Oh boy, this thread was made for me. I went to a high school that was geared towards the arts, and let me tell you, it was a breeding ground for this shit. The quirky hair colors, the fake mental illnesses, the kinnies, the breakdowns, the tiptoeing around eggshells. Ah, it was bittersweet.
I was in ninth grade when Undertale came out, and you know how rabid Tumblr went for it. Everyone was talking about it. I vividly remember this chick with bright blue hair who was obnoxious as hell. I remember her being asked whether she had done the Genocide route or not yet, and she looks at the person she's talking to and goes, "I was, but my BPD started acting up, so I had to stop." Note that BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) was the "in" mental illness fad at the time, because Tumblr would go through those phases when it was cool to self-diagnose with the disorder of the month. Still don't see what the correlation was between her being unable to play Undertale and her "BPD." A tame story, but it just shows how deeply ingrained it was in this school to just drop your "uwu mental illness" everywhere you could for sympathy points.
I also knew this guy (let's call him Bill because he was a Bill Cipher kinnie) who was quite agitating. This dude came to school one day in sophomore year and suddenly, he had Dissociative Identity Disorder. Bill started speaking in all these different tones, saying that all these fictional characters were fronting and shit. I know that DID is a real thing, but this dude just pulls up one day and starts sperging about how he has this disorder out of the blue. I had a mutual friend with Bill at the time (who was also a Tumblrista, but he's a whole other breed) who fell for this shit. One of Bill's "alters" said some meanie shit that hurt the mutual friend's feelings, and my mutual friend was just like, "Oh, well that alter is just toxic." I swear, nobody besides the "uwu" people believed him on this shit, but nobody was about to say shit because of the Echo Chamber. The whole DID thing lasted about a month, but I will never forget the experience of having an "anime character" lecture me on why white people wearing cornrows is cultural appropriation.
More on Bill and this mutual friend. These two were inseparable freshman year. They both were Bill Cipher kinnies and claimed to have this "psychic link" that they'd speak over every night. They both liked all the Tumblr shit that was in at the time, like Star VS the Forces of Evil and Steven Universe. A lot of "you're valid" shit between them, plus bolstering each other's SJW art style. Typical Tumblrista friendship. That friendship later fell apart for them because they didn't agree about something on butch culture or something like that. It might have been something about how "trans men are supposed to look" because both of them were trans.
I don't know how Bill didn't get kicked out. You had to maintain a certain GPA to stay in this school or else you'd be sent to your neighboring high school. Bill was that kid who never did any work and would just sit and doodle all day. Teachers begged for him to do his work, and he would just sort of look at them. I think he only stayed in the school because he would play on the staff's heartstrings about "muh mental illness" and how if he went to a neighboring school, he would be torn to pieces because of him being trans. Normally I wouldn't say something like this, but he probably needed to be bullied. He would always whine about how "emotionally abusive" his mother was, despite the things I heard sounding like she was just genuinely concerned and confused about how to handle this sperg. I even heard him saying to someone how they needed to "rebel," and that he took great joy in seeing his mother cry. And she's the abuser? You never know what's going on behind closed doors, but good God this guy was a prick. Bill barely graduated, so I can't help but wonder where he is now. Oh to have his Tumblr handle.
Other examples of this behavior from Tumblristas range from harmless but annoying shit, like some rando freshman screaming the lyrics to a Hamilton song at eight AM and making her whole personality talking about how she was gay, to someone actually punching a dude who showed up in a MAGA hat on the day after the election.
I just wanted my diploma, man.
. I've seen this said mostly in and about urban/inner-city public schools, but it's also spreading to suburban districts. There's nothing inherently wrong in wanting more minorities to consider teaching as a career, but to suggest that people can only learn from someone who looks like them seems to be some combination of classism, racism, and an insult to student intelligence. More importantly, most teachers with the seniority to teach wherever they want -- regardless of race -- tend to avoid public schools and districts where the learning environment is poor at best and a war zone at worst.
