Your Children Want to Break the First Rule of White Club

Critical race theory is a scapegoat. And they know it.

I realized I was writing the wrong book when a white student, Sophie,* sat across the conference table from me — her white teacher — and said that her Black classmate, Maya, didn’t deserve to be a writer.

It was only a few days into the Kentucky summer program where I teach creative writing and my first one-on-one conference with Sophie. Sophie was angry. Earlier that day in a workshop, her classmate, Maya,* had written and shared a poem about being poor and Black in Louisville, about being a survivor of sexual abuse. The poem was bad, Sophie asserted, because “real writing isn’t complaining,” and all Maya had done was “complain about how terrible the world is.” Maya had also shared a poem about familial love and thrift-shopping, but that one hadn’t registered with Sophie, it seemed, hadn’t pushed her to write a response piece which she shared with me privately, in addition to this speech about the not-so-badness of the world we were living in.

We talked. Sophie wasn’t my first student who had come to me with complicated feelings about other classmates’ work, and when I accepted this job I had specifically made it my personal goal to talk to white students about race in ways that I wasn’t offered as a white…