To the SC high schoolers afraid to discuss race: You’d fail my college class | Opinion

To the white students in an AP class at Chapin High School:

Someone’s been lying to you. I don’t know if it’s your parents, the Fox News Mafia, or South Carolina Republican legislators trying to undermine our education system. Whoever they are, if you keep listening to them, you’ll become adults who wilt at the sight of a rainbow flag or Black Lives Matter placard.

Though it gives me no pleasure to say this, I must be frank. You are already displaying cowardly tendencies. You were asked to view a couple of videos about race and inequity, discuss “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, describe his argument, and provide your own. You responded by saying it “made you uncomfortable” and “I actually felt ashamed to be Caucasian.”

“I was incredibly uncomfortable throughout both videos, and was in shock that she would do something illegal like that,” one of you said about your teacher. “I am pretty sure a teacher talking about systemic racism is illegal in South Carolina,” according to The State.

I’ve heard similar stories from black professors in South Carolina who’ve also had white students balking at such work and got their parents to intervene.

Let me be franker: If you came into my college classroom with that attitude, you’d fail, and spectacularly. I would not disrespect you. But I will challenge you, sometimes make you squirm. And I will absolutely present information you don’t like and expect you to explain it clearly and sometime provide comprehensive, well-reasoned explanations for why you agree or disagree.

I will not hold your hold hand as though you are a delicate flower who needs protection from ugly truths. If you don’t want to be educated, stay out of the classroom. Avoiding discomfort should not be a priority. It weakens rather than strengthens you.

Let me be franker still: You live in South Carolina. Our state was the first to take up arms against the U.S. to begin what remains our bloodiest war. The state did so to implement a form of black enslavement built upon the idea that God supposedly wanted white people to own black people forever.

But long before that, this country, and states such as South Carolina in particular, implemented laws that privileged whiteness like the kind you were born with. That meant white people were given free land, the best jobs, the most generous social safety net help – including what often amounted to free education funded in part by tax dollars and economic growth built upon the labor of black people – even as black people were largely excluded from such benefits.

Better yet, take the 30-minute drive from Chapin High to the Statehouse. There you’ll find monuments to white men who literally used the lynching of black people to gin up votes to help them and others of like mind to attain or retain power, and if a black person objects to such an honor being bestowed upon men like those, it’s the black people who are shouted down and demeaned as wanting to erase history.

And let me not get started on what it means to have to look at the faces of men who enslaved your ancestors every time you pull a dollar bill out of your pocket. I can only imagine what you’d do if you had to grow up black in this state, maybe curl up in a ball and never leave the cozy-dark space in your closet where nothing that could cause you upset could reach you.

You attended a school that’s more than 80 percent white, and still, you couldn’t handle a lesson on this country’s racial history and present without crying foul. Must this country, the world, forever cater to your every whim or preference?

Here’s the deal. I’m convinced you are tougher than that, smarter than that.

If you aren’t, don’t come to my class because you will be challenged – and not even your mama will be able to shield you from truth you’d rather avoid.

Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer based in Myrtle Beach. He teaches at Davidson College.