The N-word classroom incident simply must bring change

I was dismayed by the article on the front page of last Sunday’s Express-News about J. Frank Dobie Jr. High School, where I taught until a year ago.

Reporter Danya Perez described how a seventh-grade class debated with English teacher Pamela Orr-Atwood about her use of the N-word during a different class while reading from the Newbery Award-winning “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” a novel about 9-year-old Cassie Logan and her family in Depression-era Mississippi.

During the class discussion, Orr-Atwood, a new Dobie Jr.

High teacher whom I’ve never met, said the word again at least twice in trying to justify using it. She later apologized.

It’s worth watching the video of the Feb. 15 board meeting on the Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City Independent School District YouTube channel — around the 31-minute mark, right after a district staff member reads about recognizing Black History Month — to hear Aisha CollierMcGarity and her 13-year-old son, Tristan, an honor student and athlete, eloquently describe what happened Jan. 6 and why it was deeply offensive.

Collier-McGarity told me she still grapples with the question she asked in closing her public comments: “How is it possible in 2022 a teacher doesn’t understand the impact of the N-word — the same word that was often the last word Black men and women heard before being lynched and has been used to degrade and dehumanize Black people?”

Collier-McGarity told me her son doesn’t use the N-word and that the teacher was insensitive, unprofessional and dismissive.

The teacher was also brave. It took courage to teach that book amid our nation and state’s deeply divided political landscape, a state where Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Ken Paxton spread baseless claims that students are being indoctrinated with critical race theory. A state where lawmakers legislate against teaching history.

But the teacher made mistakes — and there’s no space for error. Out of this disgraceful incident must come genuine change.

Implicit bias and diversity training must be required for all teachers of all backgrounds who need guidance in speaking about race. Senate Bill 3, enacted in September, requires civics training be developed for only one teacher and administrator for each district or campus for certain grades, and it can be implemented as late as 2025. It’s woefully inadequate.

When I taught the Pulitzer Prize-winning “To Kill A Mockingbird,” I told my students we would be reading the offensive word as “the N-word.” No one had to tell me to do that. There wasn’t a policy I was adhering to or a training I was recalling. But my background — growing up as Mexican American in South Texas, mom to a biracial African American and Mexican American son and wife of an African American man — informed my perspective. In my 41 years, I have never uttered the N-word, and I never will.

But teachers are from all backgrounds, and a new rule is necessary. Collier-McGarity’s idea is to change district policy so teachers are held to similar standards as students, who face consequences for “name-calling, ethnic or racial slurs, or derogatory statements that school officials have reason to believe will substantially disrupt the school program or incite violence.”

In response to my questions, an SCUCISD spokesperson said the district plans to implement McGarity’s idea. Excellent. But this isn’t only about SCUCISD or Dobie Jr. High or Orr-Atwood’s classroom. It’s about all schools, all students. The State Board of Education should amend the Texas Administrative Code’s Educators’ Code of Ethics to permit teachers to read the Nword

but not say it in conversation.

SCUCISD is also developing new training for teachers, and I hope it considers all the politics, nuances and responsibilities facing teachers and do it in a way that still empowers them. Collier-McGarity told me that during the meeting with the principal, the teacher said she no longer would teach controversial topics.

And that’s the biggest threat — to limit access to information, books or topics, to limit education out of fear of discomfort or incompetency. And that must not happen.

In her author’s note, “Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry” author Mildred D. Taylor wrote: “By the fireside in our northern home or in the South where I was born, I

learned a history not then written in books but one passed from generation to generation on the steps of moonlit porches and beside dying fires in one-room houses, a history of great-grandparents and of slavery and of the days following slavery: of those who lived still not free, yet who would not let their spirits be enslaved.”

Stories in history, literature and current events, with all their racial slurs and deep discomfort, are America’s story. If we have any chance of changing our present and future, teachers must teach them, and they must teach them with purpose, care and empathy.

Kin Man Hui / Staff photographer Change must come from the degrading incident experienced by Tristan, seen here with his mother, Aisha Collier-McGarity.