Today I had a conversation with one of my students who failed my eleventh grade English class (along with most of the other classes he took last year). Despite a transcript that looks like he has learned nothing at all, he is extremely bright, articulate, and analytical about the world around him. He fails his classes not because he can't do the work, but because he is completely disillusioned with his formal education experience and the injustice he experiences on a daily basis in his neighborhood and in his school. While this rebellion is only hurting him and seems utterly stupid, it is his one assertion of power when he feels completely powerless. Though he entered the school an honors student, at the highest testing level, he is now in danger of graduating because he has failed so many classes.
When he was in ninth grade, he was mistaken for another student on a security camera and has been a target of the administration ever since. In a culture of students where it is considered the worst offense in the world to "snitch," he kept his mouth shut following that incident that has shaped the way in which he has been treated in school for the past three years. The accusation has shadowed his high school identity and young, vulnerable, and afraid to speak up he let it define him despite knowing that it was wrong.
As he headed to PM school today to make up classes that he failed, since he is working hard to graduate on time and get out of an environment he hates, he stopped to talk to me about Troy Davis, the man in Georgia who is slated to be executed tomorrow for a crime that it increasingly looks like he did not commit. My student questioned why he should even bother trying to "make it" in society where the justice system is inherently racist and where something as barbaric and cruel as the death penalty is even legal. All I could come up with was a shallowly subverted feeling of outrage and some encouragement that this was why he needed to graduate and go out and get himself into a position of power.
Perhaps this is why I have been so saddened and outraged by the Troy Davis case. He was nineteen when the supposed shooting occurred. Nineteen. If, and I use the conditional knowing full well that there is great probability that this is not an "if," he is innocent and is executed in the face of all of this doubt, what does this say about our justice system? If innocence and guilt are not so black and white, as the justice system manufactures us to think with its guilty and not guilty verdicts, how do we then reply with something as black and white as life and death?
In the world of false absolutes, something about this just seems absolutely wrong...
So, tonight, I think of Troy Davis and I hope that justice won't be denied in Georgia.
No comments:
Post a Comment