Ohio Teacher Greets Every Student With The Shuri And T’Challa ‘Black Panther’ Handshake

Tina Rucker Bailey says she was inspired by the film.

After watching Black Panther, one Ohio teacher was inspired enough to take a little bit of Wakanda into the classroom.

Tina Rucker Bailey, a teacher at Dayton Leadership Academies, works diligently to make her classroom a special place for her students. The Central State University graduate started using Shuri and T’Challa’s handshake from the film to greet her students in the morning to help get them pumped for the day, according to Yahoo Entertainment.

A fellow teacher filmed Bailey, while she wore a panther mask and greeted her students with their special Black Panther handshake. The video was shared on a site called Black Educators Rock, where it garnered over 2.5 million views and a lot of positive feedback from parents.

“A lot of teachers have been excited about it because they understand,” Bailey said. “And there were a lot of parents commenting asking, ‘What school is this? I’m sending my kid there. What grade do you teach?’ So it’s very exciting, but I just hope that people remember that it was for the kids. I don’t want them to take the focus off that. This is for our students.”

Bailey said that her classroom acts as a safe haven for her students away from the negative aspects of the world.

“Our babies are so stressed out in these areas. You have the low-income, you have bullying, you have just different things that are going on in the world. We do one thing to get them excited and [commenters] have to take it somewhere else. They forget that it’s for the students. It’s not for you all,” she added.

While there have been some critics claiming that she would not treat a class with white students the same, Bailey said that those naysayers would be wrong.

“A lot of people have different perceptions of the movie. They feel that a lot of African-Americans are taking the movie out of context and we are using it as a movement and not that it was just a superhero movie,” she said. “I enjoyed the film — all aspects of what it represents — and people need to just appreciate that the movie was well put together. It …

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