Controversy in Education.... Is it Though?

All of my life, even as a small child, I have been no stranger to controversial topics.  In the third grade, after having received the book “Where Do Babies Come From” with explicit instructions NOT to take it to school. I couldn’t wait to sneak it to school. Because, I figured, this is good information that everyone needs to know.  Of course, I was caught and my mother was told.  I couldn’t understand what the problem was.  It was the truth, wasn’t it?  What is the problem with distilling factual information.  

Throughout my teaching career then, I have constantly gotten into trouble discussing “controversial” topics. One of the first came from debunking the myth during student teaching about Catherine the Great dying from having sex with a horse.  I was reprimanded from even bringing it up because I was in the South and in the South, they believed that Social studies was wholesome and should be devoid of anything “sexual,” including showing the students photos and pictures from the Renaissance.  If I wanted to show Michelangelo’s David, I had to only show his face.  I could not show the entire sculpture.  I felt it was ridiculous; these are high school students who are more than equipped to be able to see the human form in sculpture.  

This continued when I compared the United States to Nazi Germany – or rather, when I told my students that the model for the Nuremberg Laws in Germany were the Jim Crow Laws in the South as well as the German eugenics program being funded, in the beginning, by American corporations.  Teachers balked when the history teacher told their students that America wasn’t the “shining city on the hill” and told me that I needed to go tell the principal that I was teaching subversive material, or they would.  I said, “Go ahead.”  There were no repercussions.

So, I have never shied away from controversial topics, even when it caused me my job.  No teaching position has illustrated this more than teaching in China, where in September, I lost my job at the top school in the province because I said something off the cuff that the administration thought was “disharmonious to the social order” because it flew in the face of official CCP teaching.  It may have been something about Tibet or Taiwan or Tiananmen or something, I can’t remember, but what it did make me realize is the tenuous hold on power by the CCP.  I was moved to a remote outpost in the hinterlands of China so that the school could be protected if it was found out that they had a subversive teacher; because power is so fleeting in China that it would be a political disaster.  Also, our principal is a “party member”.  I don’t even remember what I said.  It may have been something about what the rest of the world thought about China.  It may have even been something complimentary.  It doesn’t matter.  All I know is that it hurt someone’s feelings. Fuck your feelings. Facts don’t care about feelings. The CCP is crippling an entire culture in how not to think for themselves and instead of putting their ideas into the public sphere, they instead punish those who do not follow their directive.

Which now makes me wonder, what iscontroversy?  I think nothing is controversial because everything is knowledge; what you choose or don’t choose to do with the information is your own prerogative, but my job as a teacher is to disseminate the information. This means things that Christians find offensive, whites find offensive…. I find that things are only controversial if other people don’t agree with them. Columbus NOT discovering America for me is not controversial; it’s only controversial to the white teachers that think “colored” populations were to stupid to have done anything without the benefit of whites.

A note on our course materials, specifically the reading, while the author of the “Silence on Gays and Lesbians in Social Studies Curriculum” uses the example of James Baldwin, I am more of a Bayard Rustin fan and years ago I told my mother I was done teaching MLK because he was a sell-out, I was a Bayard Rustin woman through and through. The architect of the March on Washington and a mentee of A. Phillip Randolph, Rustin was denied his place in the Civil Rights Movement because he was gay AND a Communist!  And which one is worse?  In the annals of American history, its hard to say which one is more “offensive” to people.  The fact that he was also Black?  An anathema to all we hold dear!  

The very fact that he WAS all those things: black, gay, and Communist were the very reason that I wanted to teach him to my students, because everyone does not ascribe to the “American ideal” – straight, white, cis-gendered, and I needed my students to know that America was made up of so many different things.  This is America’s truth.  

And, the fact that he then later said that the barometer of progress on the Civil Rights front was not Black Rights, but Gay Rights, showed where he was next taking the fight for Civil Rights, had he not passed away in 1987.  Again, these are facts I share with students as we traverse through history; by incorporating these stories into your regular lectures, it is obvious that you are normalizing the so-called “other.”  This is not a bad thing, it is the fabric of America.  

In 1993, I went to DC in April.  The day that we were leaving, we noticed some “strange” behavior from many of the people there.  Men with their hands in other men’s back pockets; men wearing feathers and boas; women holding hands with other women.  And then, we found out it was the nation’s first Gay Pride Parade. My classmates were disgusted; I was fascinated.  I was never one to believe the religious and cultural arguments against homosexually and I wanted to see how they interacted with one another – a learning experience that I would one day share with my students who blanched openly at homosexuality. This is something I never wanted my students to be curious about; its just another aspect life in America.

As a Black American, my life is a dichotomy of controversy and offense; I always have to make sure that I don’t “offend” someone, hurt someone’s feelings, whether it’s race, or gender, or the truth about American white supremacy.    The truth is not convenient, nor is it controversial.  It is what it is.  Sure, there is age appropriateness, but trying to shield high school students from Renaissance nudity is not controversial, it’s political. It’s conservative, and it’s counterproductive.  

And really, that’s what controversy is – what offends the sensibilities of those in power.  For example: The Laker Girls?  Not controversial.  Family friendly entertainment!  Lizzo wearing ass-less chaps at the same Lakers Game?  What about the Children!!!  Think of the Children!!!!  What’s the difference?  Is it size? Race?  

Controversy in nations is political and in turn those politics dictate culture.  Why else then would the Chinese, in an effort to shield themselves against criticism, say that foreigners speaking on Chinese sovereignty is like using the word “nigger.”  No it isn’t. It’s not even close.  That is controversy for a homogenous group to coopt the connotation of the word racism and nigger; for them to coopt that struggle for themselves and then punish anyone that speaks against it; that to me is the definition of offense, for them to coopt that struggle of millions of people of color to subjugate another group in defense of their territorial aims. 

So, do teachers teach controversy?  I feel that it is educational malpractice and a shirking of a teacher’s responsibilities not too.  Just because a teacher may feel uncomfortable, that does not mean that they are not responsible for children’s learning.    Who cares if a teacher is labeled as something, as long as students feel the need and the right to express themselves and grow as citizens.  It is unfair to hide a country’s own insecurities in the psyches of children; to try to subvert natural instincts and make them conform to something else.  That is controversial.