Back in the 1970’s there was a TV drama called The White Shadow. It was a classic white man’s burden story popular in that era. The white man would learn the wonders of diversity, while helping the minorities rise from the ghetto to something better. Back then it was what passed for cutting edge. It was also fairly dull and no one watched it. Finally after three seasons the network threw in the towel.
Today, of course, the white man would be routinely humiliated in each episode in an attempt to atone for his whiteness. The difference is it would not be a TV show but real life. According to America’s newspaper of record, the White Shadow is suing the New York City schools for discrimination.
A Bronx teacher says being a white man at his mostly black and Latino middle school has made him a target for unfair treatment — including being denied a key to the restroom for three years.
Paugh William Shadow of upstate Port Jervis charges he was discriminated against as a white man at MS 391, according to a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit he filed against the city and the Department of Education.
Shadow claims he was falsely accused of corporal punishment, using derogatory language and leaving his post; and that school administrators refused to back him up on disciplinary matters and failed to reimburse him after he bought materials for his science-lab students.
The charges, including an allegation he marched sixth-graders up and down a set of stairs for more than five minutes as a means of discipline, were dismissed, he claims.
Shadow says he “was humiliated in front of his peers” and that school officials “discriminated against [him] due to his gender and race.” He is seeking unspecified damages.
My have times changed.
It is a funny story, with lots of teaching moments. But even prisons have guards who inmates refer to as “angels” because they will not yield to the prison culture. There are no angels at a school like this. My sister was a master teacher, but moved about the country with her Army husband. Their last stop was in Fayettville, NC. She took a position, for greater pay, at an all black elementary school, which hired her in an attempt to bring them up from a rating that would lose their federal money train. She did, single-handedly. With one (of… Read more »
The future is now.
“an allegation he marched sixth-graders up and down a set of stairs for more than five minutes as a means of discipline”
Perhaps, just perhaps, this bunch of kids deserved some discipline and in the great scheme of things it is hardly the most onerous punishment. But on the other hand, no one else is going to discipline them so why bother?
Mr. Shadow is a loser fool and deserves his fate. Any person with self respect and a modicum of professional excellence would have left an environment so evidently wretched after his first year. But Mr. Shadow apparently planned to make it a career there when there are teacher shortages around much of the country. We are left to assume that he knows he does not have the stuff to better himself. I’m sure I agree.
Yeah, the Shadow strikes me as a loser who most likely deserves his fate. Since the only way you can get fired from the NYC public schools is to commit a felony (and even then you have to be convicted and sent away in order to be fired), I suspect he fits right in with the rest of them. But, it is still a funny story.
The boycott and rejection of the Negro culture has begun in earnest in White America.
Whether Mr. Shadow wins or not doesn’t matter. He’s taking a stand in public, others will follow.
His public action represents deep and unforgiving resistance that has been brewing for quite some time.
Times have already changed, Negroes and their race hustlers will be the last to know and the first to fall.
My the times have changed. ? He hasn’t won yet.