The deepest feeling

Fifth grade was the first time I remember witnessing racism and discrimination in a classroom. I didn't know those words then, but I knew what I had seen was wrong.

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Weekly Three

HEAR: “Range Life” by Pavement

READ: Advice from rom Nobel Prize winner Albert Schweitzer on how to stay compassionate.

VIEW: I really liked the Netflix docuseries We Are The Champions (2020). Here’s the trailer. It celebrates all people as champions, not just pro-level athletes, and it’s narrated by Rainn Wilson.

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No. 83: The deepest feeling

The other week I read an article that featured a quote from a Marianne Moore poem. 

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.

Immediately a scene from elementary school came to mind. The two players in the scene were Mrs. Blanton, my fifth grade math teacher, and Eric Sanders, my classmate. 

Eric was Black and proud of his Blackness. He didn’t try to dress or talk like the white kids. He wore his hair in braids with colorful little marble ties in it. His go-to was a long graphic tee with ripped jeans and cool sneakers. Basically, he flexed on the typically lame elementary school fit with his advanced and kickass style.

Mrs. Blanton was white and refined with carefully-styled hair that somehow looked exactly the same everyday. She wore long skirts, stockings, and cotton cardigans. She had tortoise shell glasses, seemed well-off, and was strict. 

Like Eric, I was entirely uninterested in math. Mrs. Blanton considered us troublemakers and kept a watchful eye on us and the other kids that couldn’t focus on her exceedingly boring lessons. But I realized that something was off in the way she dished out her scoldings. 

Eric, more than anyone else in the class, was the object of her punishments, and I think it was because he was Black. What I know with certainty is that her treatment of Eric was unfair. I can remember it clearly now, which means it was probably even worse than I remember at the time.

Without fail, Eric would get called out by Mrs. Blanton on a regular basis. Even if it was a group of us goofing off, the white kids a.k.a. myself and some of the others  (I’m a half-Mexican but I look white) would get off scot-free while Eric was individually named, threatened, and degraded. We would feel only the shockwave of the atomic bomb that was dropped on directly on Eric, and that was more than enough for us to meekly return to whatever it was we should have been doing. 

This was not normal, but it was normal in that classroom, and I subconsciously realized — and later consciously realized — that the whole thing was extremely fucked up. 

But there was one day that was especially fucked up. Mrs. Blanton was apparently on a mission to utterly destroy this kid who probably already had enough problems without this sadistic teacher in his in his life. That day, she channeled all her Old Authoritative White Lady intensity on poor Eric. 

The first reprimand was typically bad, but they got worse. Eric would do some something completely normal for a fifth grader that wasn’t getting the support or help he needed, but because Mrs. Blanton disapproved of his actions and, it seemed, his existence, she would unleash her full fury on him, threatening to kick him out of class or making him sit in a corner. It was as if the rest of us didn’t exist that day. The classroom was being used as an arena for the unfair fight between Mrs. Blanton, an adult, and Eric, a kid, and for nothing else. If he spoke a word, even to ask someone next to him an earnest question about the assignment, he would be singled out with especially unprofessional language, words like shut up or idiot and others that I can’t remember now but that should never be spoken to a kid, or to anyone. She may have even made references to his Blackness as a reason for his behavior, comments that she would have made knowing they would fly over our ignorant fifth-grade heads.

Eric took these verbal lashings stoically. He wouldn’t talk back. He wouldn’t apologize. He wouldn’t frown or laugh or smile or look around. He would just stare back at Mrs. Blanton with a deadpan expression and take it. Every muscle in his face was completely relaxed. His eyelids would be slightly lowered, which made him look wholly unamused. His lips would be in a slight pout that, to me, communicated an unmovable toughness. His face was expressionless. And all of this struck me. Here was a boy being talked to as if he were nothing, and there he sat like a statue. 

But there’s one scene in particular from this day that I remember as if it were still happening in front of me. It was when the statue finally crumbled.

Mrs. Blanton simply wouldn’t let up on Eric. Then, out of nowhere and for the slightest possible violation, she shouted at him in a voice more shrill than her usual tone.

“Eric!” she said. “Go to the principal’s office. I’ve had enough of you.” 

The class went silent. Eric went into his statuesque pose. To add a flourish to her nasty attack, she picked up the phone on her desk and called the office. 

“Hello?” she said. “Yes, I just wanted to let you know that Eric Sanders is headed to the principal’s office for misbehaving. Thank you.” Then she hung up the phone with a plastic slam. 

But Eric wouldn’t move. He was standing up when he got this order from Mrs. Blanton, and now he sat on his desk looking off into the distance with his same stolid stare. All of us were looking at him. He was looking somewhere far, far away, somewhere beyond the walls of our classroom. Then a single tear started to run down his face. Then another. And then another. And each tear fell on that same expressionless face. Eric, the kid who never showed emotion, was crying in front of all of us, even as he sat there as solid as a rock. Mrs. Blanton had finally broken him, and I’m sure she couldn’t have been happier. 

I can never know, but I can imagine some of the things running through his head as the tears fell.

Why does this lady hate me so much? Why can’t I do anything right? Why don’t the other kids get in trouble like I do? Why do I have to go to the principals office and get yelled at again? What am I going to tell my mom and dad? Why am I always disappointing them, and everyone? Now I have to get yelled at by them, too? Why is life so hard? 

Eventually he walked out of the classroom. I remember nothing else from that school year, and I don’t know what became of Eric Sanders. What I do know is that, for the first time I can remember, I witnessed racism and discrimination directed at a student from a teacher, and even though I didn’t know much about words like those, as fifth-grader I knew that what I had seen happen to Eric was wrong. 

I’m not sure that I can use my age as an excuse for not standing up for Eric. I wish I had. It haunts me still that I sat there feeling terrible for him but saying nothing. But while I may have failed, it makes me happy to think that fifth graders today might be better equipped to stand up and say something in situations like this. This is one of the beautiful changes in our society, one that I can proudly point to as an incremental move in the right direction that has taken place within last ten to fifteen years. Young people today seem so much more aware of injustice, of the need for tolerance and respect, and of what it feels like to walk in the shoes of someone facing difference challenges than them. For all the ills of social media, its ability to share stories and voices from underrepresented communities is a world-changer without parallel.

I’m thankful I ran into that Marianne Moore quote the other day, because when I saw it I also saw Eric’s stone solid face with tears running down it, and by thinking of Eric I thought about the millions upon millions of Erics we often encounter without knowing it, or who we don’t encounter but who are everywhere — those people that have a remarkable ability to go apparently unaffected by terrible things when, truly, they are those who are hurting the most. ♦

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