South Carolina high school English teacher Mary Wood was reprimanded last school year for teaching a lesson on race. She began teaching it again this year.
Mary Wood walked between the desks in her AP English Language and Composition classroom, handing out copies of the book she was already punished once for teaching.
Twenty-six students, all but two of them White, looked down at Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” a memoir that dissects what it means to be Black in America — and which drew calls for Wood’s firing when she tried to teach it last year in her mostly White, conservative town. Wood crossed to a lectern and placed her hands on either side of a turquoise notebook, open to two pages of bullet points explaining why she wanted to teach Coates’s work.
“That book that you guys have, it deals with racism,” she said on a recent Tuesday. “It’s going to be something with which you’re unfamiliar. That you need to spend time to research to fully understand.”
Wood stared at her class. She tried to make eye contact with every teenager. Anyone, she reminded herself, might be secretly recording her — or planning to report her.
Between the World and Me is a book-long letter to Coates’ son about his own experiences with racism. Why would that be taught in social studies? I read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in English class. It dealt with racism just as much as Between the World and Me. It wasn’t taught in social studies because it’s literature. So is Between the World and Me. You don’t read literature in social studies, you read it in English. In fact, I don’t remember ever reading a book in high school social studies that wasn’t the textbook. What did you read?
Is it true Americans bend onto one knee whenever a black person passes?
The fuck?
I see it in video.
What on Earth are you talking about?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlPM37eCge8
Got it. You’re just an extremely tedious troll. Not interested. Goodbye.
That’s a bit unnecessarily mean