KQED News Mind/Shift – Will Sentell
“Some students gather enough confidence from their teachers, family, mentors, and peers to succeed in spite of subtle and overt social cues that signal the perceived intellectual inferiority of black people. But too many African American students that McKamey encounters fall off the cliff. They internalize the damaging feeling of inferiority that young adults pick up even from the most casual encounters in and out of the classroom. Some are explicit demands for silence directed at black students. Others are more subtle rejections: averted gazes, hesitations, and pauses. Jesmyn first met McKamey four years ago, when she walked into a night class to fix an F she had received in English. The first thing Jesmyn declared—with much conviction—was that she wasn’t good at school. The second statement she made was that she was a bad writer. Her teacher listened patiently, she recalls, and looked at her differently than any other teacher before. “Ms. McKamey was able to see the good in me through the worst of my times,” Jesmyn recalls now. “When I came to Mission, I was going through a lot of challenges in my life and I was a mess. I had a huge attitude. But Ms. McKamey continued to remind me that I was a wise and beautiful young lady every chance she got. If I didn’t feel like reading or writing and I gave her attitude, she’d give it right back to me, but then there was a compliment about my work right after.” She got an A– in that night class with McKamey. “I worked my butt off learning grammar and writing,” she says. “When I heard my grade, I thought they made a mistake.” A year earlier, she had transferred to Mission High with a GPA of 1.1.”(more)