Pink Pages

Diepiriye Kuku

Today I was fired for being a faggot. Midday, April 2009. A call arrived on my mobile phone during lunch and instructed me to see the middle school principal. I had been a substitute teacher at the American School here in Delhi for several years, beginning with an initiative that I started as a resource educator for Black History Month in February 2005.

Africa and African-American parents I knew outside of the school regularly expressed concern that the school celebrated multi-culturalism through a pan-Asian food fare and otherwise provided no real meaningful classroom support for dealing with social difference. I was just in the library editing some papers, which is near the office. So I arrived in the principal’s office in moments. For years, I had expected this day, so my cool temperament really threw the principal off her game. She even tried to throw me through several digs, complaining that in one instance I had not precisely followed the absent teacher’s instructions. Often teachers don’t leave clear instructions, if any, I explained, and had consistently been lauded by teachers and students for helping to make the subject matter more real to the kids. Anyhow, this part of the firing all came as fodder to justify and support her trump card: I had spoken about homosexuality during a class.

As the principal’s lips continued to move, I was taken back to 1987 back in Kentucky, and the sheer oppressiveness of the silence around diversity in general. It was my seventh grade, and one classmate accused me of looking at our gym teacher’s butt. Having learned no words to speak about this injurious stigmatization, I used my fists. That girl beat my ass. We were separated and sent to the principal’s office, a man that had known me, and these conflicts since second grade. Nonetheless, we had to explain ourselves to him, and as an adult I can say that it must have been crystal clear to the principal that he was dealing with a young person struggling to understand his sexuality. The punishment we received was more sympathetic than harsh. Still, no guidance was offered. I grew up terrified in middle school; I turned in on myself as it became apparent that the secret I held was nasty. My own middle school principal silenced everything homosexual in the same way that this principal was enforcing such silence today by kicking me out of that so-called liberal and progressive educational environment. It didn’t matter to her that one of her students called me a “Fag,” and that I had used a portion of the class to facilitate a discussion where the young people spoke about how to include people who may feel on the margins in their school. The kids did more of the work of inclusion than the school’s curricula, which has a token sprinkling of color, yet is otherwise quite sanitized of reality.

The trouble began 10 days earlier when I received threatening comments on a video uploaded to my YouTube channel where I discuss similarities between queer life in Africa and India. Before quickly deleting his/her user account, Rhubaru wrote: ‘This thing (woman?) teaches at a school a friend of mine goes to, it’s disgusting. He teaches at one of the top schools on Earth and he’s not goddamn fired yet. FORTUNATELY these videos have started to circulate around the staff and parent of the students. I’d only give him a couple of days left at the place. It’s really really gross. I don’t think my parents would even let me go to a school with staff like that. Not a suitable thing for children to see, especially middle school students.’ On another selection of my videos, Rhubaru left the blunt comment: ‘You disgust me.’ When firing me, the middle school principal quoted Rhubaru’s comments as evidence of my immorality. She suggested that I had encouraged kids to visit my channel, based on this another video where I use many curse words to create a comedic play about how my second grade teacher assigned me a nickname on the first day of school. My first grade teacher, another middle-class liberal white woman, never learned to say my name! This was a practice so common at the American School today that once when a Korean student acted out violently in class, none of the other teachers could help me to identify him since they only knew him by the Anglicized name he was politely and gently forced to adopt in the so-called multi-kulti school. Ironically, the initial video in question was not uploaded to my YouTube account, but to a net community to which I belong, and it discussed a specific issue that I faced as a kid, which is an extreme issue at this school. Another middle school parent made me aware that her daughter had found the video and warned me that it had gone viral amount the students. She cautioned me that the school was far too socially conservative for her European tastes and that she had planned to remove her kids as soon as possible.

Overall, this experience has reminded me that some people really do see me, hear what I am saying, but only hear an angry negro, because that is indeed all that they are prepared to see. People often ignore what oppression is like. We distance ourselves from the brutal terrorism of the earlier parts of our history, culminating in non-violent resistance. In America, we forget that our culture was born out of domination and absorbing difference into sameness, rather than ever genuinely celebrating our socio-religious and ethnic diversity, regional brilliance and potential for interaction. We live separated along gender, race and class, and thereby are never made accountable for our rhetoric. We can feign commitments to education and flaunt our secular values, while never sincerely confronting difference and therefore engaging in “subject to subject” talk with the ‘other’. How could we, when folks like me are simply removed like stains. My circumstances here reminded me more of the abandonment I had felt by the education system that failed to protect me from regular harassment as a kid, and refused to even acknowledge my difference, save for the innuendoes and quiet conversations years after high-school graduation with retired teachers who always meant well.

Today, I was fired from a job and accused of inappropriately behaving with kids. Instead of forgetting, I remembered how as a child I longed for someone to help me understand my difference, to assist me in processing the taunting, harassment and abuse that terrorized me throughout my youth as an effeminate boy, and I continue to sift through the residue. Where were the gay teachers? I had met one, and years later thanked him for showing up at school every now and then. He never breeched the subject with me, but it was his pride that shined through. As much as schools work to reinforce a heteronormative environment under the guise of safety and ‘appropriateness’, a modern world must make concerted efforts to cultivate diversity, to teach peace through dialogue, and never shy away when confronted with alterity. The American School’s middle school leadership in question here has regularly put students’ lives through her fear-of-the-other. Black youth, and boys in particular, have expressed to me several ways in which they emotionally feel unsafe at this school and are usually too few in number to perceive of their collective stereotyping- at this age they take it personally.

Much like the weekend Korean language courses at the school organized by Korean parents targeting young Koreans growing up outside their home environment, Black parents both in America and certainly at this school must manage to pick up the pieces and heavily supplement the book learning if ever their kids are to develop a healthy self-image. Korean and other East Asian students are the second largest visible ethnic cluster among the schools student population. Students have told me that they suffer the same sort of homogenizing force of oppression, the tacit assumption that everybody wants to be white and elite, though their families are numerous and inter-connected enough to form a refuge. Many of the American expatriates may even begin to use the terms ‘white’ and ‘western’ interchangeably, though I suspect that electing the first president of color will give many permission to come out from under the cloak of political correctness. Moreover, teachers do not bother learning their names, for example, and liberally suggest Anglicized nicknames. Likely the teachers have the best intention of integrating the kids into the fold. It’s radical to think that educated adults are unaware of the respect demonstrated by just paying enough attention to learn to properly pronounce an individual’s name. By those standards, it’s easy to see how individuality is discouraged while maintaining the façade of plurality. Yet as the old saying goes: Last hired, first fired. In the age where money talks, Rhubaru’s folks apparently yield a great wand than most, as the school is indelibly linked to the American Embassy and its socio-political whims. Yet, instead of being their fall guy, I follow my own example set in middle school when I first became aware that such targeted discrimination would follow me: Pray for the other’s happiness for they know not how much they damage their own karma with such displays of moral drawback and pestilence. Most of all, we must speak out. Silence is the virtual key to our continued exploitation, and fear its fulcrum. Hence, the courage to love ourselves and a healthy self-esteem is always the answer. As queer people, it is our responsibility to speak up and speak out. Whether you reach out to a friend, or extend your words to masses, know that none of us are alone. By speaking about, we build a consensus of love and respect against the quiet tide of heterosexual panic.

Popularity: 7% [?]