My eighth grade homeroom teacher once did something that permanently altered how I saw not just her, but all women whose personality was 'I'm well-meaning and nurturing and love kids uwu'. She knew an autistic boy in our class fixated on spoken word poetry and poetry jams and loved writing. She knew damn well everyone thought he was a loser. She found his attempts at sincerely conveying his emotions via poetry incredibly funny. He thought she supported his poetry writing and his aspirations of being a poet.
She had him perform in front of the entire homeroom, who burst into laughter and cackled at him like he was a comedian and not someone performing a piece about his ongoing struggles with depression. I sat there, too stunned to even process what was happening, as he performed at the request of a neurotypical adult he trusted and that adult as well as 19 of his peers laughed their asses off at him. Myself and 3 others at least didn't laugh, but I don't think that lessened the damage any.
Because, to be clear, it did hit him that people were laughing at him. Not 'laughing with him', as the teacher claimed later, no, people were laughing at the funny loser talking about serious things and trying to project his voice and do inflections and lmao lol what a loser what a freak lololol. He tried to tell himself the teacher didn't know that would happen. When I confronted her after class about that being messed up and bullying, however, she had said - with him in earshot - that it was funny and I needed to lighten up.
He spent the rest of the semester visibly depressed, withdrawn, not talking to anyone, angrily asserting that poetry was stupid, which expanded to literature being stupid. Our English Literature teacher was also our homeroom teacher, and she spent the next three months confused on why he was doing the absolute bare minimum to pass or alternately not doing anything at all. She could not wrap her mind around how having 20 people laugh at him to his face might be related to this. To this day, over a decade later, she will deny that she had any part in his unhappiness. Kids around school who weren't in our homeroom knew about what happened and quoted lines from his poem at him as a funny meme. Kids in the lunchroom would put on reenactments of it for their friends, to cackles and laughs. Bits of it ended up written in pen and pencil on a variety of surfaces.
I saw one line, which people meme'd to death, written on the wall in the bathroom at the local theater. (We were the rare small town with an old theater at all, an ancient family-owned one that inexplicably continues on to this day.) I tried scrubbing it off, but it didn't work. I took long enough trying to get to it that the theater manager came in. He asked me what was going on. The autistic kid's other major interest, I knew, was film. He came to this theater all the time. He was going to see this if it didn't get covered and he was already being heckled on a daily basis. So I told the theater manager about the whole thing. The performance, the mockery, all of it.
"Mrs. Johnson knew he was going to do it? And she didn't stop him?" he asked at one point, to which I replied, "Mrs. Johnson came up with the idea in the first place."
He stared at me, absolutely horrified. "That woman is a monster."
I think about that a lot. Mrs. Johnson was nice, blonde, blue-eyed, thin, white, had a normal marriage to her high school sweetheart, taught Sunday school at her church, allegedly became a teacher because she cared about kids so much, showed genuine empathy for other kids when they were going through something, dressed nicely, and was the ideal small town woman who hadn't left her small town she grew up in but instead accepted a teaching job there even when the pay was low. She was anti-bullying and anti-racism and stood up for me when another kid got mad one of my stories in English class mentioned gay people. I'm sure she thinks of herself as a very good person. She certainly does not fit the model of what most people think of when they imagine a bully.
She also deliberately orchestrated an autistic 13 year old being mocked by a group for her own entertainment and then let the mockery continue unabated without a word of objection for four months.
The theater manager, Ronnie, is not conventionally attractive, he's aroace and therefore single by choice, he's not extroverted, he moved to this small town from out of state - something people here hold against him as if he'd committed a crime as an unspoken 'you will never be one of us', and he is outwardly unexpressive a lot of the time, with a flat affect and lack of expressions.
He outright banned the next kid he caught writing that stupid meme'd line onto the bathroom stall. He drove across town to get paint and painted over the writing I'd been trying to get rid of that very night.
I'm not autistic, but I have ADHD. I have a lot of similar problems. I think, a lot, about Mrs. Johnson wanting my permission to show my writing to people. I'd told her beforehand not to and that if she did, I would be getting my parents involved. I think about how that could have gone down for me, how she said I was a good writer and she just wanted to help me. I think about how many other neurodivergent kids probably felt safe with her and the amount of damage she might've caused over her 43 years of teaching. To this day she denies she ever did anything wrong. It was a joke. Kids these days are so sensitive.
When the autistic kid she'd used like an animal performing a fun trick for her amusement became so depressed that he first stopped going to school, then tried to kill himself, that was the response: "He's too sensitive."
Not "maybe I was wrong", not "and from now on I promise to come down hard on bullying", nothing else. He was too sensitive.
Nothing gets me on guard now like very nice, sweet, loving neurotypical women who assure you that they're anti-bullying and they love kids and they're here to help. Having completely convinced themselves that they're always in the right and always good people, they are capable of astonishing cruelty, whose consequences they will not stop and whose victim they will never see as human. When I corrected her spelling once, she got visibly upset for a moment. When kids quoted lines at this kid to make fun of him, for months, she could not see why this might be upsetting, why having your poetry about your depression turned into a meme by kids you spent 8 hours a day with might hurt in any way.
He was 13. She was in her late 50's. Or, as my mom put it, she was old enough to know better. Many neurotypicals assured me at the time it wasn't bullying, it was just a joke. Ronnie, undiagnosed but likely neurodivergent, inarguably hit upon the actual problem here: "That woman is a monster."
It's just that when the monster looks 'normal', we call the monster's actions something else. Bullying is such an ugly word. Let's reframe it as comedy instead.
You'd think an English Literature teacher would know changing what something is called doesn't change what it is.
