#Ferguson On The First Day?

I am organized.

I have to-do lists, stop-doing lists, someday lists, and checklists galore. When it’s time to prep for the semester, I pull up my teaching Excel spreadsheet and get to work. Order books. Revise syllabus. Set up BlackBoard. And request to be assigned to my favorite sunny classroom.

I had my lecture ready for the first day of my Introduction to Old Testament/Hebrew Bible class. It is a combination of welcome, syllabus review, and class overview while channeling Lou Gossett, Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman.

But when the news broke regarding Ferguson, I had to reconsider.

On August 9^th in Ferguson, Missouri, a White police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and killed an unarmed Black man, 18-year-old Michael Brown. As the news went viral, many of my academic colleagues on social media offered their thoughts and feelings about yet another instance of police brutality against African Americans. Marcia Chatelain began tweeting teaching resources with the hashtag #FergusonSyllabus, and some colleagues expressed their intention to discuss issues related to Ferguson on the first day of class.

Yet, I noted that my non-Black colleagues tended to not say much if anything about Ferguson. Of course, I follow only a limited number of academics on social media, and I am generalizing based on my own curated networks. Still, I asked others to point me to blog posts and articles, and I heard crickets. Odyssey Network’s “On Scripture” offered preaching reflections several days after the initial incident. Later, G. Brooke Lester tweeted his post for the “white, patched-elbow, #sbl academic”

I wondered if some academics regarded Ferguson as a “Black” issue and they were afraid to address issues of race. Or perhaps they regarded the events in Ferguson as unrelated to their academic fields and unconnected to their course material.

So I had to ask myself: Should I discuss Ferguson in class? On the first day of class?

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#Ferguson on the First Day?