Hurtful Variation Of ‘Anything To Win’
Hector knocked up six girls in his gang, the math problem begins. There are 27 girls in the gang. What percent of the girls in the gang did Hector knock up?
It took high school principal Dwain Dawson about 30 seconds to answer that question by posing a math problem of his own: If half of the math teachers in my school hand out a math test like this, what percentage of them will draw a paycheck here next week?
If you said 50 percent, you passed a test half the math teachers at Elsie Robertson High School in Lancaster, Texas, failed woefully. They also failed to understand who their principal was.
“I guess I’m an old fogey,” Dawson told me yesterday. “This kind of stuff is not my cup of tea. Maybe they thought they were being funny. … I didn’t laugh.”
The teachers aren’t yukking it up now, either. Dawson suspended five of his 11 math teachers for 30 days without pay and suspended the math department head for 60 days without pay. Then he really got busy.
“I had a meeting with my entire faculty, and I told them we will not put up with anything like this. If they show a movie or hand out a book, they’d better know what’s in it, and they’d better clear everything with me.
“I sent a letter to each of the parents of the kids involved” - there were 100 - “and I’m going to write to every parent in school.”
“These are good teachers. The math department head is a Bible school teacher and a youth minister in a church. I don’t know what they must have been thinking.”
They must have been thinking that it was harmless fun the way most people do when they tell race jokes or “dumb blonde” jokes. They think the rest of us are, to use Dawson’s term, “old fogeys” or too politically correct.
But these teachers at a high school that is 58 percent black, 2 percent Hispanic, didn’t understand that to connect names commonly associated with minorities to drugs, prostitution, gangs and guns in a math problem is to perpetuate a harmful stereotype.
One of the questions begins “Rufus is pimping for three girls …” Another talks about cutting cocaine to make crack and asks what percentage of the finished product is cut.
“Actually, I didn’t think about the racial stereotyping so much as I thought about drugs and violence and sex - things that we spend half our time preaching against,” Dawson said. “Kids are kids to me.
“I’m a father of four children, and I wouldn’t want any of my children to hear this stuff. It has no place in school, although some of the kids hear this stuff on the radio and TV and records. Some of them think it’s funny.”
And some were insulted by it.
“We felt like it was derogatory toward black students,” said Jassmon Tell, editor of the school newspaper. “Other subjects could have been used to frame math problems. Why drugs? Why not clothes?”
And why does it seem so natural to use names like Hector and Rufus, as opposed to Blaine or Buffy? Nobody means anything by it. It just seems more natural that way. But stereotyping is not benign. The danger in reducing groups of people to their lowest common denominators is that it usually gives you the wrong answer.
American Airlines got the wrong answer from its vast experience with Latin American people who fly with it. The company recently spent two days apologizing for the stereotypes perpetuated in its training guide for pilots who fly Latin American routes.
One section titled “Survival in Latin America” claims that “It’s rumored that they will call in a false bomb threat to delay a departure if they think they’ll be late.” “They like to drink in the plane prior to takeoff. Unruly and/or intoxicated passengers are not infrequent.”
Except that it’s not true, or it’s no more true of Latin American passengers than it is of other passengers, according to American Airlines spokesman Tim Smith.
You’d also have a tough time proving that the Irish drink more than other people or that the Scottish squeeze their dollars tighter. But there are plenty of people who think so and who act on those stereotypes.
But it’s all very harmless - unless somebody makes a false accusation that you robbed them at knifepoint and the police believe it because it sounds like something somebody like you would do. Or unless you fail to get a job or promotion because the boss is uncomfortable with your kind. Or unless you are one of the minority students in an integrated school where the staff thinks the best way to teach you math is to talk about pimps and crack dealers.
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