Last Friday, the school singled out all of its Black fourth and fifth graders and pulled them into an assembly where they were held responsible for the school’s low test scores. 

A PowerPoint presentation, titled “AA Presentation,” was shown to the students. The presentation itself contained typos and errors, and the irony of that is making me constipated because how are you going to create an entire assembly to shame Black children for the failures of the system (of whiteness) when you don’t even have it together enough to proofread said presentation? Y’all are just sloppy all around.

It identified Black students as “the problem” in low test scores because they “have underperform [sic] on standardized assessment for the past three years.” It notes that the school only has 32% of its students who are where they need to be when it should have 41%.

It then tasks the students with committing to getting themselves up to where they need to be on the standardized tests; passing all their curriculum-based assessments with a 75% or higher, and committing to “maintaining high iReady scores within their individual track.”

There were no bullet points in the presentation that detailed how the school was going to help the Black children keep these commitments. 

Whiteness does not care about the comfort or education of Black students