BACK TO SCHOOL

Going into freshman year, I was officially in my awkward puberty phase. My hair didn't seem to want to do what I wanted it to do, my acne was at it's worst and on top of that I had just gotten braces. I like to call this my "Missy" from Big Mouth phase. So needless to say, my appearance just added insult to injury when it came to the racist jokes. 

That year, I had a history class that I really enjoyed. The teacher was doing a great job of actually teaching us information that we were going to remember. We got to our unit about slavery in America, and this was a topic that was important to me. I was excited to be able to talk about it and have a good discussion about it. I truly thought that this might open the eyes of the people who were consistently racist. I thought my teacher was going to do a good job explaining this topic in a respectful and informative way.

Until he didn't.

My class was all white, and I was the only person of color in the class. You already know what was running through everyone's heads' when we got on this topic. I could hear the quiet laughter behind me or the subtle jokes about me being a "slave in a former life". Regardless, I chose to ignore it. 

One day during this unit, my teacher was explaining how exactly slavery worked, and how the slaves had to go about working for their "masters". He chose to do an interactive example in which one of us was the slave and the other was the "owner". He chose a white male in my class as the slave owner and...me as the slave. I had never been humiliated like that in front of my peers. I couldn't believe that the teacher I had so much respect for would think it was remotely even okay to do something like that.

Everyone in the class knew what he just did and almost all of them found it funny. For the next week, I was hit with endless slavery jokes, and was called a slave relentlessly.  I said something to my parents about the whole situation, and my dad being a heavily involved educator, called the teacher and asked him about the situation. 

The next day, the teacher pulled me aside into his room and talked to me about it. He apologized and told me that he never meant to do something like that and that he never even considered what he did. I wanted to believe that he was sorry, that he didn't intentionally mean for me to be the slave. But at the same time it was hard for me to believe that he didn't once consider what he was doing.

At the end of the day, I'm sure everyone that was in that class (including the teacher) forgot about this whole incident. But it sticks with me and I consistently think about it.