Hey there’s a teacher out there who is saying she got fired for teaching a poem about Asian American racism, and I don’t know all the facts, but I am a little wary of her account because she dodges a bad fact and that makes me uneasy.

She is teaching seventh graders, and the poem she taught includes this.

(cw asian racism, sex slaves)

I don’t know the district policies on teaching language like this. I don’t know if the waiver she sent to parents included a warning sufficient for parents to know that this was on the syllabus.

So how I feel depends on those things.

And the district certainly should have contacted her before letting the news get out.

But I am substantially bothered that she made an entire thread about how the poem was about anti-Asian racism, and then didn’t mention that there is other content people could object to.

My Chinese mother would have objected to me reading that line when I was 12.

(Which is why I always forged my permission slips from my Chinese mother, she never let me read ANYTHING with sex in it, god, mom, why are you like this.)

I think there is a lot of slam poetry about anti-Asian racism that would not include content that would be objectionable like that, and I think this would be a lot cleaner as a case if she had chosen one of those poems.

She also taught Amanda Gorman, and nobody objected to that, so I’m wary that this account is not giving us the full story.

For the record, the news story about this references the explicit content. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/seattle-school-investigation-teacher-sexually-explicit-race-homework

The more I think about this, the more I realize how hard it is to teach this line to seventh graders.

What the poem is doing is combatting the hypersexualization of Asian women by using hypersexual language to describe those doing the sexualization.

But seventh graders have not been exposed to as much of that hypersexualized imagery. (Some, yes, inevitably.)

And so without someone to sit down and say “here are the instances of hypersexual imagery. Now we’re going to reverse it. I want you to imagine the person who is gazing, not the person being gazed upon.”

And you could talk about this explicitly in the form of the Atlanta shooter and what was said about Asian women!

But it is a hard needle to thread for kids who will often deal with the embarrassment of their first exposure by laughing.

I feel like there are so many necessary building blocks in anti-racist education that you’d need before getting to an understanding of this—what is white gaze, what is hypersexualization—that trying to teach this first could backfire.

Because if they just don’t get it, then what you have is kids who have been given school-sanctioned hyper sexual language that was used in the context of Asian women, and that can be *really* damaging to the Asian girls at the school.

Hey look, I get that the Washington Examiner is utter trash, but it’s the utter trashness of it that makes me think that if the issue was the anti-racism content they would have just said that?

Because they hate anti-racism?

The Washington Examiner was not my news source for the content I think is objectionable. I did not see the Washington Examiner story until after I’d penned the thread prior to it.

You can find the content that is objectionable in one of the grainy images that the teacher making the thread attaches to it. That’s what I was going off of—actually reading the poem she links in her thread and feeling weird about her portrayal of the content.

For the record, the Issaquah school district statement references “inappropriate language.” Which is incredibly vague.

https://www.issaquah.wednet.edu/news-details/2021/04/28/district-investigating-inappropriate-middle-school-assignment

Not the people with the “oh you’re just a pearl-clutching prude” starting in on this.

Some people: oh no, kids totally understand this perfectly

Me: fully 70% of the adults I meet wouldn’t be able to understand what “colonized dick” meant