S. Renee Mitchell
Mitchell, who has a doctorate in educational leadership, is a former Metro columnist for The Oregonian and a former high school teacher. She lives in Portland.
My Black life never mattered at Newberg High School.
Being the only Black student throughout most of my K-8 classroom experiences, I was accustomed to being bullied, shunned and overlooked. But moving from a small town in Northern California to the rural Oregon town of Newberg in 1976 exposed me to a whole new level of hate.
Like many Black children in schools across America, my melanined skin was initially wrapped in deficit imagery – people assumed I wasn’t capable of being educated. But after making Newberg High School’s honor roll year after year, my disruption of the school’s racial ecosystem was less about being smart enough and more that my Black presence disturbed the existing order of things.
I remember rocks being thrown in my direction as I walked between buildings at Newberg High School. Thumbtacks were left on my classroom seats. Students regularly lined the hallways near my locker to hurl an almost daily parade of racial insults. I also remember willing myself not to cry as an older football player punched me, while my homeroom teacher and classmates watched. I was 14. What this learning environment taught me best was to maintain hyper alert status for almost certain menacing.
Despite teachers advising me that I was “not college material,” I graduated at age 17 with SAT scores high enough to receive a full academic scholarship to major in journalism at a historically black college far, far away from home. Florida A&M University was where I first experienced Black teachers, my first Black friends and my first authentic pride in being African American.
So, I am not surprised about what is now happening in Newberg. Not by the school board’s decision to ban Black Lives Matter signs or displays of the Pride flag. Not by the participation of at least one Newberg High School student in a social media chat about auctioning off Black students in a “slave trade.” Not by the special education assistant who wore blackface to the elementary school, saying she was trying to look like Rosa Parks to protest Oregon’s vaccine mandate for school employees.
While decades have elapsed, America’s historical anti-Black structures, policies, values and behaviors have subtly and unquestionably been passed down from generation to generation. They are entrenched in our ecosystems and serve as a foundational thread of many past and current educational policies, teaching practices and educators’ personal beliefs. While I had hoped my childhood experience was an anomaly, I learned of similar emotionally distressing stories through my interactions with Black youth as a journalism teacher at North Portland’s Roosevelt High, and then as a founding director of an award-winning, youth leadership-development program called I Am MORE (Making Ourselves Resilient Everyday.).
Then, while obtaining my doctorate from the University of Oregon, I was exposed to decades of research that documented how this country’s deeply entrenched, white-supremacist ideologies tend to confuse racism with patriotism. In Carter Woodson’s book published in 1933, “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” the father of Black History Month wrote: “there would be no lynching if it did not start in the classroom.” Schools’ historic mistreatment of Black students continues to seed racially disproportionate discipline rates, normalize the racial academic achievement gap, and funnel students through the racially biased school-to-prison pipeline.
And even though diversity, equity and inclusion trainings have become an “easy button” fix, new policies don’t make people integrally nicer or put an end to the psychological bullying some students of color are still experiencing in classrooms. This conundrum is what prompted me to publicly document my experiences at Newberg High School. More people of color need to share our stories so society can recognize the common and deeply embedded threads of racism woven into our experiences. Without the raising of our individual and collective critical consciousness, racial discrimination becomes subconsciously normalized, and its victims often internalize its traumatic aftermath for generations.
Having spent years honing an expertise in helping others – and myself – heal from trauma, I can interpret my experiences at Newberg High School though a different lens now. I recognize those types of maladaptive behaviors from students and adults were never a reflection of my worthiness, and that each unkind act was merely a statement about whom that person is as a human being. As the saying goes: “Hurt people hurt people.”
So, my heart goes out to children of color in the Newberg school system, and elsewhere whose burdened hearts are aggrieved from being trapped within deeply entrenched systems designed to work against them. I see you. And I applaud you for the strength to publicly name and protest against acts of anti-Blackness and other forms of bias. You possess the bravest of voices because you are carving an authentic pathway toward social justice. You are holding up a mirror to the inner rage eating away at someone’s else soul and sense of compassion and inviting them to heal their own wounds so they can stop inflicting their unprocessed trauma upon others.
See, when our inner child remains emotionally wounded, we will always seek out ways to pacify the unsettledness of our internal suffering. That shows up through road rage, through domestic violence, through terrorizing lower-level employees. Through gun violence. Through gossiping and spreading rumors. And even through policies couched in anti-Blackness.
Unprocessed trauma can be such a trickster. It is so, so skilled at disguising itself. But once you recognize it, you can’t unsee it. You also cannot ignore its familiar stench.
I see you, Newberg. I see you loud, and clear.
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