“Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.” —Zora Neale Hurston
I remember my first encounter with race-based prejudice in the classroom like it was yesterday. It was my first year teaching 9th grade English in the United States, 26 years ago. Prejudice centered more on socioeconomics than race in the international school where I’d been teaching, and we weren’t even talking about anti-racist work in schools at the time. Honestly, I was completely unprepared for the moment. I can still picture my classroom: huge windows along one wall opened onto a green courtyard no one ever spent time in, long tables were placed in a giant U so we could see each other during literary discussions and writing workshops. I was doing what I’d been doing for a few years already, but everything felt like starting over.
We were reading one of my favorite novels, Their Eyes Were Watching God. My students were struggling with Zora Neale Hurston’s language; her phonetical spelling was hard for young readers to decipher. Every day, we would read portions out loud, trying to capture the sound and rhythm and intention as accurately as possible. On this particular day, we were trying to unpack the character Joe, a Black man in the Deep South who was oppressing other Blacks. Hurston’s symbolism suggested that Joe was using white systems of power to place himself above his community, and that power and position made him feel like a big man—especially the power he held over his wife Janie.
My students and I were exploring the dynamics of intergenerational oppression, how Joe’s behavior was a reaction to his own victimization and that of his predecessors. My students got it when I used an example from their own lives, the way an adolescent ostracized from a social clique would, once accepted into a more popular group, act out the same behaviors that once made them miserable. In an all-girls school, such examples were everywhere.
All of a sudden, in the middle of a discussion about the oppressive patterns Hurston was pointing out, a 14-year-old white girl raised her hand and, in a matter of fact tone, made what sounded like a declaration: “I don’t understand all the fuss about racism. I mean, white people are discriminated against, too.”
The class fell silent. All I could hear was my heart beating in my ears. I had no idea what to say or do. Eighteen impressionable teenagers were looking at me for a response, only three of whom were girls of color. I froze. I think I said something like, “Well, that’s another conversation for another day,” and went on like nothing happened, but my memory of the moment is less than sharp. We went on with the discussion of intergenerational abuse and oppression, and the girl’s comment hung like fog in the air, heavy and wet.
I carried the weight of her unanswered comment for three days. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened, didn’t look for help or advice. I tried to pretend it didn’t happen. I knew that wasn’t the right response, but I’d never been trained for this, had no tools or strategies. I sat with her comment, and the guilt of doing nothing overshadowed everything. I felt too sick to eat; I wasn’t sleeping well. I kept hoping the problem would solve itself, but every day I could feel the tension growing in that class. It was not a problem that could fix itself.
On the third night, a student called me at home. She was a 14-year-old Latina with a backbone, someone who knew how to advocate for herself and didn’t back down from a fight. It was the first time a student had ever contacted me outside of school.
“When are you going to do something about what happened in class on Monday?” she asked, calmly but firmly.
In retrospect, I’ve never been so grateful to a student for pushing me to be a better educator. Trembling with guilt, I promised I would address it the very next day. I apologized for not responding sooner. I admitted that I felt unprepared to handle the comment and thanked her for forcing me to find a solution. I asked her to forgive my cowardice, my paralysis.
I spent that whole night thinking about how to handle the situation—not through disciplining the white girl or giving a lecture on why discrimination was bad, but through something that would help my students understand the nature of privilege and prejudice. I searched through the literature on my shelves, looking for the story or poem that might help grow empathy and understanding. And then I found it: a poem I’d studied in graduate school, by Lorna Dee Cervantes. Lorna was a professor in the creative writing department, and poet Linda Hogan had assigned one of her books. It had the longest title I’d ever seen: “Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe in the War Between Races.”
If you haven’t read it, I encourage you to do so (you can find the full poem below this post with a link to more about Lorna and her work). Cervantes wrote about the poem in 2007, clarifying that it’s not a political poem: “It is a poem of the experience of racism. It is not smart, it is smarting; it is an emotional poem: e-motion: that movement after an act.” It was this very e-motion I hoped might move my students to see and understand discrimination.
I got to school early the next morning to make copies, and I started every class with “Poem for the Young White Man” that day, not just the section where conflict arose. I didn’t want my students to analyze the poem—I wanted them to feel it. I read it aloud to them once, and all I asked them to do was mark the lines that resonated for them. I had them reread it in silence, I read it one more time aloud, and then they shared the lines that made them feel something, even if they couldn’t quite articulate why.
They went after all the right lines, if Lorna will forgive me for putting it that way (because, after all, every line is a right line in a powerful poem). The lines exposed something real about what it feels like to live “marked by the color of my skin.” In the lines they were most drawn to, Cervantes wrote that it’s easy to assume others exaggerate their experiences of prejudice, “But they are not shooting at you.”
They are not shooting at you. Less than a year after the shooting at Columbine, at a different high school in Colorado, the line hung heavy for a lot of reasons. Not the least of those was a growing recognition that other people’s experiences mattered even if we hadn’t experienced the same; that the willingness to ask, listen and believe would teach us how to live better together, how to learn from each other with grace and love. The desire to negate anyone else’s experience fell away. I could feel it in the air, the way these 14 and 15 year olds let themselves lean in and learn from each other. They started asking each other questions. Have you ever felt this way before? They realized members of their class experienced racism every day, in and out of school. And the racism wasn’t always “discreet and designed to kill slowly.” Too often, it was overt and hateful.
In the following months, the white girl who made the comment and the Latina who pushed me to respond became best friends. Years later, they were maids of honor for each other’s weddings.
And every year after that, I read Cervantes’ poem with students before they read a single word of Hurston’s novel. It always worked. Lorna’s words created an e-motional reaction that motivated students to think differently before they even touched the novel. The impact was deeper than a poetic education—it was as though the poem changed the anatomy of my students’ hearts, opening them to something beyond their own experience that was real and raw, not to be compared or minimized. They also read Hurston differently after this; they stopped fighting with the language and read for a deeper understanding of what Hurston wanted to say to the world.
Poetry did that. Poetry can express the ineffable; language can rise and vibrate until it fills every space, every pore. It bears witness, it creates community. Poetry can always do that.
But the moral of this story is bigger than leveraging powerful poems to facilitate growth and understanding. I’ve realized since that what I modeled during those three days of paralysis probably did real damage to learners in my classroom—that the willingness of any adult to act, to respond, to interrupt, to educate, is always more important than our own discomfort. When we don’t step up, our most vulnerable learners see that, and so do their peers. By remaining silent, we normalize inaction over collective growth, cowardice over courage. We can put everything we want in our Graduate Portraits and mission statements, but when we fail to respond, especially to protect learners, we suggest that we don’t care enough to do so.
We don’t have to have it all figured out right away. As long as there’s no direct threat that must be addressed immediately, teachers can admit when we’re not sure what to do, or give ourselves permission to step away and ask the counselor for help. We have to offer ourselves a little grace and teach the next generation to do the same. But we have to do something.
We are educating in an era of book bans and legislative oversight strategies that push us to do nothing, that tell us diversity, equity and inclusion are illegal and never appropriate in schools. But our students are watching us every minute, learning from how we respond. They are watching us model what it means to live in community with compassion and connection, even in times that appear to lack both. We can either brush reality under the rug to hide it, or we can pull back the rug and help young people make sense of the mess. Personally, I believe it is our responsibility to do the latter.
“Poem for the Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, an Intelligent Well-Read Person Could Believe in the War Between Races”
By Lorna Dee Cervantes
In my land there are no distinctions.
The barbed wire politics of oppression
have been torn down long ago. The only reminder
of past battles, lost or win, is a slight
rutting in the fertile fields.
In my land
people write poems about love,
full of nothing but contented childlike syllables.
Everyone reads Russian short stories and weeps.
There are no boundaries.
There is no hunger, no
complicated famine or greed.
I am not a revolutionary.
I don’t even like political poems.
Do you think I can believe in a war between races?
I can deny it. I can forget about it
when I’m safe,
living on my own continent of harmony
and home, but I am not
there.
I believe in revolution
because everywhere the crosses are burning,
sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,
there are snipers in the schools. . .
(I know you don’t believe this.
You think this is nothing
but faddish exaggeration. But they
are not shooting at you.)
I’m marked by the color of my skin.
The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly.
They are aiming at my children.
These are facts.
Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my
“excuse me” tongue, and this
nagging preoccupation
with the feeling of not being good enough.
These bullets bury deeper than logic.
Racism is not intellectual.
I can not reason these scars away.
Outside my door
there is a real enemy
who hates me.
I am a poet
who yearns to dance on rooftops,
to whisper delicate lines about joy
and the blessings of human understanding.
I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and
bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn’t fade out
the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage.
My own days bring me slaps on the face.
Every day I am deluged with reminders
that this is not
my land
and this is my land.
I do not believe in the war between races
but in this country
there is war.
Read more about Lorna Dee Cervantes here.
