Parents entrust their children to their teachers and school administrators for eight hours a day, five days a week — and sometimes more if the student participates in sports or extracurricular activities. But what happens when those teachers let their biases run rampant?
Recently, we asked people of color across the BuzzFeed Community to share times when teachers broke this trust and said problematic things to them. Here are some of their stories:
1."A teacher in high school asked a Chinese kid in the class how to make kimchi and if he eats it every day. When he proceeded to tell her he doesn’t know because he doesn’t eat it since he’s Chinese, she kept insisting, 'Why not? You’re Asian, though.' Poor kid had to explain (in the middle of a room full of white kids too) that kimchi comes from Korea, and just because he was Asian didn’t mean he knew the cultures of other Asian communities aside from his own."
2."I had a college counselor tell me there were scholarships for single-parent households because 'your father isn’t around, right?' They knew nothing about my family situation."
3."When I was taking a standardized test in second grade, the test proctor insisted I had made a mistake when I filled in the bubble next to Native American as my race/ethnicity. She stood over me and made me erase the bubble and tapped on the bubble that said Caucasian instead."
4."When I was in the third or fourth grade, I was role-playing as Clara Barton for our history class, and my teacher told me I 'need to wear powder to lighten up that too-dark skin.'"
6."My sixth-grade teacher (who was white) told us that 'Asian students are just smarter.' I still don’t understand why he found it necessary to state this to a room full of 11-year-olds."
7."My middle school was predominantly children of color. In eighth grade, we had to take a statewide test. A week after we took our test, our teacher told us that we all aced it, but unfortunately we were going to have to retake it. Apparently, the group that grades it refused to believe that this group of Black and brown children could have scored so high on the test. They believed that our teacher (who was Black) gave us the answers."
10."When I was in fourth grade, I was the only student in my class who spoke Spanish. Our class got a new student who didn't know English and only spoke Spanish, so I was asked to help him with whatever he needs. One day, I was explaining the directions on a worksheet to him, and our class aide told me not to speak Spanish because Spanish should not be spoken in America. I replied by saying that Spanish is spoken in Latin America. She yelled at me and gave me detention."
11."When I was in the ninth grade, my high school guidance counselor told me, 'Don't try so hard, you won't graduate anyway.' I had a 3.9 GPA at the time."
12."I had a teacher in high school who would always ask me to read, then comment about how I’m 'so articulate.' I was one of 13 Black people in this whole town."
14."I was in seventh-grade PE, and the teacher asked for my name for something that I don’t quite remember. Anyway, I told her my name, and for some reason she got offended and told me that in America you only use your father’s last name and not the mother’s."
15."My family was the only Latin family in our 1-square-mile town. My twin brother took after my mom, Mexican native with island roots, so he is very dark. The teachers would joke about how he would be a janitor if he wasn’t locked up."
