Photo provided by The Black Star Project

By Christina Berchini

April 28, 2015 

I am a white teacher.  Growing up in the '80s and '90s in Brooklyn, N.Y., I do not remember having a single teacher who did not look like me. Every teacher I've ever had represented "me" in some way or another.

By virtue of being born a white child who spoke English as her first (and only) language, I was fortunate. I had my pick of mentors, my race was represented in most-if not all-curricular texts, and I excelled in school year after year. My academic fate was sealed in the most predictable of ways.

Not only were my teachers homogenously white, but in my 13 years of compulsory schooling, I do not remember being assigned a single text authored by a person of color.

Indeed, I was already at a social advantage long before my teachers even knew my name. My family and I were not tasked with learning what Lisa Delpit has famously coined the "culture of power"; as a typical neighborhood white kid, I was not ignorantly considered a cultural anomaly, nor was I a threat to the tried, "true," and impenetrable pedagogies, practices, and policies of my teachers' classrooms and those of the schools I attended.

My parents never, not once, not for a nanosecond, would have to worry about how my teachers and administrators chose to relate to me-or worse yet, treat me-because of my race, culture, or primary language. My parents did not have to worry about the potential for racist policies and practices to impact my outcomes.

As a white child, I would not have to endure a single micro-aggression by some adult who should have a) kept their mouth shut, and b) read a book by Lisa Delpit, bell hooks, Tim Wise, or other brilliant thinkers who have made it their life's mission to understand how race-including whiteness and white privilege-and the dominant culture impact day-to-day life in this country and its schools.

I may have been from a working-class community, but I had it easy. The fact of the matter is that schools were set up by people who looked like me for people who looked like me. And as Motoko Rich illustrates in her recent article, "Where Are the Teachers of Color?," despite an ever-increasing racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse student population, not much has changed in the racial makeup of the teaching force.