Rebecca wanted me to write about teaching Black and brown teens during “this time.” By that she meant in the aftermath of yet another murder of a young man who looked like my students by police for reasons that were still unclear but were also unimportant. What was important to Rebecca, a dry white woman from Brooklyn who I sensed from her curt responses to my emails didn’t think very much of me, and other editors like her—as well as seemingly the entire media apparatus—was that the man who was killed was killed on video. What was important was that his name and picture had been trending all
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