7/9/2020 1:40 pm

I am a white male teacher who worked at the SAS Puxi High School from 2016 to 2018. At the end of my first year at the school, there were openings for a learning support teacher and PE teacher. Luckily, some of the best educators I know and good friends of mine teach learning support and PE! I immediately wrote an email to the high school administration about my friends and gave them the details they would need to proceed with an interview. For the record, I do not recommend all of my good friends for jobs like this. I am very picky about who I vouch for because there’s so much at stake.

Both of them were scheduled for interviews with the high school administration. My PE friend, a white female, was offered a job almost immediately. She was a no-brainer in their minds. Her black male fiance, the learning support teacher, was second guessed. The principal approached me one day and asked me if he actually was really a good teacher and started questioning me about specifics. I reiterated my recommendation and backed it up with my experience working with him in South Korea. He appreciated my candidness and honesty, and he said he would relay this information to the other administrators.

In the end, they did not offer him a job. They still kept the offer for my white friend in the PE department, but they said they just didn’t feel right about her fiance. Instead, they hired someone who could only work in China for ONE year because of the visa age requirement.

At the time, I suspected that race could have been a factor in their decision to deny him this job that I KNOW he would be perfect for. But now that time has passed and the world is waking up to racial injustice, I am more convinced than ever that race played a role in my friend not being offered a job at SAS. Think about it: They had an opportunity to add to the diversity of the almost completely white faculty, even as the controversy over the infamous “Diversity at SAS” video was being hotly debated. AND HE IS A FANTASTIC TEACHER who is now teaching at ANOTHER SCHOOL IN SHANGHAI. Some other school is now benefitting from SAS’s loss. This makes me angry and sad. The administrators who did not offer him a job were [redacted]. They are all white, privileged, and all of them are now principals at international schools in three different countries.

SAS, just like many other international schools, is not perfect. To me, this is the ideal time to blow things up. Let’s question the way we do things and call for progressive change: why not offer and possibly REQUIRE an ethnic studies course? Whose history are we and SHOULD we be teaching? How can SAS work on making the faculty more diverse? Why did it take so long to get rid of the highly inappropriate white English teacher who sexually abused his students, vaped in class, berated his students, and established intellectual domination in his classroom? What does the “A” really stand for in SAS? Are we proud of that? Why or why not?

Former Teacher, ’16-’18

6/30/2020 5:21 pm

I had more than one teacher say they were allowed to say the n word bc they had an ‘n word pass’ from having black friends.
I personally had friends who would say it all the time and I didn’t realize how harmful it was because I got so desensitized to it. That’s how common it was.
But it wasn’t just anti black racism, anti Asians racism was visible in every single class – they were considered the ‘quiet ones’ so were expected to succeed the same way as others but with less encouragement because ‘that’s what they were used to’ and because they’re ‘smarter’. They were just way more dismissed unless they had an obvious American background. And those that were Asian American were praised to such an extreme extent probably because they were the ‘perfect mix’ – American in nature but smart like stereotypical Asians. There’s really no way of fully explaining it because it’s just how things worked there.

Anonymous, ’18

6/27/2020 11:48 pm

I can only speak to my own experiences with SAS as an Asian American (specifically East Asian) student. I grew up in a small town in America where I was pretty much the only Asian person and one of the few people of color before moving to Shanghai and attending SAS in 8th grade. Attending SAS gave me a deeper understanding of structural racism, white privilege, and white supremacy in ways that I never truly understood. As a child, I had understood that racism existed from my experiences in a predominantly white town but had always assumed that was a function of being a numerical minority. However, coming to SAS and seeing the levels of white privilege in a predominantly Asian school and in Shanghai overall was both eye-opening and heartbreaking–it was a moment that I recognized that white privilege and supremacy was not just a function of numbers but a culmination of centuries of colonization that still shape the attitudes of white and western expats to this day and their treatment and disdain for “local” people.

I had attempted to start a student organization at SAS addressing issues that Asian Americans faced, and two white faculty members called me racist. One white faculty member explicitly told me that white people were the ones experiencing racism and oppression in Asia. This event was personally very traumatizing for me. The one positive thing that came out of SAS is that I can definitively say that these experiences led me to devote my time advocating for antiracism and social justice.

Anonymous, ’13

6/27/2020 11:08 pm

Racism at SAS takes the form of a subtle beast that covers its own tracks. It never quite rears its head as intentional slights. Rather, it is more of a wilful ignorance of race, a kind of “colourblindness” that we get to experience as privileged children in a fairly liberal bubble.

First, high school, grade 11. My Lang/Lit teacher used the N-word in class when we were on the topic of Language and Mass Communication. When asked to stop in one of those teacher surveys, he responded by saying that he uses the word because he wanted us to be able to discuss the words when they are stripped of this power. Except, he, a white man, has no right to strip the N-word of its power. That word accrued power through oppression. To deny its power is to deny its long and fraught history. Worse, to do so in the name of letting us learn suggests that we are somehow exempt from the social consequences of using the N-word because we are studying it. Despite what good intention led to this decision, all it really did was encourage a holier-than-thou attitude towards racist language and behaviour.

Second, middle school, grade 8. We were, of course, studying To Kill a Mockingbird, a book that features the use of the N-word. When my teacher read the novel aloud, she read all of the words. That, by itself, I understand. But, I cannot, for the life of me, recall there being a serious conversation about what the N-word means in a modern context. Was it okay for us to use it in a quote? Would it be appropriate if we were trying to emulate period speech? These conversations were not meant to be part of our curriculum. That, there, is the problem. Even when we learned about the history of slavery and lynching and segregation we weren’t taught how to contextualise that for the present day. Everything we learned just felt like something from the distant past. Leaving these conversations to the subtext means that we aren’t always able to tell what is appropriate and what isn’t. That year, for instance, I ended up using the N-word in a written project because I took my teacher’s use of it as a go-ahead. Its another insidious way that we foster ignorance.

(Then, there was the case of using the Malcolm Gladwell piece about how growing rice made Asians good at maths (like, wow, combining two stereotypes into one!! How genius!!!!) as a sample text for TOK. In hindsight, that was a really weird text, and it probably warranted more discussion about racism than it got. That, though, is kind of off-topic).

We tend to like to wave these cases off as “oh, it’s to teach the kids”, “it doesn’t really affect us here”, or “there’s no way to change the curriculum that drastically”. To deny responsibility to model and actively seek anti-racist teaching is negligence. No, we don’t experience many overt shows of racism at SAS. But that is far from the only form of racism.

Anonymous

6/25/2020 2:27 pm

I don’t think people at SAS are willfully, maliciously racist. But I think that’s true of a substantial chunk of people responsible for racist behavior. I think there’s an ignorance that is perpetuated and normalized, which we need to change through authentically checking ourselves, and discussing our privilege as a community.

The reality is that the vast majority of SAS is either white or East Asian. There’s plenty of discourse surrounding white privilege, but as an East Asian person myself, I want to recognize the unique position that we’re in. We’re still a minority that faces discrimination, but many of us often take this to mean we can act as the mouthpiece for all BIPOC. Coming from backgrounds of privilege as expats in Shanghai, this can lead to us committing serious acts of anti-Blackness. I often see people just like me speaking “as a minority”, downplaying issues around the racial injustice around the world, or repeating the tired notion that we should just put our heads down and stop complaining.

In English class, we read Huckleberry Finn, and were instructed to read the N-word out loud because it was “just a word”. As is the case for many privileged Americans, the “just a word” argument one of the many ways in which racism is normalized. We should be examining ourselves and what makes it such a horrid word to say, rather than desensitizing ourselves to how jarring it is. I, alongside many of my peers, carried this notion that it was “just a word”, and people making a big deal about it were in the wrong.

The only time ideas about racial injustice came up outside of history classes were about college admissions, and the notion of affirmative action. It certainly isn’t a perfect system, but bemoaning it and the way in which it ‘disadvantages’ privileged expat students in their pursuit of an Ivy League, rather than examining its intentions and its reasons for existing, only served to make our worldview all the more myopic. The ways in which ignorance can be normalized makes many of us less open to notions of power and privilege, particularly when faced with it when leaving our international school bubble.

Anonymous, ’13

6/24/2020 1:15 am

I only learned about racism in English class. I remember studying “To Kill A Mockingbird” in 8th grade English and people volunteered to read aloud from the book. When it got to the parts where the n-word was written out in the book, the (non-BIPOC) teacher had read the n-word out. Some students, probably implicitly feeling like they get a pass, also read the n-word out. First, a non-BIPOC teacher just using literature as a shield to say the n-word is fundamentally abhorrent. While I’ve never heard the teacher say the n-word outside of the book’s content, they wouldn’t be the only teacher in MS English or SAS to be saying that word. Second, the curricula really passed up a valuable opportunity to provide insight to pre-adolescent kids on the history of oppression and specifically why the n-word is harmful. I wish I could’ve learned about why the n-word is harmful, and why you shouldn’t say it, and also why you definitely don’t get a free pass to say it even in educational contexts.
In 10th grade English, I read “A Raisin In the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry– a play about a black family trying to achieve the American Dream. Note that literary studies put a huge focus on learning the contexts of the text, but I honestly do not remember learning much about the history of oppression and Black struggles when learning this book. I do, however, vividly remember way too many things about The Great Gatsby and the American Dream ideal instead. Again, another missed opportunity in terms of the curricula.
I end this by wholeheartedly saying that I genuinely enjoyed my time at SAS. I met some of the best friends and teachers, and I recognize how extremely privileged I am to receive such an education. However, I do believe that SAS can do a lot much better in terms of addressing and educating their students on a lot of social issues that are so prevalent throughout the world: systemic racism and feminism, just to name a few. I feel that a lot of students that come out of SAS perpetuate a lot of things wrong in the world– you see that a lot of students have no qualms throwing racial slurs, unabashedly engaging in cultural appropriation, perpetuating rape culture and mistreatment of women, etc. While you can dismiss this by saying “they’ll grow out of it” or “boys will be boys”– realize that these values don’t go away on its own and can pose harms on individuals when they enter college/workplaces. Education plays an essential part in forming good values that truly make their students “global-minded citizens”.

Anonymous, ’18

6/23/2020 5:39 pm

As much as I don’t want to admit it, racism exists in the core of SAS without a doubt. During my time at SAS, I noticed that faculty members at SAS favor white students. When some of my teachers walked pass a group of students in the commons, they would only greet the white kids. It’s also much easier to make a sports team as a white kid than an asian kid because white kids are stereotypically viewed as more athletic. Even though I was lucky to make the team, I didn’t enjoy being in it. It didn’t matter if I played better than everyone else because I was always given significantly less playing time. My coach made racist jokes and I didn’t feel that being on the team gave me a safe space to hone my skills. I ended up quitting the team because it was really toxic and affected my academic performance. I didn’t feel comfortable talking to the counselors about it because the entire counseling office at PDHS is white.

Anonymous

6/21/2020 10:14 am

I’ve heard racist slurs throughout my entire time at SAS, in the halls, at honor society inductions, wherever. More specifically, while I was on a team I was exposed to toxic team cultures that fostered racism within a smaller community. In large group chats teammates would regularly use the n word, make rape jokes, and speak condescendingly about LGBTQ folk. My coaches were not only complicit, but one of them also engaged in said activity. The boys club culture where coaches so obviously favored the boys team and acted as another one of their “bros” was immature and led to no consequences for any words said. I was also in the art class where our teacher said the n word. There was two classes of students and another teacher in that room. It is ironic that we were learning about Ruby Bridges, and while this white teacher was illustrating what kind of insults and oppressions she had to fight to enter white schools, they felt is was appropriate to say the n word. A lot of my classmates were shocked but nobody knew how to approach this. When coaches and teachers are perpetrators of racist behavior it is much harder to speak up.

Anonymous

6/20/2020 7:48 am

These experiences maybe a bit unexpected and could be considered controversial. This does not generalize all Chinese Americans at SAS (nor does it speak for all my experiences with them) but these are just some of the experiences I had because of SAS’s white-focused culture as a child. I spent my elementary school years at SAS PD and most of middle school & highschool at PX. I’m Chinese but not Chinese American, when I started going there in 2nd grade, I felt a significant difference between myself and the rest of the students that were ethnically Chinese. We all looked Chinese, but it felt like we grew up in 2 different cultures because we simply couldn’t relate to each other. Later I realized what was different between us, I didn’t act “American” because I had 0 experiences and exposure towards anything American such as food, TV, sports, and other entertainment. My English was fine I had 0 communication issues since it was my first language, but I was excluded by both Chinese Americans and white people. I felt excluded in all of my classes by my teachers and peers, until I realized the differences and decided to fit myself into that mold. I was too (for lack of a better term) “FOB”. After I managed to fit myself into that mold, I did suddenly make a lot of friends however it was extremely pressuring. My family members said to me: “I just see you as an American”. At some point when I stopped caring in the middle of high school, I felt like I could be myself just a little more. Some people started to distance from me but otherwise most didn’t care. I’m not writing this to shame any of my fellow Chinese classmates for growing up with a different experience and mix of cultures than mine, but I’m writing this to show how SAS has such a white-focused culture that’s pushed onto students to the point it has started to flood into the daily lives of students at such a young age, where you can be excluded for “not being American enough”. SAS has never encouraged me to be proud of my culture or to continue learning about my culture (or other non-American cultures).

Anonymous, ’19

6/19/2020 9:59 pm

I already submitted once, but I felt the need to share this additional piece of information as well, which was that the most thorough education I received on the issue of race during my time at SAS (since 8th grade) was in my IB English Language & Literature class. We did get some race-related instruction in AP World History, but due to the scope of world history this was less in-depth and dealt more in generalities rather than addressing racial dynamics within specific societies such as the United States. I find it pretty worrying that an English class was the one that taught me the most about race.

Anonymous, PD ’21