One of my students, a young African-American woman, is fired up about the new Black Panther movie, but not in the way you might think. Unlike Shaun King, a well-known activist and African-American writer who “sincerely place[s] it on the level of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the birth of hip-hop, and the election of Barack Obama,” my young African-American student thinks Black Panther is trash.
I don’t want to white-mansplain her particular argument, so I’ll leave the details to her.
Instead, what I want to talk about is her existence and its relationship to Shaun King’s.
First, some context for this post.
I have another student, a young white male, who believes he is the only truly conservative person at our school. He calls us “a school full of liberals,” and he basically disdains everything we say, discounting our knowledge and our advice because we are, as he says, “liberals.”
His attitude is familiar, I’m sure. It’s the attitude that sneers the word “liberal.” It’s also (in a different way) the attitude that sneers the word “redneck.”
This attitude is born from a mindset that feels too comfortable with labels, so comfortable, in fact, that the person is not even aware they’re using them. Unfortunately, a label doesn’t do anything except provide us with permission to stop thinking.
By labeling all of his teachers as “liberals,” my “only truly conservative” student gives himself permission to not be challenged by the ideas he encounters in school. Instead of allowing new ideas to enter into his mind, he erects a barrier — a wall, if you will — to prevent all our “liberal” ideas from getting in. As you might imagine, such a strategy does not a great student make.
By any measure, my white male student would call both my African-American student and Shaun King, the African-American writer, liberals. Both argue that society has a role to play when it comes to fighting injustice, and they both prefer using progressive, radical, or even revolutionary means if necessary. In short, they are both activist soldiers in the war against oppression.
But by labeling them both as “liberals,” my white male student remains blind to the areas in which they differ, their feelings about Black Panther being just one of them.
When we paint over people with such a wide brush, we smear away everything that makes us individuals, and because of that, we lose the opportunity to engage with each other’s truly unique minds.
This is part of what the kids in Florida, and some of the kids in my own school, are trying to get across when they talk to us adults. The kids are dying, and they’re telling us, finally and firmly, to put down our labels, stop being so petty, and start actually listening to one another.
The Parkland shooting reminded us that we are living through another 9/11. And like 9/11, now is not the time to be divided.
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But unlike 9/11, this wound is self-inflicted.
According to the CDC, the suicide rate among teenage girls doubled between 2005 and 2015, while the suicide rate for boys increased 30 percent over the same period (and is roughly three times higher than girls in the first place). Suicides across the whole population, meanwhile, increased 24-percent over a 15 year period (the rate of suicide is highest among middle-aged white men, by the way).
School shootings, we must remember, are often just another form of teen suicide.
In all the conversations about guns and security, we’re missing the bigger picture.
It’s not mental health. “Mental health” is just a red herring that will distract us from committing our resources in the right locations. Black women suffer from depression far greater than any other group in our population, and they are the least likely to seek professional help for it, yet black women are not committing these crimes against our schools, nor are they committing suicide at rates greater than the rest of the population. If “mental health” was the culprit, we’d see a lot less angry white boys on our screens and a lot more depressed black girls.
The culprit is whatever is causing the increase in suicides among teens. We could argue about its identity all day, but doing so would again stop us from seeing the bigger picture.
It’s time to talk to your kids, people. Time to look them in the eye, ask them how they are, and then listen.
And if you know a kid whose parents definitely won’t be doing that, then know that the rest of us are counting on you. You are the representative of the rest of us. Help us by helping that young, emotionally abandoned kid.
And then, after you’ve done it once, do it again, and again, and again, and don’t stop doing it until you know the kid is going to be okay. Because more than guns, more than “mental health,” it will be the helping, caring adult who will stop this.
If we can’t come together on gun control, can we at least come together on that?
And hey, if you don’t quite feel up to it, then at least take the kid to go see Black Panther. Because unlike my student, I thought it was a kick ass movie.