I am a Native American who lives in the northwestern part of Lower Michigan, adjacent to a national park, in a region where white-flight communities have grown exponentially since the late 20th century, as have minority unemployment rates. Where I live, white people so angrily deny their privilege that people of color have become hesitant to broach the topic of racism, or even to use the term white at all, much less cite statistics about local economic conditions and demographics. Yet, white people regularly toss the n-word about in public, especially in local high schools, and Native Americans are often met with war whoops and referred to as underprivileged. Our presence here is an inconvenient carryover from the time before the region became desirable to other people. 

One day, while subbing as a teaching assistant in a 2nd-grade classroom at an elementary school in Benzie County, the county adjacent to the peninsula where I live, I suggested, politely, to a white teacher that we might consider brainstorming alternative names for the game hangman. (Note the tentative, cautious nature of the verb consider.) This woman was a great teacher — thoughtful, calm, and soft-spoken — and I loved watching her work, even if she was sometimes guilty of (unconsciously) normalizing our nation’s historic violence against people of color.  

Some underlying, unspoken norm seems to suggest that it’s fine for a children’s game to feature a lynching.

I’m sure you know hangman, the children’s game about lynching. The teacher draws a gallows, along with marks representing the letters of a secret word. Students guess one letter at time, and if they guess a letter that’s not in the word, the teacher draws in a body part belonging to an anonymous human, who’ll be killed unless the players are able to identify the word before the fully drawn corpse appears. The teacher often invited her students to play the game as a way to practice their spelling words. 

No doubt, parents would object if the teacher drew a dog or a cat hanging, dead, from a gallows. But some underlying, unspoken norm seems to suggest that it’s fine for a children’s game to feature a lynching. Of course, the dead person isn’t really part of the game — nor is the historic context of lynching. It’s just there, part of the silent, implicit curriculum that normalizes such deaths or makes them invisible. 

When the teacher was away and I took over the class for her, I’d use other spelling games with the children, or we’d change hangman so that when students guessed a letter that wasn’t in the secret word, I’d fill in a star-shaped, smiley-faced pinata dangling from the ceiling. But when I worked side-by-side with the teacher, I kept my mouth shut about the hanging man. Until one day, foolishly, I spoke up.  

Substitutes and submission 

I’d never before dared to say anything about my dislike for hangman, but by this point in my career, I had established myself as an authority on teaching and learning. I’d taught everything from prekindergarten through graduate school, including teacher education courses and recertification courses for public school administrators; I had lectured on cultural competence for Michigan State University’s School of Social Work, and I had won awards for writing both fiction and nonfiction about racism in education and stereotypes in children’s literature. In my region, however, substitute teaching was the only professional work I could obtain in the field of education. And while subbing has very low status in public schools, finding even this work was considered a major accomplishment in an area where off-reservation unemployment for Native Americans exceeds 99%.  

Today, many substitute teaching jobs are outsourced to private companies (that tend to be owned by retired school administrators). Subs and paraprofessionals are on-call workers, often for several districts at once, and have no real interactions with a manager, supervisor, or anybody else who might protect them from exploitation or wage theft. For the most part, subbing now pays less than it paid 30 years ago, and a sub can be dismissed for no reason. 

For the first two decades that I subbed, I was usually the only person of color working at the school in any capacity. School districts in the area sometimes hire openly LGBTQ+ staff, a few schools have recently hired white women who’d taken their husbands’ Latinx surnames, and schools occasionally hire non-white staff members (but almost always from outside the region, and not from the local Native American community), but few stay for long. Being the token person of color in any workplace can be difficult. 

Still, even the lowliest jobs in public education were less physically demanding than most of the unskilled labor available to a local woman of color, so I worked as a sub from time to time. I carefully avoided the most abusive school environments, but as the region’s population grew, and the open apartheid and racist nature of the culture exploded, that became difficult. So there I was, an expendable, overqualified Native American woman in a low-status job, in a field of work that vacillates between 80% and 90% white, in a region where white employment in the profession rarely drops below 100%. I dared not appear too competent, lest I be perceived as a threat, and I dared not be less than perfect. 

I’d learned not to speak up about racism in northwest Lower Michigan, even though I’d published about racism in education and had lectured on the topic at universities nationwide. The last time I’d tried was 20 years ago at a banquet for the National Writing Project, part of the Ferris State University teacher recertification program, and the result was a white male teacher telling me to shut up and not talk about those things and to leave the banquet — or he’d punch me in the face. He said this in front of several coworkers and one of the program managers, none of whom spoke up. As far as I know, he suffered no consequences, but I left in terror, kept my head down, and avoided local universities for several years.  

That angry teacher’s fist in my face wasn’t the first such education-related violence I’d experienced, and it wasn’t even close to the most blatant discrimination and dangerous violence my children and I have experienced in the area’s schools. By comparison, the hangman incident was mild, but it bears scrutiny because it highlights how strongly predominantly white teaching staffs resist even the slightest change to social norms. 

Speaking up . . . and holding it in 

At the time I decided to speak up about the use of hangman, I had seen nothing to suggest that the sense of racial entitlement and control had changed at all in the local schools. Maybe I’d become overconfident because I had subbed at that particular elementary school for so many years, or maybe I’d just grown tired of being on the bottom of the professional and socioeconomic heap, while breaking in yet one more new white male administrator who thought I was dumb and devoid of credentials. Maybe I just didn’t care anymore. 

But I spoke up, and I apologized while I was doing it. I apologized for questioning the judgment of such a talented educator because I knew that I was doing something inappropriate for a low-level, “lesser” human being like me to do in the presence of a “superior” white woman with about a third of my professional credentials: I suggested that we might brainstorm together over another name for hangman. To avoid sounding like I was attacking her personally, I was careful to use a neutral phrase, normalizes violence, to explain my objection to the game. To be honest, though, I wasn’t speaking in a neutral way at all. I was speaking submissively, hoping not to offend. It’s the sort of language used by victims afraid of angering their overseers, a way of talking that is, like the game of hangman, a legacy of racial violence in America. 

The teacher’s response was vehement and angry: Everybody uses this game, and nobody cares! (It’s the norm.) Teachers have always used it. (Don’t change the status quo.) Milton Bradley even sold a version of it. (Don’t you dare question corporate America.) Oh, great, something else we can’t say or do because it hurts people’s feelings! (Don’t be so touchy.) Everybody has always played hangman. (Repeat the norm, until the transgressor gives up.) 

I thanked the teacher for sharing her angry words with me. I assured her that I was only curious, trying to find out what she thought. I was so grateful to her for helping (a second-class citizen like) me to understand her position. I kept smiling, demurely, speaking calmly and quietly. I didn’t tell her I thought she was closed-minded or lazy for not contemplating such a simple change. I didn’t tell her what I thought about the power differential between white educators and minority families, or between tenured teachers and substitutes. I didn’t tell her how lucky she was not to have to think about racism, unlike the few children of color who trickled through the hallways of that elementary school. I did not scold her or inform her that these topics had been covered in educational textbooks for decades and that her behavior was a testimony to the system’s failure to require a meaningful level of competence in multicultural education. I accepted her dominant role and the ignorance that accompanied it. That’s what my experience with American education has taught me to do. 

By the time they are nine years old, children of color can easily recognize racism at school. They used to come to me, the only brown adult in the building, after their peers casually hurled hateful language at them. Don’t defend yourself, tell an adult — that’s what they were supposed to do. But they had already learned that the white adults would be unresponsive, so they would come over and hug me, telling me what had been done or said to them on the playground or in the classroom. I’d brush their hair out of their swollen eyes and tell them that they could always talk to me and that I’d do what I could to protect them. I didn’t tell them that I couldn’t protect them. They’d eventually figure that out for themselves, as they observed me, quiet and subservient in the face of that same hateful derision, unable to protect myself. My powerlessness was part of their public education, too. 

The stories we don’t tell 

In the decades since Brown v. Board of Education, the Great Lakes exurbs have bulged with all-white subdivisions, and the region’s public schools have swelled with white educators. Meanwhile, countless teachers of color, fully certified and licensed, have been excluded from job interviews and employment. Nowadays, within the Native American community, older adults warn college students not to bother pursuing a degree in education. This frustrates recruitment personnel in colleges of education, who tell me they can’t find Native American students to take their courses. But if school districts so heavily favor white applicants, as we’ve seen for so many years, then why should minority youth waste their tuition dollars on teaching credentials? Just to help colleges of education show that they value diversity?  

I used to speak at conferences and at universities, but the monocultural bias of professional educators wore on me, causing me to censor myself. Again and again, I was the token minority presenter, trying to get through my talk while white teachers and administrators rocked in their chairs, scoffed, made snide comments, or scowled and checked their cell phones. It finally became unbearable. I desperately wanted to raise and address difficult topics, but I worried that I wasn’t behaving demurely enough to avoid the wrath of my audience. I felt like a court jester, afraid to let myself say anything too serious, lest I displease the king.  

It was in this spirit that I thanked that angry elementary school teacher for sharing her pro-hangman perspective with me. (Actually, her stance probably wasn’t pro-hangman so much as pro-don’t inconvenience me.) What didn’t I do? I didn’t burst into tears, lose my temper, stomp out, complain, or even bother telling another living soul about her casual dismissiveness. I also didn’t tell her that, in 1862, the largest American mass execution by hanging happened just on the other side of Lake Michigan — a few hundred miles away, as the crow flies, from the shoreline of the national park that drew her and so many others to our region. I didn’t explain to her that this particular game of hangman was authorized by Abraham Lincoln and that it resulted in the gruesome deaths of 38 Native American men, some of whom are related to children now attending the very elementary school where she worked. I didn’t tell her that some of those men were actually boys of elementary school age. (Boys. Do you understand that? Boys. These were not “colored bucks” who were a rape threat to your wives and daughters, as you’ve always been taught, America!) 

I didn’t tell that angry, inconvenienced teacher (who probably thinks of herself as colorblind, by virtue of her minimal interaction with minorities) that my own grandfather was lynched, and that, like so many other uninvestigated crimes against people of color, authorities passed off his death as self-inflicted. It happened when my mother was a child, and she was there when he died. After the hangmen left, she and my grandmother came into their home and found him dangling there, his hands and feet already swollen. My mother watched her mother cut through the rope with a kitchen knife and struggle to ease down a full-grown man, with that skin-tight loop of coarse rope still around his chafed and reddened neck, looped back on his wrists so tightly that his back was arched. 

My mother told me about that lynching when I was a little girl, just after I’d related to her that a boy at school had brought in a piece of rope and was teaching the other kids how to make nooses. (“Can I have a piece of rope, Mom?” I asked. “He just pulled the rope, and the loop tightened.”) She must have been afraid for me, must have wanted to make sure that I stayed well-behaved and more docile than my non-Indian peers (and, like so many mothers of color, I eventually taught my own children to do the same). 

When teacher educators suggest playing hangman as a way to help children learn their spelling words, they neglect to mention that most hanged people don’t die quickly from a broken neck; they die slowly, painfully, from strangulation. My mother taught me this. She sobbed when she described how her father was still conscious after he was cut down and that he looked at her and winked before he stopped breathing. That was the hardest part of it for her, how he looked at her and winked — almost jokingly, as if passing it off as nothing serious, right before he lost consciousness forever, leaving his family flailing for economic survival. 

I cried, too, when I got that lesson. I still force back tears when I think about it. I force back tears also when I think about how cautious I must be when it comes to inconveniencing a public school employee by suggesting that we refrain from using a publicly funded educational institution to normalize violence by lynching.  

How did sacrificing children to preserve the reputation of a school district or to prevent inconveniencing its public employees become the norm? 

Children of color, children with disabilities, and children who do not conform to the most extremely masculine and feminine notions of sexuality are most likely to be victims of in-school bullying, most likely to be victims of educator sexual misconduct, most likely to be disciplined by educational staff, most likely to drop out of school, and most likely to commit suicide. These are alternate forms of lynching. They destroy lives. They kill. They kill slowly, painfully. We chafe, we gasp for survival, and if we survive, the rope burns scar our necks forever. Compare such terror to the inconvenience it creates for school board members, administrators, and teachers when people of color suggest legitimate alternatives to the continued behavioral reinforcement of abuse. How did sacrificing children to preserve the reputation of a school district or to prevent inconveniencing its public employees become the norm? 

I was in elementary school when my mother taught me about lynching. I didn’t tell the 2nd-grade teacher that. I didn’t tell her what hangman is really about for so many families in America. And when an under-educated, self-entitled white male school administrator, assuming that I was less qualified than everyone else in the building, told me that the 2nd-grade teacher didn’t want me to sub in her classroom anymore, I smiled and thanked him for sharing that information with me. I knew better than to try to teach him anything. A lot of educators turn out to be ineducable, especially when the person doing the educating doesn’t look like them. I haven’t set foot in a public school in northwest Lower Michigan since that day. I miss working with children, but I don’t miss the everyday dismissiveness and denigration. I guess there’s more than one way to lynch a brown woman who doesn’t stay in her place.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Lois Beardslee

LOIS BEARDSLEE  is an Anishinaabe author and illustrator of both fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent book, a poetry collection titled Words Like Thunder: New and Used Anishinaabe Prayers , is the recipient of a 2021 Michigan Notable Book Award.