#if you can believe it I actually ended up winning!! (aaahhhh)
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I finally remembered to post this, my entry for the dtinys contest hosted by owlyjules and _Kannyan over on instagram ✨
#if you can believe it I actually ended up winning!! (aaahhhh)#it really surprised me since there were some gorgeous entries#anyway i had so much painting all of this fluffy#also what an adorable character! i love her so much!#myart
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Believe, Believe,electric buddi-wait a minute. .........what the F*uck we doing?
Credit to :DMC 3444
Last Time’s Egao Count: 257
Yuzu: I became stronger because of you! I was able to keep smiling! (Egao Count: 257+1=258) Respond to them, Yuya! Respond to your friends’ feelings! Let’s go back to our hometown together after this!
Reiji: All right! It’s the last turn, Yuya!
Yusho: If you let fear take hold of you, you won’t be able to do anything. If you want to win, you must be brave…
Yuya: …and step forward!
Yuya: It’s my turn! I activate the Quick-Play Magic, Smile Universe! (Egao Count: 258+1=259) I can Special Summon as many Pendulum Monsters as possible from the Extra Deck, with their Monster Effects negated!
GONGENZAKA: Supreme Dragon King has revived!
SAWATARI-SAN: Then, he’s not Yuya!?
Zarc: Pendulum Monsters are indestructible! No matter how many times they are destroyed, they will revive!
Yuya: I won’t allow that! I will put an end to this!
Zarc: W-What are you doing!? S-Stop it!
Yuya: I’ve made up my mind! I won’t ever become a demon again! Now’s your chance! Do it! Reira!
Reira: Using En Flowers’s effect, I can negate the effects of all monsters on the Field, And destroy them! And for every monster sent to the Graveyard, the owner will receive 600 damage!
Zarc: Damn you…! I’ll definitely retur—
Leo: The world is breaking into four again!
Reiji: Zarc will be reincarnated in the four dimensions again, and the same things will repeat!
Reira: I won’t let it happen again! I will seal Zarc away!
Zarc: AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!
Reira: AAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!
Yuya: Reira? REIRAAAAAAA!
Narrator: Action Duel was born from the realization of Solid Vision with mass. This kind of Duel is one where the Field, monsters, and Duelists become one, And sends the audience into a storm of excitement.
(Opening Sequence)
Yuya: AAAHHHH! I overslept!
Yoko: Why are you getting so worked up? Today is Sunday. You don’t have to go to school, you know?
Yuya: I have a Duel at You Show School! I can’t miss the principal’s hot-blooded coaching!
Yoko: AH! Look at the mess you’re making! You can’t just eat and talk at the same time!
Yuya: See you later!
Yuya: I’ve made it on time! AAAHHH!
Yuya: Hey! What was that for!?
Shuzo: You’re not on time! You’re three minutes late!
Yuya: Oh, come on! It’s just three minutes!
Ayu: That’s no good!
Ayu: The principal’s hot-blooded coaching has already begun, you know!
Yuya: By the way, what is that?
Shuzo: Oh, this thing? Isn’t it that thing…? You know, the usual… Huh? Now that you mentioned it, why is this thing here?
Futoshi: Whoa, Big Bro Yuya! Those boots are pretty cool!
Yuya: HeHe! Aren’t they!?
Futoshi: I’m getting shivers!
Tatsuya: Where did you buy them?
Yuya: I didn’t buy them. Someone gave them to me.
Ayu: Who is it?
Yuya: Hah? Well, it’s…Huh?
Ayu: Heh!? You forgot who gave them to you? You’re awful!
Futoshi: True that.
Tatsuya: Yup, yup.
Shuzo: HEY! How long are you planning to keep chattering!? It’s time for Dueling! So, get to it!
Kids: He’s so scary!
Shuzo: Hmm…
Yuya: Well then, Let’s have an unorthodox 1 vs 3 Duel today! I’ll take on all of you at the same time, So come at me in whichever order you want!
Shuzo: Listen, Yuya! Senior Sakaki, the peerless entertainer whose name graced our You Show School, Is still spreading Entertainment Dueling to the world even to this day!
Shuzo: You must become a great Pro Duelist just like my senior as soon as possible! Field Magic, Plain Plain, activate!
Yuya: Duelists gathered in the hall of battle…
Futoshi: …Kicking against the earth and dancing in the air alongside their monsters…
Ayu: …As they storm through the Field!
Tatsuya: Behold! This is the greatest evolution of Dueling!
Yuya: Action…
DUEL!
Yuya: I’ll start! Using the Scale-1 Stargazer Magician and the Scale-8 Timegazer Magician in my hand, I set the Pendulum Scales! With this, I can simultaneously summon monsters between Level-2 and 7! Swing, Pendulum of the Soul! Draw an arc of light across the ether! Pendulum Summon! Come forth! My monsters! Entermate Sword Fish! Entermate Whip Viper! And lastly, the one who bears heroic and beautiful dual-colored eyes! Odd-Eyes Pendulum Dragon!
Yuya: I end my turn!
Tatsuya: It’s my turn! Draw! Using the Scale-1 Bunborg 008 and the Scale-10 Bunborg 007, I set the Pendulum Scales! With this, I can simultaneously summon monsters between Level-2 and 9! Pendulum Summon! Bunborg 005! And Bunborg 006!
Himika: Pendulum Dimension?
Reiji: Yes. This world used to be the Standard Dimension, but it has been reborn as the Pendulum Dimension. Anyone can perform Pendulum Summon…
Reiji: …Ever since that day…
Himika: And that child is…
Reiji: I’ve already taken measures. There’s no need to worry, Mother.
Yuya: It’s my turn!
Shuzo: All right! This is where the real fight begins, Yuya! Huh?
Shuzo: What is it? WHAT!???
Yuya: Ladies and gentlemen! Huh? AAAAHHHHHHH!
Yuya: Ouch…
Shuzo: Yuya! BIG NEWS! Here! Look at this!
Yuya: This is from LDS…!
Shuzo: Exactly! It’s an invitation to the Junior Youth Championship! If you win this, you can advance to the Youth class! You’ll be one step closer to becoming a Pro Duelist!
Tatsuya: That’s amazing, Big Bro Yuya!
Futoshi: SHIVEERSSSSSSS!
Shuzo: What are you waiting for, Yuya!?
Shuzo: Come on! Go to LDS already!
Yuya: Right! I’m going!
Receptionist: Okay. All the paperwork is done. Good luck, Sakaki Yuya-kun.
Yuya: Ah, sure! Thank you very much!
GONGENZAKA: Yuya! I knew you’d receive an invitation to the Junior Youth Championship as well!
Yuya: Gongenzaka!
SAWATARI-SAN: Well, well, you two are here, too!
GONGENZAKA: Sawatari!
Yuya: You actually got an invitation as well!?
SAWATARI-SAN: Why the hell are you so shocked!? Of course I got invited! I have the perfectest grades at LDS, and my father is gonna be the next mayor! I’m the chosen one after all! The Super Ultra Hyper Strong Duelist…
Yuya/GONG: Akaba Reiji!
SAWATARI-SAN: Yup! Akaba Reiji! Wait, what!?
Reiji: You’re all here, it seems. To start off the Junior Youth Championship, I’ll have you all Duel each other.
Reiji: It will be a Battle Royal within Maiami City.
Yuya: Battle Royale!?
(ZETSUBOU commercial. Brb)
Nico: Everyone! The wait is over! The Junior Youth Championship will soon commence!
Nico: Let’s introduce our four participants! Heh? Just four!? Hmm…It’s true, after all. Well then, once again, let’s introduce them! First off, from You Show School: Sakaki Yuya! Next up, from Gongenzaka Dojo: Gongenzaka Noboru! Then, from Leo Duel School: Sawatari Shingo!
Ayu: What’s up with that…
Nico: And the last participant is… Eh…S-Secret!? Well then, the match will…
Ayu: By the way, where is the principal?
Tatsuya: He said that he has something else on his mind…
Yoko: What’s up with him!? Today is supposed to be Yuya’s big day! Sheesh. What exactly does he have on his mind!?
Tatsuya: You’re asking me?
Futoshi: Looks like it’s about to start!
Nico: All right! The participants are all in their positions! Well then, let’s start this Battle Royale! Field Magic, Wonder Quartet, activate!
Yuya: This sensation… It seems familiar somehow…
SAWATARI-SAN: Hey, he said there’s four participants, right?
Yuya: Yeah.
SAWATARI-SAN: But there’s only three of us here.
GONGENZAKA: Tardiness is simply inexcusable!
Tsukikage: If you’re looking for me, I’m right here!
Tsukikage: I am Tsukikage of the Fuuma clan!
Yuya: Tsukikage?
SAWATARI-SAN: All right, all the players have been assembled!
SAWATARI-SAN: Winning this Duel is gonna be a piece of cake for me!
Yuya: Heh?
GONGENZAKA: Yuya! I, the manly Gongenzaka, will not hold back! Fight me with everything you’ve got!
Yuya: Sure thing! I’ll do just that! I’ll show you the greatest Entertainment Duel ever!
Nico: Duelists gathered in the hall of battle… …Kicking against the earth and dancing in the air alongside their monsters… …As they storm through the Field! Behold! This is the greatest evolution of Dueling! Action…
DUEL!
Yuya: Let’s do this! I’m going first! I summon Entermate Discover Hippo from my hand!
Yuya: I set two cards face-down, and end my turn! Let’s go, Hippo!
Nico: Sakaki Yuya has made the first move!
Nico: After declaring the end of his turn, he jumps onto his monster and runs around the Field using it! Since Sakaki specializes in using Action Cards…
Shuzo: I feel like I’ve seen this before… But just what is it? A tangerine? No… It’s something else…
SAWATARI-SAN: All righty! It’s my turn next! Draw! I summon Abyss Actor - Curtain Raiser from my hand!
SAWATARI-SAN: Battle! I attack Discover Hippo with Abyss Actor - Curtain Raiser! I then activate Curtain Raiser’s Monster Effect! When Curtain Raiser is the only card on my Field, During damage calculation only, its ATK will be doubled!
Yuya: Hippo! Did you find one? Let’s go!
Yuya: Action Magic, Evasion! Rolling Hippo!
SAWATARI-SAN: Damn it… I set one card face-down, and end my turn!
GONGENZAKA: Next up is me! Draw! I summon Superheavy Samurai Flutist from my hand! Flutist’s Monster Effect activates! I can release it, and Special Summon Superheavy Samurai Big Benkei from my hand in Defense Position! Big Benkei can attack while it is in Defense Position! Battle! I attack Discover Hippo with Big Benkei!
Yuya: Quick-Play Magic, Hippo Carnival, activate! I can Special Summon three Hippo Tokens in Defense Position! The opposing monsters can only attack the Hippo Tokens!
GONGENZAKA: Hmph! Not bad, Yuya. I end my turn! Now then, the next participant is…
Tsukikage: All of you! Remember! The tournament that we once fought in! The Maiami Championship!
Yuya: Maiami…
GONGENZAKA: Champion…
SAWATARI-SAN: …ship?
Random Lady: Maiami Championship?
Random Dude: We did have one, didn’t we?
Tatsuya: That’s right. Why did we forget it?
Futoshi: Yeah. I remember that it gave me a lot of shivers!
Yoko: That’s right! Mitchie was in it! Mitchie was there!
Ayu: That’s what you remember?
Nico: I remember as well! I was providing live coverage for it… Is this what they call déjà vu!?
SAWATARI-SAN: That’s right! In the first round of the Maiami Championship, I fought a fierce battle against Sakaki Yuya, Conducted an excellent Entertainment Duel, and got the audience fired up. But I still lost.
Yuya: I remember as well… I’m sure I’ve been to this Field before… Shiun’in Sora… His opponent in the Duel was…Tsukikage?
Tsukikage: It was Hikage. He’s my elder brother.
SAWATARI-SAN: I remember this Field as well. But why did I participate in the Battle Royale when I lost in the first round?
GONGENZAKA: You returned because you got a second chance!
SAWATARI-SAN: That’s right! Akaba Reiji approved of it, and gave me a second chance, so that I can fight against the Obelisk Force!
GONGENZAKA: The Obelisk Force is an elite unit under the direct control of the leader of Duel Academia, Akaba Leo, who aims to fuse the dimensions together.
SAWATARI-SAN: Akaba Leo is Akaba Reiji’s father, right?
GONGENZAKA: We fought against the Obelisk Force with Kurosaki and others.
Yuya: Kurosaki!?
Yuya: That’s right… The real purpose of the Maiami Championship is to assemble a group of Duelists called the Lancers in order to fight against Academia, who used Dueling as a weapon to invade other dimensions.
Tsukikage: Indeed. That is what happened.
Reiji: That’s it. Keep it up, Tsukikage. Continue the Duel. No need to go easy on them, either.
Tsukikage: As you wish! Here I come! It’s my turn!
Himika: Reiji-san. Is this really going to work? Can this Duel really bring back that child’s… Reira’s smile? (Egao Count: 259+1=260)
Reiji: Of course. The only one who can bring back Reira’s smile is Sakaki Yuya. (Egao Count: 260+1=261) However, in order to accomplish that…
Yusho: Yuya needs to climb over a big barrier.
Tsukikage: Using the Scale-1 Twilight Ninja Jogen and the Scale-10 Twilight Ninja Kagen, I set the Pendulum Scales! With this, I can simultaneously summon monsters between Level-2 and 9! Pendulum Summon! Come! Twilight Ninja Shingetsu! And Twilight Ninja Shogun Getsuga!
Tsukikage: From my hand, I activate the Continuous Magic, Illusion Ninjitsu - Hazy Shuriken! Battle! I attack Hippo Token with Shingetsu!
Yuya: Hippo!
Yuya: All right! I’ll be taking this! HUH!?
Tsukikage: Not on my watch! When a card is added to my hand, I can activate the effect of the Continuous Magic, Hazy Shuriken! I send this card to the Graveyard, And inflict 300 damage to the opposing player!
Tsukikage: At this moment, Jogen’s Pendulum Effect activates! Once per turn, when a Ninja on my Field attacks a Defense Position monster, it can inflict piercing damage!
GONGENZAKA: Hippo Token’s DEF is zero. Shingetsu’s ATK is 1500.
SAWATARI-SAN: That’ll be 1500 damage.
Yuya: AAAAHHHHHHH!
Ayu: Hang in there, Big Bro Yuya!
Reiji: Don’t hold back, Tsukikage! Give Sakaki Yuya a thorough beatdown!
Himika: Reiji-san! If you do that, that child will…
Yusho: If he is defeated just like that, then he’s still not that good as a Duelist.
Reiji: Mother. I’ll apologize in advance, but should he lose, you’ll have to give up on Reira’s smile. (Egao Count: 261+1=262)
Himika: *gasps*
Tsukikage: My turn is still not over yet! Kagen’s Pendulum Effect activates! It gains the Pendulum Effect of the Jogen in the Pendulum Zone!
Yuya: Jogen’s effect!? Then, he’s going to inflict piercing damage again!?
Tsukikage: Battle! I attack Hippo Token with Getsuga!
Yuya: Getsuga’s ATK is 2000!
GONGENZAKA: Hence, the amount of piercing damage will be 2000.
SAWATARI-SAN: However, Yuya’s Life Point is 2200. He’ll survive.
Tsukikage: Kagen’s second effect activates! Once per turn, when my Ninja monster attacks, it will gain 500 ATK!
Yuya: What!?
Nico: Whoa! If this attack goes through, his Life will hit zero! Is Yuya going to lose this early in the game!?
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[Editor’s Note: This is just one of thirteen essays in our newly-released collection of first-hand reports about the reality of race, Face to Face with Race.]
I recall a bad joke that explains, in crude terms, the relationship between blacks and whites in America today:
“What do you call a white man surrounded by 20 blacks?”
“Coach.”
“What do you call a white man surrounded by 1,000 blacks?”
“Warden.”
I might add another line to this joke: “What do you call a white man surrounded by 30 blacks?”
“Teacher.”
Until recently I taught at a predominantly black high school in a southeastern state. I took the job because I wasn’t knowledgeable about race at the time, and black schools aren’t picky. The school offered me a job and suddenly I was in darkest Africa. Except, I wasn’t in Africa; I was in America.
Blacks outnumbered whites about five to one at this school and there were hardly any Hispanics. Some of my classes were all-black, or nearly so, because the gifted and advanced classes siphoned off most of the white students and I taught regular classes. There were some black teachers but the majority were white.
Most of the blacks I taught were from the area. They did not tend to travel very much, and I am sure there are regional differences in the ways in which blacks speak and act. However, I suspect my experiences were generally typical, certainly for Southern blacks.
The mainstream press gives a hint of what conditions are like in black schools, but only a hint. Expressions journalists use like “chaotic” or “poor learning environment” or “lack of discipline” do not capture what really happens. There is nothing like the day-to-day experience of teaching black children and that is what I will try to convey.
Noise
Most whites simply do not know what black people are like in large numbers, and the first encounter can be a shock. One of the most immediately striking things about my students was that they were loud. They had little conception of ordinary white decorum. It was not unusual for five blacks to be screaming at me at once. Instead of calming down and waiting for a lull in the din to make their point — something that occurs to even the dimmest white students — blacks just tried to yell over each other.
It did no good to try to quiet them, and white women were particularly inept at trying. I sat in on one woman’s class as she begged the children to pipe down. They just yelled louder so their voices would carry over hers.
Many of my black students would repeat themselves over and over again — just louder. It was as if they suffered from Tourette syndrome. They seemed to have no conception of waiting for an appropriate time to say something. They would get ideas in their heads and simply had to shout them out. I might be leading a discussion on government and suddenly be interrupted: “We gotta get more Democrats! Clinton, she good!” The student may seem content with that outburst but two minutes later, he would suddenly start yelling again: “Clinton good!”
Anyone who is around young blacks will get a constant diet of rap music. Blacks often make up their own jingles, and it was not uncommon for 15 black boys to swagger into a classroom, bouncing their shoulders and jiving back and forth, rapping 15 different sets of words in the same harsh, rasping dialect. The words were almost invariably a childish form of boasting: “Who got dem shine rim, who got dem shine shoe, who got dem shine grill (gold and silver dental caps)?” The amateur rapper usually ends with a claim — in the crudest terms imaginable — that all womankind is sexually devoted to him. For whatever reason, my students would often groan instead of saying a particular word, as in, “She suck dat aaahhhh (think of a long grinding groan), she f**k dat aaaahhhh, she lick dat aaaahhh.”
Many rap lyrics are crude but some are simply incomprehensible. Not so long ago, there was a popular rap called “Tat it up.” I heard the words from hundreds of black mouths for weeks. Some of the lyrics are:
Tat tat tat it up.
ATL tat it up.
New York tat it up.
Tat tat tat it up.
Rap is one of the most degenerate things to have come out of our country, and it is tragic that it has infected whites to the extent it has.
Black women love to dance — in a way white people might call gyrating. They dance in the hall, in the classroom, on the chairs, next to the chairs, under the chairs, everywhere. Once I took a call on my cell phone and had to step outside of class. I was away about two minutes but when I got back the black girls had lined up at the front of the classroom and were convulsing to the delight of the boys.
Many black people, especially black women, are enormously fat. Some are so fat I had to arrange special seating to accommodate their bulk. I am not saying there are no fat white students — there are — but it is a matter of numbers and attitudes. Many black girls simply do not care that they are fat. There are plenty of white anorexics, but I have never met or heard of a black anorexic.
“Black women be big Mr. Jackson,” my students would explain.
“Is it okay in the black community to be a little overweight?” I ask.
Two obese black girls in front of my desk begin to dance, “You know dem boys lak juicy fruit, Mr. Jackson.” “Juicy” is a colorful black expression for the buttocks.
Blacks are the most directly critical people I have ever met: “Dat shirt stupid. Yo’ kid a bastard. Yo’ lips big.” Unlike whites, who tread gingerly around the subject of race, they can be brutally to the point. Once I needed to send a student to the office to deliver a message. I asked for volunteers, and suddenly you would think my classroom was a bastion of civic engagement. Thirty dark hands shot into the air. My students loved to leave the classroom and slack off, even if just for a few minutes, away from the eye of white authority. I picked a light-skinned boy to deliver the message. One very black student was indignant: “You pick da half-breed.” And immediately other blacks take up the cry, and half a dozen mouths are screaming, “He half-breed.”
For decades, the country has been lamenting the poor academic performance of blacks and there is much to lament. There is no question, however, that many blacks come to school with a serious handicap that is not their fault. At home they have learned a dialect that is almost a different language. Blacks not only mispronounce words; their grammar is often wrong. When a black wants to ask, “Where is the bathroom?” he may actually say “Whar da badroom be?” Grammatically, this is the equivalent of “Where the bathroom is?” And this is the way they speak in high school. Students write the way they speak, so this is the language that shows up in written assignments.
It is true that some whites face a similar handicap. They speak with what I would call a “country” accent that is hard to reproduce but results in sentences such as “I’m gonna gemme a Coke.” Some of these country whites had to learn correct pronunciation and usage. The difference is that most whites overcome this handicap and learn to speak correctly; many blacks do not.
Most of the blacks I taught simply had no interest in academic subjects. I taught history, and students would often say they didn’t want to do an assignment or they didn’t like history because it was all about white people. Of course, this was “diversity” history, in which every cowboy’s black cook got a special page on how he contributed to winning the West, but black children still found it inadequate. So I would throw up my hands and assign them a project on a real, historical black person. My favorite was Marcus Garvey. They had never heard of him, and I would tell them to research him, but they never did. They didn’t care and they didn’t want to do any work.
Anyone who teaches blacks soon learns that they have a completely different view of government from whites. Once I decided to fill 25 minutes by having students write about one thing the government should do to improve America. I gave this question to three classes totaling about 100 students, approximately 80 of whom were black. My few white students came back with generally “conservative” ideas. “We need to cut off people who don’t work,” was the most common suggestion. Nearly every black gave a variation on the theme of “We need more government services.”
My students had only the vaguest notion of who pays for government services. For them, it was like a magical piggy bank that never goes empty. One black girl was exhorting the class on the need for more social services and I kept trying to explain that people, real live people, are taxed for the money to pay for those services. “Yeah, it come from whites,” she finally said. “They stingy anyway.”
“Many black people make over $50,000 dollars a year and you would also be taking away from your own people,” I said.
She had an answer to that: “Dey half breed.” The class agreed. I let the subject drop.
Many black girls are perfectly happy to be welfare queens. On career day, one girl explained to the class that she was going to have lots of children and get fat checks from the government. No one in the class seemed to have any objection to this career choice.
Surprising attitudes can come out in class discussion. We were talking about the crimes committed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and I brought up the rape of a young girl in the bathroom of the Superdome. A majority of my students believed this was a horrible crime but a few took it lightly. One black boy spoke up without raising his hand: “Dat no big deal. They thought they is gonna die so they figured they have some fun. Dey jus’ wanna have a fun time; you know what I’m sayin’?” A few black heads nodded in agreement.
My department head once asked all the teachers to get a response from all students to the following question: “Do you think it is okay to break the law if it will benefit you greatly?” By then, I had been teaching for a while and was not surprised by answers that left a young, liberal, white woman colleague aghast. “Yeah” was the favorite answer. As one student explained, “Get dat green.”
There is a level of conformity among blacks that whites would find hard to believe. They like one kind of music: rap. They will vote for one political party: Democrat. They dance one way, speak one way, are loud the same way, and fail their exams in the same way. Of course, there are exceptions but they are rare.
Whites are different. Some like country music, others heavy metal, some prefer pop, and still others, God forbid, enjoy rap music. They have different associations, groups, almost ideologies. There are jocks, nerds, preppies, and hunters. Blacks are all — well — black, and they are quick to let other blacks know when they deviate from the norm.
One might object that there are important group differences among blacks that a white man simply cannot detect. I have done my best to find them, but so far as I can tell, they dress the same, talk the same, think the same. Certainly, they form rival groups, but the groups are not different in any discernible way. There simply are no groups of blacks that are as distinctly different from each other as white “nerds,” “hunters,” or “Goths,” for example.
How the world looks to blacks
One point on which all blacks agree is that everything is “racis’.” This is one message of liberalism they have absorbed completely. Did you do your homework? “Na, homework racis’.” Why did you get an F on the test? “Test racis’.”
I was trying to teach a unit on British philosophers and the first thing the students noticed about Bentham, Hobbes, and Locke was “Dey all white! Where da black philosopher a’?” I tried to explain there were no blacks in eighteenth-century Britain. You can probably guess what they said to that: “Dat racis’!”
One student accused me of deliberately failing him on a test because I didn’t like black people.
“Do you think I really hate black people?”
“Yeah.”
“Have I done anything to make you feel this way? How do you know?”
“You just do.”
“Why do you say that?”
He just smirked, looked out the window, and sucked air through his teeth. Perhaps this was a regional thing, but the blacks often sucked air through their teeth as a wordless expression of disdain or hostility.
My students were sometimes unable to see the world except through the lens of their own blackness. I had a class that was host to a German exchange student. One day he put on a Power Point presentation with famous German landmarks as well as his school and family. From time to time during the presentation, blacks would scream, “Where da black folk?!” The exasperated German tried several times to explain that there were no black people where he lived in Germany. The students did not believe him. I told them Germany is in Europe, where white people are from, and Africa is where black people are from. They insisted that the German student was racist, and deliberately refused to associate with blacks.
Blacks are keenly interested in their own racial characteristics. I have learned, for example, that some blacks have “good hair.” Good hair is black parlance for black-white hybrid hair. Apparently, it is less kinky, easier to style, and considered more attractive.
Blacks are also proud of light skin. Imagine two black students shouting insults across the room. One is dark but slim; the other light and obese. The dark one begins the exchange: “You fat, Ridario!”
Ridario smiles, doesn’t deign to look at his detractor, shakes his head like a wobbling top, and says, “You wish you light skinned.”
They could go on like this, repeating the same insults over and over.
My black students had nothing but contempt for Hispanic immigrants. They would vent their feelings so crudely that our department strongly advised us never to talk about immigration in class in case the principal or some outsider might overhear.
Whites were “racis’,” of course, but they thought of us at least as Americans. Not the Mexicans. Blacks have a certain, not necessarily hostile understanding of white people. They know how whites act, and it is clear they believe whites are smart and are good at organizing things. At the same time, they probably suspect whites are just putting on an act when they talk about equality, as if it is all a sham that makes it easier for whites to control blacks. Blacks want a bigger piece of the American pie. I’m convinced that if it were up to them they would give whites a considerably smaller piece than whites get now, but they would give us something. They wouldn’t give Mexicans anything.
What about black boys and white girls? No one is supposed to notice this or talk about it but it is glaringly obvious: Black boys are obsessed with white girls. White parents would do well to keep their daughters well away from black schools. I’ve witnessed the following drama countless times. A black boy saunters up to a white girl. The cocky black dances around her, not really in a menacing way. It’s more a shuffle than a threat. As he bobs and shuffles he asks, “When you gonna go wit’ me?”
There are two kinds of reply. The more confident white girl gets annoyed, looks away from the black and shouts, “I don’t wanna go out with you!” The more demure girl will look at her feet and mumble a polite excuse but ultimately say no. There is only one response from the black boy: “You racis’.” Many girls — all too many — actually feel guilty because they do not want to date blacks. Most white girls at my school stayed away from blacks, but a few, particularly the ones who were addicted to drugs, fell in with them.
There is something else that is striking about blacks. They seem to have no sense of romance, of falling in love. What brings men and women together is sex, pure and simple, and there is a crude openness about this. There are many degenerate whites, of course, but some of my white students were capable of real devotion and tenderness, emotions that seemed absent from blacks — especially the boys.
Black schools are violent and the few whites who are too poor to escape are caught in the storm. The violence is astonishing, not so much that it happens, but the atmosphere in which it happens. Blacks can be smiling, seemingly perfectly content with what they are doing, having a good time, and then, suddenly start fighting. It’s uncanny. Not long ago, I was walking through the halls and a group of black boys were walking in front of me. All of a sudden they started fighting with another group in the hallway.
Blacks are extraordinarily quick to take offense. Once I accidentally scuffed a black boy’s white sneaker with my shoe. He immediately rubbed his body up against mine and threatened to attack me. I stepped outside the class and had a security guard escort the student to the office. It was unusual for students to threaten teachers physically this way, but among themselves, they were quick to fight for similar reasons.
The real victims are the unfortunate whites caught in this. They are always in danger and their educations suffer. White weaklings are particularly susceptible, but mostly to petty violence. They may be slapped or get a couple of kicks when they are trying to open a bottom locker. Typically, blacks save the hard, serious violence for each other.
There was a lot of promiscuous sex among my students and this led to violence. Black girls were constantly fighting over black boys. It was not uncommon to see two girls literally ripping each other’s hair out with a police officer in the middle trying to break up the fight. The black boy they were fighting over would be standing by with a smile, enjoying the show he had created. For reasons I cannot explain, boys seldom fought over girls.
Pregnancy was common among the blacks, though many black girls were so fat I could not tell the difference. I don’t know how many girls got abortions, but when they had the baby they usually stayed in school and had their own parents look after the child. The school did not offer daycare.
Aside from the police officers constantly on patrol, a sure sign that you are in a black school is the coke cage: the chain-link fence that many majority-black schools use to protect vending machines. The cage surrounds the machine and even covers its top. Delivery employees have to unlock a gate on the front of the cage to service the machines. Companies would prefer not to build cages around vending machines. They are expensive, ugly, and a bother, but black students smashed the machines so many times it was cheaper to build a cage than repair the damage. Rumor had it that before the cages went up blacks would turn the machines upside down in the hope that the money would fall out.
Security guards are everywhere in black schools — we had one on every hall. They also sat in on unruly classes and escorted students to the office. They were unarmed, but worked closely with the three city police officers who were constantly on duty.
Rural black schools have to have security too but they are usually safer. One reason is that the absolute numbers are smaller. A mostly-black school of 300 students is safer than a mostly-black school of 2,000. Also, students in rural areas — both black and white — tend to have grown up together and know each other, at least by sight.
There was a lot of drug-dealing at my school. This was a good way to make a fair amount of money but it also gave boys power over girls who wanted drugs. An addicted girl — black or white — became the plaything of anyone who could get her drugs.
One of my students was a notorious drug dealer. Everyone knew it. He was 19 years old and in eleventh grade. Once he got a score of three out of 100 on a test. He had been locked up four times since he was 13, and there he was sitting next to little, white Caroline.
One day, I asked him, “Why do you come to school?”
He wouldn’t answer. He just looked out the window, smiled, and sucked air through his teeth. His friend Yidarius ventured an explanation: “He get dat green and get dem females.”
“What is the green?” I asked. “Money or dope?”
“Both,” said Yidarius with a smile.
A very fat black interrupted from across the room: “We get dat lunch,” Mr. Jackson. “We gotta get dat lunch and brickfuss.” He means the free breakfast and lunch poor students get every day.
“Nigga, we know’d you be lovin’ brickfuss!” shouts another student.
Some readers may believe that I have drawn a cruel caricature of black students. After all, according to official figures some 85 percent of them graduate. It would be instructive to know how many of those scraped by with barely a C- record. They go from grade to grade and they finally get their diplomas because there is so much pressure on teachers to push them through. It saves money to move them along, the school looks good, and the teachers look good. Many of these children should have been failed, but the system would crack under their weight if they were all held back.
How did my experiences make me feel about blacks? Ultimately, I lost sympathy for them. In so many ways they seem to make their own beds. There they were in an integrationist’s fantasy — in the same classroom with white students, eating the same lunch, using the same bathrooms, listening to the same teachers — and yet the blacks fail while the whites pass.
One tragic outcome among whites who have been teaching for too long is that it can engender something close to hatred. One teacher I knew gave up fast food — not for health reasons but because where he lived most fast-food workers were black. He had enough of blacks on the job. This was an extreme example, but years of frustration can take their toll. Many of my white colleagues with any experience were well on their way to that state of mind.
There is an unutterable secret among teachers: Almost all realize that blacks do not respond to traditional white instruction. Does that put the lie to environmentalism? Not at all. It is what brings about endless, pointless innovation that is supposed to bring blacks up to the white level.
The solution is more diversity — or put more generally, the solution is change. Change is an almost holy word in education, and you can fail a million times as long as you keep changing. That is why liberals keep revamping the curriculum and the way it is taught. For example, teachers are told that blacks need hands-on instruction and more group work. Teachers are told that blacks are more vocal and do not learn through reading and lectures. The implication is that they have certain traits that lend themselves to a different kind of teaching.
Whites have learned a certain way for centuries but it just doesn’t work with blacks. Of course, this implies racial differences but if pressed, most liberal teachers would say different racial learning styles come from some indefinable cultural characteristic unique to blacks. Therefore, schools must change, America must change. But into what? How do you turn quantum physics into hands-on instruction or group work? No one knows, but we must keep changing until we find something that works.
Public school has certainly changed since anyone reading this was a student. I have a friend who teaches elementary school, and she tells me that every week the students get a new diversity lesson, shipped in fresh from some bureaucrat’s office in Washington or the state capital. She showed me the materials for one week: a large poster, about the size of a forty-two inch flat-screen television. It shows an utterly diverse group — I mean diverse: handicapped, Muslim, Jewish, effeminate, poor, rich, brown, slightly brown, yellow, etc. — sitting at a table, smiling gaily, accomplishing some undefined task. The poster comes with a sheet of questions the teacher is supposed to ask. One might be: “These kids sure look different, but they look happy. Can you tell me which one in the picture is an American?”
Some eight-year-old, mired in ignorance, will point to a white child like himself. “That one.”
The teacher reads from the answer, conveniently printed along with the question. “No, Billy, all these children are Americans. They are just as American as you.”
The children get a snack, and the poster goes up on the wall until another one comes a week later. This is what happens at predominately white, middle-class, elementary schools everywhere.
Elementary school teachers love All of the Colors of the Race, by award-winning children’s poet Arnold Adoff. These are some of the lines they read to the children: “Mama is chocolate . . . Daddy is vanilla . . . Me (sic) is better . . . It is a new color. It is a new flavor. For love. Sometimes blackness seems too black for me, and whiteness is too sickly pale; and I wish every one were golden. Remember: long ago before people moved and migrated, and mixed and matched . . . there was one people: one color, one race. The colors are flowing from what was before me to what will be after. All the colors.”
Teaching as a career
It may come as a surprise after what I have written, but my experiences have given me a deep appreciation for teaching as a career. It offers a stable, middle-class life but comes with the capacity to make real differences in the lives of children. In our modern, atomized world children often have very little communication with adults — especially, or even, with their parents — so there is potential for a real transaction between pupil and teacher, disciple and master.
A rewarding relationship can grow up between an exceptional, interested student and his teacher. I have stayed in my classroom with a group of students discussing ideas and playing chess until the janitor kicked us out. I was the old gentleman, imparting my history, culture, personal loves and triumphs, defeats and failures to young kinsman. Sometimes I fancied myself Tyrtaeus, the Spartan poet, who counseled the youth to honor and loyalty. I never had this kind intimacy with a black student, and I know of no other white teacher who did.
Teaching can be fun. For a certain kind of person it is exhilarating to map out battles on chalkboards, and teach heroism. It is rewarding to challenge liberal prejudices, to leave my mark on these children, but what I aimed for with my white students I could never achieve with the blacks.
There is a kind of child whose look can melt your heart: some working-class castaway, in and out of foster homes, often abused, who is nevertheless almost an angel. Your heart melts for these children, this refuse of the modern world. Many white students possess a certain innocence; their cheeks still blush.
Try as I might, I could not get the blacks to care one bit about Beethoven or Sherman’s march to the sea, or Tyrtaeus, or Oswald Spengler, or even liberals like John Rawls, or their own history. They cared about nothing I tried to teach them. When this goes on year after year it chokes the soul out of a teacher, destroys his pathos, and sends him guiltily searching for The Bell Curve on the Internet.
Blacks break down the intimacy that can be achieved in the classroom, and leave you convinced that that intimacy is really a form of kinship. Without intending to, they destroy what is most beautiful — whether it be your belief in human equality, your daughter’s innocence, or even the state of the hallway.
Just last year I read on the bathroom stall the words “F**k Whitey.” Not two feet away, on the same stall, was a small swastika. The writing on that wall somehow symbolized the futility of integration. No child should be have to try to learn in such conditions. It was not racists who created those conditions and it wasn’t poverty either; it was ignorant, white liberals. It reminds me of Nietzsche: “I call an animal, a species, an individual corrupt, when it loses its instincts, when it prefers what is injurious to it.”
One often hears from egalitarians that it doesn’t matter what color predominates in a future America so long as we preserve our values, since we are a “proposition nation.” Even if we were prepared to hand over our country to aliens who were going to “preserve our values,” it simply cannot be done with blacks.
The National Council for the Social Studies, the leading authority on social science education in the United States, urges teachers to inculcate such values as equality of opportunity, individual property rights, and a democratic form of government. Even if teachers could inculcate this milquetoast ideology into whites, liberalism is doomed because so many non-whites are not receptive to education of any kind beyond the merest basics. Many of my students were functionally illiterate. It is impossible to get them to care about such abstractions as property rights or democratic citizenship. They do not see much further than the fact that you live in a big house and “we in da pro-jek.” Of course, there are a few loutish whites who will never think past their next meal and a few sensitive blacks for whom anything is possible, but no society takes on the characteristics of its exceptions.
Once I asked my students, “What do you think of the Constitution?”
“It white,” one slouching black rang out. The class began to laugh. And I caught myself laughing along with them, laughing while Pompeii’s volcano simmers, while the barbarians swell around the Palatine, while the country I love, and the job I love, and the community I love become dimmer by the day.
I read a book by an expatriate Rhodesian who visited Zimbabwe not too many years ago. Traveling with a companion, she stopped at a store along the highway. A black man materialized next to her car window. “Job, boss, (I) work good, boss,” he pleaded. “You give job.”
“What happened to your old job?” the expatriate white asked.
The black man replied in the straightforward manner of his race: “We drove out the whites. No more jobs. You give job.”
At some level, my students understand the same thing. One day I asked the bored, black faces staring back at me. “What would happen if all the white people in America disappeared tomorrow?”
“We screwed,” a young, pitch-black boy screamed back. The rest of the blacks laughed.
I have had children tell me to my face as they struggled with an assignment. “I cain’t do dis,” Mr. Jackson. “I black.”
The point is that human beings are not always rational. It is in the black man’s interest to have whites in Zimbabwe but he drives them out and starves. Most whites do not think black Americans could ever do anything so irrational. They see blacks on television smiling, fighting evil whites, embodying white values. But the real black is not on television, and you pull your purse closer when you see him, and you lock the car doors when he swaggers by with his pants hanging down almost to his knees.
For those of you with children, better a smaller house in a white district than a fancy one near a black school. Much better an older car than your most precious jewels cast into a school where they will be a minority.
I have been in parent-teacher conferences that broke my heart: the child pleading with his parents to take him out of school; the parents convinced their child’s fears are groundless. If you love your child, show her you care — not by giving her fancy vacations or a car, but making her innocent years safe and happy. Give her the gift of a white school.
Of course, even the whitest schools are riddled with liberalism. There is only one way to educate your children in a way that does not poison their minds. If at all possible, home school your children. Educate them yourself.
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