It’s the oxygen hissing out of my room–Charleston and the mass murder at Emanuel AME Church.

I have been thinking about the role of teachers in this: how we failed, how we could have  done better, how we succeeded elsewhere. I have a few stories from my high school teaching days. I wonder every once in awhile if one of my crazed students is prepping out there for a town near me or near you. Wondering. Unsurprised by the dark heart of America–I live in it.

I was inspired to say more by Charlie Pierce’s article in Esquire. He argues that the murders weren’t unthinkable.  They were premeditated and we are obligated to think about them, an interior monologue as well as a out loud and in dialogue with others.

He argues that it was not unspeakable.

What happened in a Charleston church on Wednesday night is a lot of things, but one thing it’s not is “unspeakable.” We should speak of it often. We should speak of it loudly. We should speak of it as terrorism, which is what it was.

He continues that we need to speak to the historic assault that is at its roots–slavery and the near destruction of our political commonwealth that enslaving others represented.  And continues to represent.

As Pierce says so well,

Not to think about these things is to betray the dead. Not to speak of these things is to dishonor them. Let Nikki Haley, the governor of South Carolina, look out her window at the flag of treason that is flown proudly at her state capitol and think about these things, and speak of them, before she pronounces herself so puzzled at how something like this could happen in South Carolina, the home office of American sedition.

I am unsurprised.  As I said, I taught these students.  One particular incident comes to mind when I taught high school.  I was the technology coordinator as well as the coach/mentor for the student technology leadership program at our school.  We were the de facto geek squad and we were very good, but apparently I failed because I didn’t even discover what had happened.  I had a student give me a heads up on what was going down on our servers, what was laying in wait like a copperhead in the grass.

Two of my most talented and trusted students were revealed to have been using the servers to hide neo-Nazi “material” which they were sharing with their …cadre?  When confronted it was like the end of Othello where Iago says, “From this time forth I never will speak word. (V.2.316-317)

Three adults confronted them with the heinous racist lies in the files they contained and not a peep.  Silence. Unspeakable, unthinkable silence.  We could not even have a conversation.  They sat mute as my principal and I asked them with furious incredulity, “Do you really believe this?”  Not even name, rank and serial number.  Their parents never said a word.  No wonder there.  Racism is grown from the root.

All that we were left with was punishment.  It could not even be public punishment because they were minors and because of school privacy laws.  Not sure public shaming would have done any good anyway in a public that was secretly and unashamedly racist.

Ever after, the names of those two boys have been seered into me.  I have a forever alert in my head and heart hoping I never see their names as shooters in some synagogue or mosque or other AME congregation.

I feel like I was such a frail reed protecting those around me, bent by the dark forces of hate and fear and history.  Even the nickname of our high school was the “Raiders”.  We were named after a sociopathic, slave owning, guerilla Civil War cavalry captain, John Hunt Morgan.  I pointed this out at every opportunity to the blank, uncomprehending stares of my teaching peers.  Another kind of silence.

It is all of one piece.  The murders in Charleston  are not an isolated incident. This was not one rotten apple.  It is most definitely not an attack on religious freedom that many on the right are insisting it is.  This is what I know. I know because every day  I live where I live.  This is a culture of hate, of fear, of the fake ‘heritage’ that has kept this beloved place awry, out of place, dying.

I cannot keep silent.

Below is a collaborative poem that I started so that I could speak and for others to speak (especially in #CLMOOC).  Join in the collaboration with text and with voice and with image.  It doesn’t matter how messy it gets, that’s how the truth looks no longer quiet as its kept.