Brand New Pandemic, Same Old White Supremacy

Every August, it’s the same: I wake up in the middle of the night, heart beating wildly, convinced that my nightmare is reality. For almost a decade, the nightmare has been some version of me showing up to the first day of school without shoes. Silly, but petrifying for someone who prides herself on preparedness and organization. As a teacher for fifteen years, I am accustomed to these back-to-school nightmares and related jitters, and I always comfort myself with reminders of “you’ve been here before,” and “you’ve got this.” Up until recently, I have been able to wake up from the nightmares and reality has been soothing.

Since the COVID pandemic closed schools in my area beginning in March 2020, however, the reality has been anything but soothing. The difference for me this August is that I will not be returning to teaching full time. I have decided to leave the only professional career I have known, and I am not sure I will ever return. 

When people ask me if I left teaching because of the way schools have changed during COVID, I make sure to explain that schools actually have not changed. The country has not changed. I have deliberately chosen to stop teaching in a system that refuses to change. Schools, after all, are institutions. Like the United States, they currently exist under systems of patriarchy and white supremacy. While schools had to make significant adjustments in order to continue to educate students who were at home and socially distanced, the systems under which they operate has not changed at all.

During the pandemic, all of us who teach have had to stretch ourselves in ways we could not previously imagine. We hastily went through technology trainings to learn new platforms that would forever change the way we engage with students. Many of us did this training over the summer of 2020 without pay because we wanted to be prepared for our students. When distance learning started up in the fall of 2020, we tried our best not to be discouraged by all the shortcomings and problems. The protective plexiglass that we had the luxury of putting on each desk meant that there was always going to be a glare on Zoom, and we would never really be able to see all of our students at once. Our cameras malfunctioned and zoomed in on plants instead of speakers, and our speakers were never perfect. In so many classes, we spent a great deal of time yelling, “Can you repeat that?” Still, we persevered.

For me, the main problem this past school year was not the technological challenges. It was that, as we worked tirelessly to serve students and schools, we got further and further away from actually serving students in an equitable and just way. As the pandemic raged on, I continued to be reminded that I was serving the white community of parents and students more than any other. At my school — and others, I’m sure — when teachers were told they had to return to in-person teaching, they were told it was the best thing for all students. Of course, we were not consulted on what was best for students. We kept hearing from administrators that schools were feeling pressure to return to in-person learning, but where was the pressure coming from? Not from communities of color.

Because the private school where I taught offered teachers an option to opt-out of in-person teaching for a few months, I opted out. By then I had been teaching on Zoom for months and felt I could still serve my students best that way. Most importantly, I knew that I was still going to have at least four students who would remain as distance learners. When teachers were told they had to go back in-person unless they wanted to risk losing their jobs or face a pay cut, I returned, but not all of my students did. Three of the four students who didn’t return were boys of color. They stayed home for a variety of reasons that are similar to the ones many families of color have cited for keeping their children at home: their own health risks, immunocompromised family members who live with them, parents who had high-risk jobs, and long commutes that did not make sense anymore if they could learn from home. 

As a Vietnamese-American teacher, I was particularly attuned to the challenges my Asian and Asian-American students faced. In a country whose President called the pandemic the “China virus,” and that turned Asian hate into escalating numbers of cases of violence against Asians, I was not surprised that one of my Asian students would choose to never return in person. And I was completely unsurprised by articles like this and this that cited the relief felt by students and families of color when students no longer had to suffer the daily microaggressions inside their schools. 

Still my school, and most others, pushed on for in-person learning with little to no concern for students and families of color.

Here’s the heart of the problem. At the same time that schools told teachers to innovate, white supremacy also reconstituted itself. White supremacy realized that the more nervous families felt about children “falling behind” academically, the easier it was to push through policies without consulting marginalized communities. Because of the pandemic, it was also easier to create sweeping policies and brand new schedules without asking who benefitted. Whenever I raised concerns about the inequities and challenges of hybrid teaching, I was told to take my students outdoors — as if fresh air was the only thing I needed to offer. I was told that everything would improve if we could all be on campus together. Meanwhile, school leaders ignored my students who could not return to school. We were never all together. 

Even in the face of a global pandemic, white supremacy has been relentless. The chaos of schools regrouping so quickly was used as a reason to cut budgets so that professional development was completely frozen. That professional development was often the only way to offer and hold teachers accountable for doing social justice work. And when many of us asked what will happen this coming year to reengage with this essential work, our questions were met with silence.

And now the country and its schools are caught in the debate about critical race theory. In so many states, legislatures have proposed bills or passed laws that now ban teaching about the ways racism has shaped American public policy and, thus, the society. Critical race theory isn’t new, of course. But white supremacists have been actively misrepresenting it and using this misrepresentation to strengthen their grip on society and control what is taught in schools. It has come clear to me that this tactic is a symbol of how white supremacy, like the Delta variant, can mutate to be more effective. 

I have taught English Literature and Social Studies my entire career to date — and have always included critical race theory as an essential lens through which to understand literature and society. How could I teach any book written in the United States without discussing racism? How could I be asked to teach books written mostly by dead white men without honestly and openly criticizing the curriculum? 

The key argument against teaching critical race theory in schools, especially in the primary and secondary schools, is that students are not developmentally ready for a discussion of racism or that the discussion itself is divisive. The question that needs to be answered, however, is who is not developmentally ready? My students and families of color have lived with racism their entire lives. When people talk about critical race theory being developmentally inappropriate, what they are really saying is that white supremacy uses white fragility to keep us from making the institutional changes that will lead to racial justice. It is not a coincidence that we are talking about critical race theory now when the country is exhausted from the pandemic and reeling from police brutality and attacks on Black and Asian lives. The pandemic has isolated all of us, so that marginalized communities have even less power, and white supremacy has found a way to capitalize on this. 

When I woke up at 3 a.m. from my last school nightmare, I realized that it was not the usually trivial one about being shoeless. This one was more realistic. In the dream, my white male head of school approached me with concerns from white parents that I was teaching too much about current events. The truth was too heavy a burden for kids to handle, he said. But if there is anything I have learned in fifteen years of teaching, kids are not the ones who cannot handle the truth. I have watched kids be the most resilient during the pandemic while adults have tried to catch up, or worse, actively work against change. 

I woke up from my nightmare wondering, are we going to learn anything from this pandemic? Who pays the cost of keeping things the way they are? Students and families of color certainly pay a huge toll. But in our unjust system, we all pay a cost. As teachers head into another unprecedented year, full of uncertainties caused by the Delta variant, are we going to change everything from health protocols to technology and classroom setups, but leave white supremacy in place? Are these the kind of schools we want to support?

Thu Anh Nguyen (she/her) is an educator and writer whose work centers around equity and justice. She has taught English, Creative Writing, and History for fifteen years, most recently at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. Thu Anh has led workshops and writes essays about cultural competence and literacy. She is also a poet. Her writing has been published in Literacy Today,  Southern Humanities Review, Cider Press Review, and Crab Orchard Review.  Thu can be reached through her website, www.thuanhnguyen.com .

For our next podcast, Elizabeth Denevi will be in conversation with Thu Anh Nguyen about what white teachers, leaders, and parents can be doing to break this cycle and ensure we don’t return to school like we always have. Be sure to subscribe here.