Rev. McKinley L. Sims, M.Div.

My first year of teaching, I was in a 5th grade classroom in New Haven, CT. Every child in my class had brown skin. I do not. I doubt I was the first white teacher they had ever had. I doubt I was the first male teacher they’d ever had in class. I don’t doubt that I was the goofiest, white, male teacher they had ever or would ever have. Stephen MacDonald, excluded.

 

Our first hour of class was spent in getting to know one another. We started with some softball questions, like favorite food, fruit, song, and dream job. I was answering those questions too, all the while passing a giant exercise ball around our classroom so that engagement was as proportionally high as the danger of getting nailed in the head with a giant exercise ball if you weren’t engaged. Teacher tricks.

 

Finally, I asked the kids two questions. The first was, what would you do if you had no limits?

 

Confused silence. “Uh… be rich?”

 

Dream bigger.

 

“Be famous.”

 

Dream bigger.

 

“Be president!”

 

Dream bigger.

 

“I’d fix the world’s problems. I’d feed all the hungry people. I’d send everyone to college. I’d teach everyone to dance like Michael Jackson.”

 

Now we’re thinking big, especially you, Michael Jackson kid.

 

The second question was easier: Who would play you in the movie about your life?

 

Almost all the boys said Jaden Smith. Most of the girls said Willow Smith, and two said Nicki Minaj. That tells me something about their life experience, and it speaks to how their culture and history were transmitted to them. In 2010, those three were probably the most popular black young people.

 

Interestingly, some of the kids were not African-American. Some were Dominican, some Puerto Rican, some mixed. They all chose black actors or actresses or Nicki Minaj, though. I would have thought it was some kind of awesome statement of racial awareness and thumbing the nose at social systems that create oppression…..it’s probably more to do with whippin’ my hair back and forth and Starships that were meant to fly.

 

(If you don’t get that joke, you need to spend more time with middle schoolers).

 

And then it came my turn to answer the question, “Mr. Sims, who would play you in the movie?”

 

I didn’t hesitate.

 

“Will Smith.”

 

…..silence…..

 

Politely puzzled, downright confused, trying to figure out if I was joking…silence.

 

And then, miraculously, a brave boy raised his hand and brought up the elephant in the room. “Mr. Sims…you know that you’re…..white….right?”

 

“So? Why can’t Will Smith play me?”

 

“Because……because….you’re white!” said one student.

 

But another student immediately said, “So? That doesn’t matter!” Then he squinted at me, concentrating and goes, “Actually, I can kind of see it.”

 

Brilliant.

 

We did a lot of play acting that year, emulating scenes from American History. My kids played the King of Spain, Paul Revere, George Washington, Sojourner Truth, Pocahontas, Lewis and Clark, Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr….and Alexander Hamilton.

 

I wanted them to never question that America was not their home, that it’s history was not their history. I wanted them to see themselves in more than just the chapters on chattel slavery and Jim Crow. I wanted them to see their history for what it was– incomplete and imperfect. The story of America is the story of all of us, but America has never lived up its promise to all of us. I wanted them to care enough to change their futures so that their histories would be full of a more perfect union.

 

I don’t claim to have been the greatest teacher, nor to have created “Hamilton” before “Hamilton” became the greatest piece of American art ever created. But I did try my best, with incomplete and stuttering understanding, to to let my kids know that the color of my skin didn’t mean I was committed to overlooking the dark parts of their history, our history. I wanted them to know that I was willing to look into my past and stare down the uncomfortable things I found.

 

A family history of profiting from enslaved peoples in Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and the island of Antigua. Census records with enslaved humans noted as nothing more than slash marks. A manifesto describing Capt. Symes’ journey from England to oversee the plantation in the Caribbean. A great-great grandfather who went to the Alabama Supreme Court to recapture an enslaved human woman named Anna who had tried to escape north. Ancestors who fought for the Confederacy to preserve a devilish institution.

 

That is my history. That is our history. It cannot be made great by glossing over it, refusing to talk about it, or forgetting about it. The effects of the past are still with us. So the past must be witnessed and presented as a guide for how we move forward into the future together. We have to ask ourselves the hard questions of who we are and whom we want to be.

 

My kids in New Haven grew up with a Black president. That can never be overlooked for its importance in their ability to dream big. They grew up acting out the roles of Burr and Hamilton, Truth and Douglass, Washington and Lincoln. They’ve seen founding fathers and mothers played by non-white actors and actresses. They’re seeing more of themselves in our history than I saw of them when I was growing up. Their blackness and my whiteness coexisted beautifully when we all dropped the awkward routine and got down to talking about the big wall between us. We brought it down with some laughs and two questions.

 

Surely the rest of us can do the same. Let’s ask tough questions. Have hard conversations. Let’s engage in each other’s history…and make it our shared story.

 

And maybe one day, a white teacher can say that he wants Will Smith to play him in a movie about his life, and no one will think twice. They’ll just jump to, “…Yeah, I can see it.”

 

(Sidenote: I made them laugh by pretending that I was just now made aware that I was a white person and didn’t handle it well. Some of the girls believed that story for approximately two months after this event)