??
The 1st Amendment being what it is, I’m by no means advocating teachers shouldn’t enjoy the right to hold their own opinions. That said, neither should they be wearing something that, whether intentionally or not, displays a stunning lack of sensitivity at best and is arguably racist at worst? These are the people charged with teaching children, and when they’re implicitly teaching and reinforcing racism…well, is that the message we want children to be learning? That “White Makes Right” and it’s acceptable when police shoot non-White miscreants (and aren’t they all?)? Do we really want that sort of insensitivity and divisiveness in our classrooms?
Silly me; I’d have thought that we’d want our teaching modeling acceptance and tolerance…but what do I know?
Wow. Just…wow.
