Teacher-Objects and the "I Don't Know" Mentality

• In Event: "I Can't Breathe": Police Killings of Black Men and the Quest for Justice of Black Boys in School

Abstract

I remember it was a late Friday afternoon when a fellow teacher justified their bringing a gun with them to school earlier that week. “I don’t know why I brought it,” the teacher claimed, looking confused. “But I didn’t bring it inside,” they added quickly. The previous week, this teacher had been involved in a verbal conflict with one of my students at the school. “ I was legitimately afraid, y’know,” the teacher Mr. T went on after a moment of silence, “Can you blame me?” “I don’t know why..” was a justification used long before the conversation with Mr. T that day. In 2018, Antwon Rose, the 17-year old black youth, was fatally shot by police in East Pittsburg, PA. After the shooting, witnesses report standing by Rose's body, watching the officer on the sidewalk nearby saying repeatedly, "I don't know why I shot him. I don't know why I fired." Two years prior, social worker Charles Kiney survived being shot by police while attempting to assist one of his patients back to the group home where he worked. After being shot, Kiney looked up and asked the police officer ‘Sir, why did you shoot me?'" Kinsey recalled," and his words to me, he said, ‘I don’t know.” In early 2019 amid several officer-involved shootings in Dallas, Texas, a Dallas-area police officer’s voice was recorded via dash cam after firing on a civilian explaining, “I don’t know why I shot...I’m pissed off because I don’t know why I shot, it was so stupid of me to (expletive) shoot.” This paper takes up one connection between US police brutality toward unarmed black and brown men and the role of the teacher in American classrooms. In particular, I look at the “I don’t know why” justification given by police officers in the aftermath of such violence alongside the same justification by a former teacher-colleague in response to his bringing a gun to school with him when he felt threatened. The similarities in the teacher and police officer languaging raises salient implications for how we understand the objectification of teachers as conduits of white supremacist delusion (Taylor, 2019) within the larger School Discipline Net of Social Control (Irby, 2014). What would it look like to take teachers and police seriously when those involved gave an “I don’t know why” justification after assaults or assassinations of black men? Would taking seriously this declaration of mindlessness absolve the officers involved from responsibility for their actions? Or would it further extend implication to education, to spaces that perpetuate or disrupt systems of white supremacist thinking that undergird “conscious” choice? In this paper, I pause to make sober connections between the “I don’t know why” statements made by police officers after the shootings of black and brown men and my teacher-colleague’s echoed justification of mindlessness in our schools that enact emotional abuse, with particular attention to the description of the ideal teacher as someone who can control and be controlled at the same time (Grumet, 1988).

Author

• AK O'Loughlin, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities