In 5th grade, my son asked me “Mama, is there something wrong with me?” My heart broke, but I kept calm to say no and ask why. White woman teacher in his favorite class (math) wouldn’t stop calling his name. Always on him. He’d be doing same as others but she’d call him out. 1/11

My 10yo son was the only Black child in the small country school (central PA). He loved math class and was devastated to never be able to do right by his teacher. My baby wanted to know what was so wrong with him that she couldn’t stop shouting his name and singling him out. 2/11

If you can imagine what this woman put my son through for a child to think “something’s wrong with me” cuz she treated him so different from others. I hid my rage, calmly told him nothing was wrong with him, the problem was his teacher putting such negative attention on him. 3/11

Wasn’t the first issue with my son at that school. Homeroom teacher complained he delayed walking in and transitions, stared out window, finished work, disappeared to toilet for 30min. She suspected he was slow with special needs. I asked, why don’t you suspect he’s bored? 4/11

We’d just moved there, and they didn’t know my son. Instead of imagining his special needs were for more interesting, accelerated work, they assumed he had problems and deficits. So I requested to meet to discuss testing for giftedness, which his LA teachers had recommended. 5/11

They called me into a conference room. My son’s 2 classroom teachers, literacy professional, skills counselor, school psychologist, and principal. 6 white women educational professionals and me. I’m a PhD education professor, and I was intimidated, so imagine other parents. 6/11

Looked at that conference room thinking, wow, it’s one thing to read the research on how white educators marginalize and negatively track Black children in US schools, it’s a whole other thing to see it happen and experience what Black parents go through to protect our kids. 7/11

We discussed everything, and I stoically fought every move they made to propose some kind of negative intervention for my child (including medication), insisting their approach be to stop assuming my son was slow, but instead, that they were the ones moving too slow for him. 8/11

When we settled on his plan, I raised the issue of the math teacher, how her targeted negative attention and constant redirecting drove my child to ask if something was wrong with him, how he loved math and the teacher, and how this affected him horribly. She began to cry. 9/11

As the math teacher cried, colleagues rallied to comfort/defend her. One swore my son was wrong, she’d never treat him different. So, a meeting for my son’s education was completely derailed to focus on this white woman’s feelings, instead of the harm she caused my child. 10/11

As we engage in #ScholarStrike to manifest against racism and violence against Black people in the US, my contributions cover what I know personally and professionally about systemic racism and marginalization of Black children in our schools. We live this as we fight this. 11/11

Key #ScholarStrike video from Dr. Osamudia James making the critical connection tying racism and anti-Blackness in policing and society with racism and anti-Blackness in education. If my son’s story resonates, learn more about this huge issue and its broader implications here https://twitter.com/ScholarStrike/status/1303385110096601088

Thanks for all your care and support for my son. He’s 14 now and in a better place. Here he’s doing HW for 9th grade cooking class. Please read the replies/quoted RTs. This problem is widespread, what happened is very common, racism and anti-Blackness are endemic in US education.

My original thread discussed the case of my son, however, I’d like to also call attention to how violence, racism, and anti-Blackness in our schools target and marginalize Black girls in particularly vicious ways. https://twitter.com/UjuAnya/status/1303701943395799040