I just watched Spike Lee’s Katrina documentary on Netflix and it left me lost in thought about history and experience and being white.

On August 29, 2005, I stood in front of my closet trying to decide what to wear for my first day teaching at Douglas Middle School. I once compared the job to Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds. That comparison should tell you everything you need to know about where my head was at. I was 31, credentialed, idealistic, and thoroughly steeped in white savior logic. I thought I was going to change lives. I thought I was going to make a difference. I thought showing up was the revolution. I did not yet understand that the story I was telling myself, the one I learned, was a mirror and not a window. It reflected my sense of purpose back to me, but did not open onto the lives I claimed I wanted to serve.

That same week, Hurricane Katrina made landfall. The country watched an entire American city drown.

Before I ever stepped into a classroom, I had been trained, formally by teacher prep, informally by media, in how a white woman was supposed to teach “inner city” kids. My clearest lesson came from Dangerous Minds, the 1995 film where Michelle Pfeiffer plays LouAnne Johnson, a white ex-Marine who walks into a classroom of mostly Black and Latino students and wins their loyalty through poetry, discipline, and sheer white woman determination. That movie wasn’t just fiction, it was a whole curriculum; an unspoken pedagogical model. And I followed it, unconsciously but religiously.

In that story, the classroom isn’t a system. It isn’t underfunded, racially segregated, structurally unequal. It’s a redemptive stage. A place where one woman’s willingness to care is enough. The students aren’t protagonists. They’re instruments of transformation, hers, not theirs. They are not shaped by structural violence, but softened by a white woman’s tenderness. Her presence is the plot. Her empathy is the miracle.

That was the story I carried with me to Douglas. That was the story I carried when I looked at my classroom walls and decided what to put up. That was the story I channeled when I tore a magazine cover from Time and taped it beside the chalkboard.

The cover showed the floodwaters swallowing New Orleans. The Superdome full of suffering Americans. A lone man chest-deep in current. It had only been a few days since school started, maybe a week. I taped it up without discussion. No context. No framing. No consent. Just the image: disaster as décor. I told myself it was to help students understand what was happening in the world. I told myself it was civics. That it might provoke conversation. That maybe they would be grateful for what they had. But none of that was real.

What I did was decorate the room with catastrophe. I framed someone else’s suffering as a learning opportunity. I offered no safety, no space for processing, no invitation. Just a command: look. And the command wasn’t neutral. It was steeped in the belief that I knew what needed to be seen. That I knew what mattered. That I knew what would teach.

What I actually did:

I used Black suffering as a backdrop for white awareness.

I collapsed empathy into spectacle.

I converted someone else’s emergency into my performance of care.

No student asked for that image. No student needed that image. And yet I taped it to the wall and called it education.

Years later, watching Spike Lee’s Katrina: Come Hell and High Water, I saw the same images through an entirely different lens. The film is devastating not because of the hurricane, but because of the human choices that followed it. The government didn’t just fail to respond. It actively withheld care. Delayed aid. Spun narratives. Turned survival into suspicion. They didn’t see a city in crisis. They saw a city full of Black people. And the white men in charge were afraid.

Afraid of what it would mean to center Black pain and Black survival. Afraid that acknowledging the scale of abandonment would demand restitution. Afraid that the people saving themselves might keep going, might demand power, might not need white authority at all. So they did what systems do when they feel threatened: they criminalized the victims. They turned shelters into crime scenes. They called parents looters for trying to find formula. They painted the Superdome as a war zone and ignored the cries for help echoing from inside.

And I had hung that story on my wall, silently aligned with that same framing. I hadn’t asked what my students had seen. I hadn’t asked what they already knew. I had made their education a site of my projection. And that, too, was violence.

That fall, I stood in a room full of mostly Black students, many of whom lived in neighborhoods shaped by disinvestment, displacement, and generational neglect. I taped a photo of catastrophe to the wall, as if to say: this could be you. As if they hadn’t already lived through systems that let buildings rot and families scatter. As if my gesture was anything but self-serving.

I regret it.

I regret the arrogance of unexamined good intentions. I regret the way I mistook control for competence, proximity for purpose. I regret how much space I took up in that classroom; how I saw myself as the author of change, instead of a listener in a room that was already full of knowledge. I regret every time I confused being liked with being effective. Every time I used my students’ trust to validate myself instead of to challenge the systems around us.

I walked in with a blueprint, Dangerous Minds tucked somewhere behind my lesson plans, and I followed it. I performed concern. I delivered rigor. But I never once questioned why I had been handed the chalk in the first place.

This is not an essay about redemption. It’s not the part in the movie where I say I’ve grown, where I tie a bow on my own evolution. It’s an essay about harm. Harm that was made possible by the structures I was trained in. Harm I didn’t recognize at the time. Harm I still feel sick about.

Because what I did wasn’t extraordinary. It was ordinary. It was the default. The baked-in assumption that whiteness is benevolent as long as it means well. That whiteness can witness, manage, and narrate pain without being implicated in it. That whiteness can enter a room and call it service.

But meaning well does not dissolve harm. And care, when centered on the self, is not care at all.

I’m still white. I’m still in the room. I’m still catching myself rehearsing control, stylizing empathy, bracing against discomfort instead of entering it. And I am trying, daily, to interrupt those patterns. Not for applause or for approval. But because I believe harm must be named, not hidden, and I feel shame exposing this part of myself. But shame doesn’t hold us accountable, and silence makes us complicit.

I don’t want to be congratulated for telling the truth. I want to be changed by it. I want other white people to think about themselves and identify baked-in, structurally racist biases. Because we have a lot of them.

Katrina showed us what happens when a nation’s racism is laid bare. So did Dangerous Minds. So did my personal experience.

And I will not look away from that. Not anymore. We need to air it out and figure out a way to help each other, as structural oppressors, move past being structurally oppressive. We need to push through our embarrassment and discomfort, and name it when we know it.