My 55 black students could be divided into four groups:

1. Good kids who desperately wanted to get out of the ghetto (about 4 students)

2. Decent kids who, with a bit of effort, could perhaps rise above and become good citizens (4 students)

3. Bad kids who regurgitated what they knew white teachers wanted to hear (7 students)

4. Ghetto thugs (40 students)

Once the administration thought they had eliminated all of the possibilities for gang colors, the students started dying their teeth red and blue.

The gang affiliations would have gone unnoticed if the school did not have frequent “walk-by shootings.” Gang members would stalk the fences of the school looking for rival gang members to shoot at.

Riots were fairly common as well. For instance, two girls who started fighting over a boy would draw in their friends, and the friends of their friends, and so on and so forth.

Things I saw:

- Students robbing grocery stores in uniform

- Students talking about their grandmothers giving oral sex to animals for crack

- Students having sex in empty classrooms

- Students not understanding that the world was not in black and white before color photographs

- Boys hitting girls

- Open drug use

- Overt racism between students who called one another “stupid Africans” and made clicking sounds to mimic African languages (all these students were African-American, not African immigrants)

After three years, I was moved to a middle school where a majority of the students were Jewish, Persian, or Hispanic. There were no problems there. The Jewish and Persian kids understood the lessons immediately. The Hispanic kids had some trouble and lagged a bit, but not far enough to derail a lesson, and they were respectful enough not to keep a lesson from progressing. I eventually left that job, but only for financial reasons.

…

By their senior year, the whites, Asians and Hispanics had grown to detest their black classmates. They saw them as disruptive and ignorant thieves. I can remember another teacher sitting in a meeting and saying, “Remember Martin Luther King? ‘Judge me not by the color of my skin but by the content of my character?’ He probably should have left that last part out.” That about sums it up.