White People

Race plays a prominent role at Breakthrough, whether or not that makes some people uncomfortable. Regardless, it is as tricky to work with as it is necessary to acknowledge.

Before I started working at Breakthrough last summer, I’ve always believed that all students of all different ethnicities should be looked at as equals and treated no differently from each other. Okay, that’s still pretty true for me. But I used to believe, and I still think a lot of teachers today believe, that, as way of making a completely perfect world, everyone must be colorblind. Colorblindness is key.

All that matters is your education. Your grades. I don’t need to think of your race when I teach you. I don’t need to acknowledge it. All that’s bullshit reasoning now.



90% of Breakthrough students are of color. 79% are Latino. 68% receive free or reduced lunch. And 77% speak English as a second language.

In my writing class two weeks ago, we read excerpts from The Bluest Eye, and of course, race issues came up. However, that discussion went a direction that I didn’t expect it to go.

My students hate white people. And since there were no white students in my Block C, they didn’t feel any reason to not shout it out and declare it with so much rigidness, a rigidness that could only be supported by their past experiences.



Yesterday, Wednesday, Breakthrough had a field trip day, “Occupational Career Day.” While some large groups got some pretty cool places to go to, such as Google, Yahoo, and Adobe, I had a small group of three students, and I had to take them to the San Jose Water Company. Great.

On the bus ride there—okay, first thing’s first. I made my group board the bus going in the wrong direction. Oops. One of my students, let’s call him Cecil, who is also a student from my Block C class (irony: his pseudonym is a white name), kept on thinking out loud, “I think we’re going the wrong direction.” It wasn’t until he said with confidence, “Alright, I know we’re going the wrong direction.”

The bus driver confirmed it, and we got off. I thought the kids were going to kill me and hate me for the rest of the day, but once we got on the right bus, things were going smoothly again.

This particularly bus was driving around in the area of Valley Fair Mall and Santana Row (the rich people land that I referred to in the previous entry), so I brought up Valley Fair. Cecil told me this story:

“One time, my dad brought me to Valley Fair, but before getting out of our car, he asked me, ‘Do you think you can handle this?’ I didn’t think there was nothing to be afraid of, so I said yeah. When I went inside, I got scared. I couldn’t handle it. I made my dad drive me to Oakridge Mall instead.”

When I asked him what he was so afraid of, he responded, “White people.”

Why all the hate for white people? I knew. And I felt for him. It wasn’t hard to fill in the gaps.

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“Ironically, I think none of this would’ve happened if…” (Excerpted)
Written on March 28th, 2006

I go out to Oakridge at least twice a week and come home anywhere between 10 and 12. My mom does not utter any single sign of protest at all, so I was always thinking, "Cool, I have the best Asian mom ever."

I've finally had to have my brother call me while I'm away at some key club event whatever and listen to him as he explains that my mom would, walk into his room, tears streaming down her cheeks, and explode with random shit about how she's so afraid that I'm really smoking pot with the true Mexicans and Blacks that Peter and John are.

So at this point, I've had two things that have really been bothering me about my mom:
-She still has a problem with Peter, John, and Miranda, the Mexican, Black, and White, respectively. I've tried so fucking much to show my mom that they're not a bad influence: I had them over for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I told her about how we've eaten dinner at the Cheesecake Factory and how Peter paid for my dinner. I'm constantly telling her, "Yeah, John's driving me," or, "Yeah, Miranda's driving me."—no fucking car accident to date. And of course, every weekend: "I'm at the mall with John, Peter, and Miranda." My mom must actually be that fucking stupid to not be able to determine that I'm perfectly sober each time I come home after a day at the mall with those three.

So my brother tells me that she told him that she would rather have him hang out with his friends, who amazingly enough, are all Asian. Here, my mom also managed to contradict herself. A while back, she told me she thought Miranda was weird (in whatever worst way possible) because she was some White 18-year-old and was still hanging out with 15-year-olds like me. But what the fuck, my mom would rather have my brother's Asian friends (18-19) take me out?

But my mom says she's perfectly cool with Peter, John, and Miranda being Mexican, Black, and White. Really Really? My fucking ass.

My mom so desperately cries, "Why aren't you the nice little boy that you were when you were 9?" Well, I grew, I became less naïve, and I was finally able to see all the gaping holes in my parents' logic.
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And three years later, after having gazed into those “gaping holes” for so long, I now know how they got there.