DTFO!!!

I have had one of the most uncomfortable mornings teaching that I have ever had in eleven years of standing in front of a classroom.  For the first time in my career, one of my students said something blatantly racist.  We were discussing how long drugs can be detected in someone's system through their hair, and this fifty year old woman pipes up with "That's why so many black men shave their heads bald."

Umm...what?  No.  No, it isn't. 

This woman has not struck me as the brightest bulb in the box.  She's needed more help to get less done than everyone else in her class, and now?  Now, she says something blatantly racist like that in a class where everyone is twenty years younger than her, at least, and then tries to defend said statement with "I'm not racist!  My fiance is black!"

Wow.  And she didn't even realize that the whole class was about to dog-pile her for that statement, and glared at me when I shut discussion down to move to another topic. 

There were two black kids in that class.  And the young man is one of the two cleanest-cut of his particular age group in the class.  There are four Muslims in that class, and they are all very dark, and were just as shocked and disgusted as everyone else.  The one sitting next to her got up and moved a seat down away from her.

And she didn't realize how angry the entire class was.  Nor that the whole class was about to dog-pile onto her.  Nor yet that almost all of the black men on campus wear long, beautifully maintained cornrow braids, nor that most of the bald guys in the area shaving their heads are white.

That takes a special kind of stupid, one that I don't have patience with, and doesn't belong in a college setting.

I don't care what you think, only that you think...and that includes determining when and where is appropriate to open your mouth and spew stuff that sounds like it came from the Jim Crow south.

This dumb bitch really needs to drop out...or at least drop my class.