Critical Race Theory

[Rev. Rye]

It’s one thing to accidentally misname someone. It’s another thing entirely to keep calling someone the wrong name for months on end, especially if the name you use came from another student whose only real similarity is that they’re black males.



Maybe if it was established that she had a bad memory for names, but it seems she only has that problem with black students.

To be fair, most of the white adults in the book were basically written as ridiculous parodies, like the gym teacher who kept asking if what he was saying was racist every five seconds, and then you had the white Karen teacher who got his name wrong all year long, which is not a realistic situation at all and would not happen in real life, especially given that the teacher gets his name right all of a sudden when he gets in trouble. The message of the book to be learned ends up being that black kids shouldn't take shit from their white teachers, and that they should stand up for themselves and tell their teachers off if they get their name wrong. I simply don't think this is good advice for young black kids, as they are already being suspended at a far greater rate than children of other races, so don't give the teacher another legitimate reason to suspend you.

And that was your only takeaway from the book? Not even that white people should try and be more mindful about the ways we interact with minorities? Or, fuck, even that if you're gifting something to someone because they love the Knicks, it might be good to make that connection clearer?

Hell, even with that lesson of not taking shit about misnaming, Jerry Craft pointed out that there are limitations to that approach in the story proper, where the Karen teacher finds a comic where Jordan vents his frustration about being misnamed, and she takes it as a polemic against the school itself. And that's even after the incident where Drew tells off the teacher for calling him by the name of another student who barely looks anything like him.

That said, the white adults being very obvious caricatures was probably the weakest part of the book, that much I can agree with you on.