This week, I lodged a complaint with a public high school in Fairfax County that one of its teachers holds biases against white male students following an incident concerning what I believe to have been grading inequities. The principal tasked an administrator to investigate my accusation that the teacher has referred to a “privileged white boy” in front of her students on more than one occasion.
A few hours later, the administrator concluded her “investigation” and sent me an email indicating that the teacher “never said that to any student, ever. She is fair and consistent with her grading with all students.”
Clearly, the administrator is committed to thorough investigations concerning matters of racism against the students. In just a few short hours, without speaking to me for clarification or collecting witnesses’ names or statements, she was able to testify confidently that the teacher “never” used the phrase “privileged white boy” in front of her students, “ever.”
The administrator, likely a friend of the teacher’s, is wrong. The teacher reportedly referred to Shakespeare’s Romeo as a privileged white boy and to a student in one of her classes as “a basic white boy.” The apparently self-loathing white teacher has not just implicit but also explicit biases against white male students.