Why are substitute teachers lecturing twerking kids about kidnapping?
The blurred line between having a 'village' and victim blaming young girls
Every time I see a yellow blouse, I think fondly of my fifth-grade teacher. She called me out into the hallway one day. Unaware of what I did wrong, I followed her. She patiently told me that my blouse was a little too big and pulled out a safety pin, showing me exactly how to pin it so the chest area didn’t show too much. I wasn’t a buxom girl, but I was definitely wearing a bra.
I was also none too pleased with wearing this yellow blouse in the first place. My elementary school had asked all the parents to vote on whether we should wear school uniforms. I loved coming to school in my own style of clothing. But to my disappointment, my parents (and majority of other parents) voted for school uniforms. As an adult, I understood the reasons: partially because it would save a load of money on buying school clothes, secondly because I was in a neighborhood where shifting your cap to the left or the right could get you jumped (or killed). Same goes for wearing red or blue.
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A school uniform simplified things. However, my parents didn’t take into account how expensive the uniform store was, and my mother would improvise. As a shopaholic, she had a bunch of yellow blouses. She was also a seamstress. So she would take them in so I could wear those instead of the traditional blouses, especially after realizing how often school uniforms had to be washed. Still, the safety pin trick was something she did not teach me — and I was grateful for my fifth-grade teacher who gave me the clothing lesson and let me be. (My mother sewed an extra button at the top after hearing this story.)
My teacher didn’t ridicule me for having a chest. She didn’t shame me for a bra. She didn’t start talking about the dangers of young girls or sexualize the situation. She kept it very G-rated and about the attire. I respected that. She wasn’t always the nicest teacher to everyone in our class, but she was nice to me.
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While I had a mean teacher who twisted my ear because I didn’t know how to do a math problem, that was the extent of my complaints with K-12 teachers. (When I got to college, it was pure hell for two years and I was going at it with everyone. But that was 100% to do with racism.)
I was also in dance groups and dance contests and knew all the lyrics to the latest hip-hop songs, ranging from MC Lyte to Whodini. I even knew a few 2 Live Crew songs, but as a Chicagoan, I was way more interested in what Crucial Conflict, Do Or Die and Da Brat were talking about. From 69 Boyz “Tootsee Roll” to Salt n’ Pepa’s “Push It,” I knew all the dance moves, especially the ones in this video.
At no point did my parents, godparents, grandparents or even my older brother somehow equate me dancing to kidnapping — and that leads me to this substitute teacher who for sure needs to find a new career away from children.
How did we go from twerking to kidnapping?
Every 40 seconds, a child goes missing or is abducted in the United States. Approximately 840K children are reported missing each year, and the FBI estimates that between 85%-90% of these are children. And I take that so seriously. I used to work the night shift in a newsroom and hear about these stories often. I remember reading a Tayari Jones’ book called “Leaving Atlanta” — a work of fiction based on approximately 29 African-American children, teens, and young adults — mostly boys — who were kidnapped and murdered in real life from 1979 and 1981.
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Under absolutely no circumstance were any of those kidnappings the children’s fault, and I can’t wrap my mind around why a teacher would even open her mouth to say something like this. Then, here comes a Threads conversation that made me want schools to vet substitute teachers more carefully.
Although she blocked me after sharing my absolute disgust with her for telling an innocent child about kidnapping solely from twerking, I cannot stress this enough. There is absolutely nothing a child could do that would make it their fault that they were kidnapped.
Knowing when kids are being kids versus responsible adulting
I keep going back to this yellow blouse story because I would’ve been horrified if my fifth-grade teacher would’ve started rambling about how kids get kidnapped because I did something (wear a shirt that was open too wide in the front) that I was honestly too young to even really consider. So I know I would’ve been dumbstruck by any teacher talking about kidnapping because I started dancing. One would be as stupid and dangerous as the other. This is the kind of victim blaming that leads to young girls thinking they deserve aggressive behavior from boys or that it’s their fault that a crime was committed against them.
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Telling this girl to stop twerking and sitting down — because she had no business doing that regardless of what her mother does at home (and for all we know, the mother could be twerking on her husband or the child’s father) — would’ve been fine. Kids shouldn’t be dancing in class if it’s not part of some kind of recital or school assignment. And I’m definitely in support of a village helping to raise kids and look out for children when parents cannot. But there is a difference between looking out for a child and shaming a child for being a child.
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