FCPS Investigating Alleged Racial Remarks by Marshall Teacher
African American student allegedly told to read a poem ‘blacker.’
Fairfax County Public Schools officials are investigating allegations from a George Marshall High that a teacher used a racial remark toward him during a class this month.
Jordan Shumate, a freshman at the school, alleged that Marilyn Bart directed him to read a poem “blacker,” according to a Washington Post story. Shumate, an African American, was reading a poem by Langston Hughes when Bart allegedly directed him to read the poem blacker and then allegedly said “I thought you were black,” according to the Washington Post. He told his mother about the allegation this week.
Principal Jay Pearson said the school is taking the allegations seriously and confirmed the ongoing investigation, according to the Washington Post.
Shumate alleged when he stopped reading the poem, Bart continued and read it using a stereotypical voice of a slave, according to the Washington Post.
When Shumate allegedly asked Bart if she thought all black people spoke that way, he was reprimanded for speaking out of turn and told to sit down, according to the Washington Post.
Bart has been an FCPS teacher since 1990.
Ella
12:02 pm on Sunday, March 18, 2012
I guess the teacher forgot her teachers and human ethics..............
River Song
12:28 pm on Sunday, March 18, 2012
If anybody cares to read the original story in "The Washington Post", you should read the readers' comments to it. "The teacher is black. The teacher has been teaching at Marshall for 20 years". If it's true, then what racism are we talking about here? African American teacher was insensitive about the race of African American student ?! I think, political correctness is becoming extremist. Check the "rate my teacher" site and you'll see the anonymous and extremely offensive comments about the teacher posted after this story broke. It's worse than "blacker".
Michelle Loving
3:25 pm on Sunday, March 18, 2012
That is not true. Marilyn Bart is not black. She is white and she stated on four separate occasions this kind a lazy, race based teacher. No parent wants a lazy, ill informed teacher in the classroom.
River Song
3:39 pm on Sunday, March 18, 2012
Michelle, looks like you have more info than journalists working on this story, and if your information is correct, then, yes, "No parent wants a lazy, ill informed teacher in the classroom" - I completely agree. And if the aforementioned is lazy teacher she shouldn't be teaching at all, not because she made one bad comment. Then all her students - black or white - have a problem, not only one. But we know well too, that firing a teacher is much more dificult than expelling a student.
April
9:46 pm on Sunday, March 18, 2012
Does anyone understand why a teacher of any race would want a poem read using a particular accent or inflection? I could see if this were an acting class and part of a script, but I don't think that was the case here. I just don't understand what the purpose would be for such a request. I am not familiar with the poem, so I may be missing something. But this story sure does not sound good for Ms. Bart.
Jason
9:24 am on Monday, March 19, 2012
Yeah because smart people know that "ballad of a landlord" is a performance piece. You can see it being performed on youtube. Langston Hughes would not want it read in prose. You are actually instructed to use a blues tone but I don't expect you to know what that sounds like either.
Maybe all the slaves in roots should have used their natural voices too? This is supposed to be read as a 1950s black man with a dead beat landlord. Not everything can be viewed in today's perspective. You have to use histroical context and that doesn't fit the motivations of the pseudo-racially-sensitive types.
Groovis Maximus
11:44 am on Monday, March 19, 2012
From the Smithsonian Folkways website on "Music in Poetry":
"The first to recognize the potential of the blues as written poetry was Langston Hughes, who was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. When he was eleven years old, he heard the blues coming from an orchestra of blind musicians on Independence Avenue in Kansas City. Hughes moved to the East Coast in 1921 and heard the music again, in clubs on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, New York, and 7th Street in Washington, D.C. 'I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on 7th Street,' he remembered in his autobiography The Big Sea. Those songs 'had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.' The blues stanza allowed Hughes to convey the African American experience in people's own vernacular language."
No comment on how Ms. Bart may have spoken to the student - but it seems appropriate to ask a student to "perform" the poetry if it fits with what the author was trying to convey.
River Song
9:33 am on Monday, March 19, 2012
Jason, an excellent comment and a missing piece of information about "ballad of a landlord".
Motown1911
12:01 pm on Monday, March 19, 2012
@Jason -
If your logic follows, then why did the teacher say "I thought you were black"? What does that have to do with the reading of the poem?
Further, you don't have all the facts. The same teacher had a slide that states all black people like grape soda and rap music. She also asked Jordan to "rap" a Tupac poem and asked him to explain "creole" when the class was reading "A Lesson Before Dying".
Finally, the teacher has refused to meet with Jordan's mom to discuss the issue.
The school needs to take disciplinary steps up to and including termination.
Jason
8:54 am on Thursday, March 22, 2012
It isn't my logic. It is fact that Hughes wrote in a blues inflection. Just because certain black people may speak one way today, certain others did at his time. I am from Memphi, TN originally and noone sings the blues like a blues singer and noone can deny the history of the blues is directly related to the plight of the poor black man, like the one portrayed in this poem.
"Further, you don't have all the facts"
Oh and you do? So is this teacher black or white? Facts are being withheld on this one in order to stir up tension where there is none.
The teacher should be fired for the way she spoke to the boy regardless of race. She is apparently infatuated with her own race.
kimba
3:18 pm on Monday, March 19, 2012
I think it oddly coincidental that the teacher is retiring; that she would do something, regardless of her race, so significantly questionable. If she wanted to convey the author's original intent, that should have been FIRST explained to students, AFTER reading the bio of the author. Yes, this is a new, politically correct world now, but KNOWING this, WE ALL have to make efforts not to single ANY person out in a disparaging manner. Period. Shame on you Ms. Bart...you taught a lesson all right, but not the right one. What a sad end to a career!
Groovis Maximus
3:48 pm on Monday, March 19, 2012
Actually, this whole story is weirdly ironic. The poem is about how an African American man refuses to pay the rent until his slumlord landlord fixes up the house. After an argument (which begins when the slumlord starts making threats), the police are called and the tenant ends up in jail. The poem ends with headlines in the press: "Man threatens landlord, tenant held no bail...."
So the headlines in the press completely mischaracterized the whole exchange. Again, I don't know anything about what really happened here - the teacher may have been an insensitive clod. But isn't it weird that she's garnered her own "headlines in the press" over this particular poem?