Race is a touchy subject in any venue, but discussing it in a multicultural classroom can be anxiety provoking for a teacher. However, my mission is to get my students to think, to analyze, to write, to understand. And to do that, I sometimes have to stir the pot. So, this week’s discussion of oppression was focused on race.

Thus far, the experience has proven to be instructive for all of us. I learned that my students really have no idea about the history of their country. They do not immediately understand the parallels between one experience and another. And they love to swear.

They also love to use the n-word. I tell my boys, “If you say that to each other, you open the door for other people to say it to you.”

And they say, “Naw, Ms. S. It ain’t even like that. We’re cool.”

To which I respond, “Okay, you are cool with each other, but what if some white boy comes and says that to you?”

Inevitably, I get a variation on,“I will knock that muthf***a out.”

“So, maybe it is just best not to say the n-word at all?” I suggest.

A few days ago one young man had to get clever. “What n-word?”

“The one that ends with r…”

“You don’t want us to say noisemaker?”

Yup. I am really elevating the discourse around here.

There is more than one way to access information, so on Tuesday I showed the students images and had them write ten-minute responses to the images. I finally had to put on the overhead, “Do not talk. Write first. You will have an opportunity to share later.” They were exploding. A picture, apparently, is worth a thousand words. And several pictures from the Jim Crow era added up to several thousand uses of the f-word.

And one fascinating demonstration that they are, in fact, more cool with each other than we might ever imagine:

Student One: “Hey T! How come you still sit in the back of the bus?”

Student Two: “Oh no! Damn!”

Student Three (“T” herself): “It’s cool. We still down, Mexican Girl.”

Then they all laughed.

And maybe that is why they do not view race in the same way my generation does. Sure, there are still all kinds of problems. There are race-specific gangs who bring machetes to school to kill each other and there is one school nearby where the students self-segregate so much that they have nicknamed different areas, “Little Africa,” and “Little Mexico,” and “Little Vietnam.”

But they are used to going to school together. They are used to cracking jokes with each other. They are used to saying foul, terrible things to one another and then laughing it off. And in a way, that’s beautiful. When we moved on to the reading about Jim Crow laws, the outrage my students expressed was beautiful. It demonstrated to me how far the world really has come. My students could not fathom a world in which they could not walk down the street together, sit down to eat together, marry one another. As many of them wrote, “You should be able to be with whoever you want.”

And that’s the truth. As they so eloquently explained to me, anything else is just “f***ing stupid.”