“I’m not interested in anybody’s guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason…”
I know everyone is different and some people know more about these things than others. However, you have to admit that just being a White person, you probably don’t know nearly as much about them as any random Black person.
After all, Black folks deal with this every day. You and I, we’re just visiting.
I’m not saying this like I know everything there is about the subject. I need to crack open some more books, watch some more movies and learn more, too.
Let’s say we had a ray gun that could eliminate racism. You shoot people with this zap gun and POOF they’re no longer racist.
So we take the gun to space and hit everyone in the US with it. All racist attitudes immediately disappear. Not a single person in the entire country is racist.
“I’m an American whether I like it or not and I’ve got to take responsibility for it, though it’s not my doing. What can you do about it except accept that, and then you protest it with all your strength. I’m not responsible for Vietnam, but I had to take responsibility for it, at least to the extent of opposing my government’s role in Vietnam.”
And most of the time we may not even be aware they’re there.
I know I’m not.
Let me give you an example.
Several years ago my wife and I won free tickets to an opera recital. We like that sort of thing so we dressed in our finest and went to the concert hall to enjoy some culture.
The soprano was a local girl I’d never heard of (I’m sorry. I can’t remember her name), but she was wonderful. She was also Black.
And the Black community was out in force to support her. The concert hall was filled with mostly Black faces above suits and Sunday dresses.
It was the first time I could remember not being in the majority, and it made me uncomfortable.
I knew it was stupid. The other people there at the concert were no danger. No one was going to take their suit jacket off to jump a couple of White people who came to hear Puccini and Verdi.
But I felt some fear in my gut.
It wasn’t rational. I guess all those nightly news reports disproportionately megaphoning Black crime while ignoring that committed by White folks had an effect on me. I didn’t ask to be taught that fear. I didn’t want it. I recognized it as dumb and bigoted.
I couldn’t control the way I felt. But I could control the way I reacted.
I made an effort to talk with those around us and be as friendly as possible. And for their part these folks were entirely warm, cordial and inviting.
That’s what I’m talking about.
We, White people, have to take a step beyond learning about racism and acting against it. We have to do some soul searching and locate it within ourselves.
It’s probably there.
You can’t grow up in America without having it grow inside you like an alien pathogen.
“We are very cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this continent are mainly so empty, so tame, and so ugly.”
I bring this up not to judge you.
Brother, I’ve never met you. Sister, I don’t know you.
I’m on my own parallel journey.
There is only one person you have to be accountable to – and that is yourself.
Can you live with yourself if you have not taken these few steps?
If you believe in justice, don’t you have a responsibility to be so in all your dealings with other people?
Black people are people.
Black lives matter.
White people like us have responsibilities to our brothers and sisters of color.
Let’s meet them.
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We are living through a global pandemic yet have inadequate health screenings, medical equipment or a viable vaccine.
We are witness to public lynchings of black people at the hands of law enforcement yet our legal system continues to be slow to act if at all.
Our schools and hospitals are starved for resources yet police have riot gear, tear gas and army surplus tanks to patrol the streets.
Climate change causes unprecedented storms, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes and other extreme weather yet our policymakers refuse to take any action to change it or even acknowledge it’s happening.
We’re experiencing record unemployment and a stalled economy yet the super rich loot and pillage recovery efforts to record profits.
White supremacists are terrorizing our communities yet we ignore it until someone is killed and refuse to see any pattern, just a series of loners unrelated and unstoppable.
Refugees with nowhere else to go seek shelter at our door and yet we respond by rounding them up like criminals, separating them from their children and caging them like animals…
Guns are unregulated. Truth is uncelebrated. Fascism rebranded.
We go door-to-door, organize and hold rallies for our chosen candidates. We navigate political labyrinths of red tape in an edifice labeled “Democracy” but at every turn stifled of collective voice. And sometimes we even win and see our preferred public servants inaugurated.
But every year nothing much changes.
Things get progressively worse no matter who is in office.
And we’re told to clutch at changes that are not nearly adequate or which are cosmetic at best.
It’s no wonder, then, that so many folks have taken to the streets to express their outrage and demand justice.
Nor did we forget Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man jogging near his home in February who was followed and shot to death by two white men who claimed they suspected him of committing some sort of crime.
It would be easy to become complacent about such things.
We refuse to shrug and let this just become normal.
America is angry. She is sick and tired of being unheard and unheeded.
She is fed up with unjust systems, gas lighting leaders and political thugs.
To quote James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
We are trying to face the truth.
Only time will tell whether it destroys us or we conquer it.
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And then you might apologize and say it was just an accident.
Maybe I’d believe you.
Until the next time when we met and you punched me again.
That’s the problem we, as a society, have with standardized tests.
We keep using them to justify treating students of color as inferior and/or subordinate to white children. And we never stop or even bothered to say, “I’m sorry.”
After all, teachers and schools have changed. They no longer educate children today the same way they did in the 1920s when the first large scale standardized tests were given to students in the US. There are no more one-room schoolhouses. Kids can’t drop out at 14. Children with special needs aren’t kept in the basement or discouraged from attending school. Moreover, none of the educators and administrators on the job during the Jazz Age are still working.
Instead, we have robust buildings serving increasingly larger and more diverse populations. Students stay in school until at least 18. Children with special needs are included with their peers and given a multitude of services to meet their educational needs. And that’s to say nothing of the innovations in technology, pedagogy and restorative justice discipline policies.
These assessments were based on explicitly eugenicist foundations – the idea that certain races were distinctly superior to others.
In 1923, one of the men who developed these intelligence tests, Carl Brigham, took these ideas further in his seminal work A Study of American Intelligence. In it, he used data gathered from these IQ tests to argue the following:
“The decline of American intelligence will be more rapid than the decline of the intelligence of European national groups, owing to the presence here of the negro. These are the plain, if somewhat ugly, facts that our study shows. The deterioration of American intelligence is not inevitable, however, if public action can be aroused to prevent it.”
The practice was even upheld by the US Supreme Court in the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision. Justices decided that mandatory sterilization of “feeble-minded” individuals was, in fact, Constitutional.
Of the ruling, which has never been explicitly overturned, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Eventually Brigham took his experience with Army IQ tests to create a new assessment for the College Board – the Scholastic Aptitude Test – now known as the Scholastic Assessment Test or SAT. It was first given to high school students in 1926 as a gatekeeper. Just as the Army intelligence tests were designed to distinguish the superior from the inferior, the SAT was designed to predict which students would do well in college and which would not. It was meant to show which students should be given the chance at a higher education and which should be left behind.
And unsurprisingly it has always – and continues to – privilege white students over children of color.
Another major eugenicist who made a lasting impact on education was Lewis Terman, Professor of Education at Stanford University and originator of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. In his highly influential 1916 textbook, The Measurement of Intelligence he wrote:
psych
“Among laboring men and servant girls there are thousands like them [feebleminded individuals]. They are the world’s “hewers of wood and drawers of water.” And yet, as far as intelligence is concerned, the tests have told the truth. … No amount of school instruction will ever make them intelligent voters or capable voters in the true sense of the word.
… The fact that one meets this type with such frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew and by experimental methods.
Children of this group should be segregated in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical. They cannot master, but they can often be made efficient workers, able to look out for themselves. There is no possibility at present of convincing society that they should not be allowed to reproduce, although from a eugenic point of view they constitute a grave problem because of their unusually prolific breeding” (91-92).
This was the original justification for academic tracking. Terman and other educational psychologists convinced many schools to use high-stakes and culturally-biased tests to place “slow” students into special classes or separate schools while placing more advanced students of European ancestry into the college preparatory courses.
In true disaster capitalism style, it concluded that our economy was at risk because of poor public schools. Therefore, it suggested circumventing the schools and subordinating them to a system of standardized tests, which would be used to determine everything from teacher quality to resource allocation.
It’s a bizarre argument, but it goes something like this: the best way to create and sustain a fair educational system is by rewarding “high-achieving” students.
So we shouldn’t provide kids with what they need to succeed. We should make school a competition where the strongest get the most and everyone else gets a lesser share.
And the gatekeeper in this instance (as it was in access to higher education) is high stakes testing. The greater the test score, the more funding your school receives, the lower class sizes, the wider curriculum, more tutors, more experienced and well compensated teachers, etc.
After all, what is a standardized test but an assessment that refers to a specific standard? And that standard is white, upper class students.
In his book How the SAT Creates Built-in-Headwinds, national admissions-test expert, Jay Rosner, explains the process by-which SAT designers decide which questions to include on the test:
“Compare two 1998 SAT verbal [section] sentence-completion items with similar themes: The item correctly answered by more blacks than whites was discarded by [the Educational Testing Service] (ETS), whereas the item that has a higher disparate impact against blacks became part of the actual SAT. On one of the items, which was of medium difficulty, 62% of whites and 38% of African-Americans answered correctly, resulting in a large impact of 24%…On this second item, 8% more African-Americans than whites answered correctly…”
In other words, the criteria for whether a question is chosen for future tests is if it replicates the outcomes of previous exams – specifically tests where students of color score lower than white children. And this is still the criteria test makers use to determine which questions to use on future editions of nearly every assessment in wide use in the US.
Some might argue that this isn’t racist because race was not explicitly used to determine which questions would be included. Yet the results are exactly the same as if it were.
Others want to reduce the entire enterprise to one of social class. It’s not students of color that are disadvantaged – it’s students living in poverty. And there is overlap here.
If these are the results, is there some villain laughing behind the curtain and twirling the ends of a handlebar mustache?
Answer: it doesn’t matter.
As in the entire edifice of white supremacy, intention is beside the point. These are the results. This is what a policy of high stakes standardized testing actually does.
If every time we meet, you punch me in the face, it doesn’t matter if that’s because you hate me or you’re just clumsy. You’re responsible for changing your actions.
And we as a society are responsible for changing our policies.
Nearly a century of standardized testing is enough.
Candlelight vigils were held nationwide – including in Boston, Houston, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New Orleans, Atlanta, Chicago, New York City and Los Angeles.
A host of international leaders from the Pope to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed outrage, sadness and solidarity.
In Kentucky, a white man shot and killed two African-Americans at a Kroger grocery store following a failed attempt to break into a black church.
Only two days later, a deranged man who had railed against Democrats and minorities with hate-filled messages online was arrested for allegedly sending mail bombs to people who’d been criticized by President Donald Trump.
Where were the candlelight vigils for those atrocities?
Where were the international landmarks going dark?
Where was the worldwide condemnation?
In the wake of Pittsburgh’s tragedy, these other violent acts have been almost forgotten.
Yet they’re all symptoms of the same disease – hate and bigotry.
I’ll admit that I am having a really hard time dealing with it.
I am not sleeping well.
I find myself zoning out in the middle of everyday activities.
And I feel this constant anxiety like part of me is expecting to hear a gunshot ringing down the hall at any time.
When the alleged shooter entered the sanctuary armed to the teeth and shouted “All Jews must die!” before carrying out his plan, he included me in his declaration.
All Jews.
That’s me.
That’s my daughter. My parents. My family.
It means something to me that so many people have come together to repudiate this crime.
You can’t go anywhere in Pittsburgh without a memorial, a moment of silence, a shared statement of solidarity and love.
At the symphony, musicians read two statements from the stage against hate before playing a Hebrew melody with string quartet.
At my school – I’m a teacher – the union decided to collect money for the victims.
I saw a barge floating down one of the rivers that had the message “Stronger Than Hate” on the side next to the modified Steelers logo where the top star had been replaced by a Star of David.
I even saw a similar message on a Wendy’s sign: “PittsburghStrong/ Stronger/ Than Hate”.
The community has come together in a way I’ve never seen before.
But I can’t help wondering why.
Even after Richard Baumhammers went on a racially motivated killing spree in 2000 murdering five people including two Jews, the response wasn’t this overwhelming.
Perhaps it’s just that this latest shooting is the final straw.
Perhaps it is the moment when our nation finally pulls together and says that enough is enough – We won’t tolerate this kind of hate and violence.
I hope that’s it.
However, in the shadows of my mind I wonder if it might not be a reflection of the same beast that struck us last weekend.
Could it be that we’re willing to put up with violence against brown people, but only draw the line when those targeted have lighter skin?
I guess my point – if I have one – is this: Thank you, But.
On behalf of Pittsburgh’s Jews, thank you for having our back.
If we’re going to survive this, we’re going to need your continued support and solidarity.
Hate crimes have jumped from about 70 incidents a year in the 1990s to more than 300 a year since 2001. And after Trump was elected, 900 bias-related incidents were reported against minorities within the first 10 days.
The shock and solidarity in the wake of the synagogue shooting is appreciated, but it’s not enough to mourn only when 11 Jews are murdered in cold blood.
It’s not enough to take a stand against anti-Semitism.
We need to join together to fight all of it.
We need to be unified against school segregation, police brutality, xenophobia and prejudice in all of its forms.
The white supremacist who killed my friends and neighbors targeted us because he thought we were helping brown-skinned immigrants into the country.
We can’t just stand for the helpers. We need to stand for those in need of that help.
It just won’t work any other way.
We can’t just be against violence to light skinned minorities. We have to empathize and protect our brown skinned brothers and sisters, too. We have to love and cherish our LGBTQ neighbors, as well.
The most vivid memory I have of my great-grandfather is the tattoo on his arm.
It wasn’t an anchor or a sweetheart’s name or even the old faithful, “Mom.”
It was just a series of digits scrawled across his withered tan flesh like someone had written a note they didn’t want to forget.
Beneath the copious salt and pepper hairs was a stark number, the darkest stain on his skin.
Gramps is a kindly figure in my mind.
He died before I was even 10-years-old. All I really remember about him are wisps of impressions – his constant smile, a whiff of mothballs, how he always seemed to have butterscotch candies.
And that tattoo.
I think it was my father who told me what it meant.
When he was just a young man, Gramps escaped from Auschwitz. A guard took pity on him and smuggled him out.
His big European family didn’t make it.
My scattered relatives in the United States are all that are left of us.
Those are the only details that have come down to me. And Gramps isn’t here to add anything further.
But his tattoo has never left me.
It’s become a pillar of my subconscious.
The fact that someone could look at my kindly Gramps and still see fit to tattoo a numeric signifier on him as if he were an animal.
A little reminder that he wasn’t human, that he shouldn’t be treated like a person, that he was marked for erasure.
If I look at my own arm, there is no tell-tale integer peeking through the skin. But I am keenly aware of its presence.
I know that it’s there in a very real sense.
It is only the American dream that hides it.
Coming to this country, my family has made a deal, something of a Faustian bargain, but it’s one that most of us have accepted as the price of admission.
It’s called whiteness.
I am white.
Or I get to be white. So long as I suppress any differences to the contrary.
I agree to homogenize myself as much as possible and define myself purely by that signifier.
White. American. No hyphen necessary.
Anything else is secondary. I don’t have to deny it, but I have to keep it hidden until the right context comes to bring it out.
During Octoberfest I have license to be German. When at international village I can root for Poland. And on Saturdays I can wear a Kippah and be Jewish.
But in the normal flow of life, don’t draw attention to my differences. Don’t show everyone the number on my arm.
Because America is a great place, but people here – as in many other places – are drawn to those sorts of symbols and will do what they can to stamp them out.
I learned that in school when I was younger.
There weren’t a lot of Jewish kids where I grew up. I remember lots of cracks about “Jewing” people down, fighting against a common assumption that I would be greedy, etc. I remember one girl I had a crush on actually asked to see my horns.
And of course there were the kids who chased me home from the bus stop. The scratched graffiti on my locker: “Yid.”
The message was clear – “You’re different. We’ll put up with you, but don’t ever forget you are NOT one of us.”
There were a lot more black kids. They didn’t get it any easier but at least they could join together.
It seemed I had one choice – assimilate or face it alone.
So I did. I became white.
I played up my similarities, never talked about my differences except to close friends.
It’s not a result of the color wheel. Look at your skin. You’re not white. You’re peach or pink or salmon or rose or coral or olive or any of a million other shades.
Whiteness has as much to do with color as Red has to do with Communism or Green has to do with environmental protection.
It is the way a lose confederacy of nationalities and ethnicities have banded together to form a fake majority and lord power over all those they’ve excluded.
It’s social protection for wealth – a kind of firewall against the underclass built, manned and protected by those who are also being exploited.
It’s like a circle around the wealthy protecting them from everyone outside its borders. Yet if everyone banded together against the few rich and powerful, we could all have a more equitable share.
But in America, social class has been weaponized and racialized.
You’ll see some media outlets talking about demographics as if white people were in danger of losing their numerical majority in this country in the next few decades. But there’s no way it’s ever going to happen.
Today’s xenophobia is a direct response to this challenge. Some are trying to deport, displace and murder as many black and brown people as possible to preserve the status quo.
But even if that doesn’t work, whiteness will not become a minority. It will do what it has always done – incorporate some of those whom it had previously excluded to keep its position.
Certain groups of Hispanics and Latinos probably will find themselves allowed to identify as white, thereby solidifying the majority.
Because the only thing that matters is that there are some people who are “white” and the rest who are not.
Long ago, my family experienced this.
Before I was born, we got our provisional white card. And if I want, I can use it to hide behind.
I’ve been doing it most of my life.
Every white person does it.
It’s almost impossible not to do it.
How do you deny being white?
At this point, I could throw back my head and shout to the heavens, “I’M NOT WHITE!” and it wouldn’t matter.
Only in a closed environment like a school or a job or in a social media circle can you retain the stigma of appearing pale but still being other.
In everyday life, it doesn’t matter what you say, only how you appear.
I can’t shout my difference all the time. Every moment I’m quiet, I’ll still be seen as white.
It’s not personal. It’s social. It’s not something that happens among individuals. It’s a way of being seen.
The best I can do is try to use my whiteness as a tool. I can speak out against the illusion. I can stand up when people of color are being victimized. I can vote for leaders who will do something to dismantle white supremacy.
But let me be clear: doing so is not the safe way to go.
In defending others you make yourself a target.
I get threats all the time from racists and Nazis of all sorts. They say they can tell just by looking at me that I’m not white at all.
The worst part is I’m not sure what I am anymore.
I don’t go to synagogue. I don’t even believe in God. But I’m Jewish enough to have been rounded up like Gramps was, so I won’t deny that identity. It’s just that I’m more than one thing.
That’s what whiteness tries to reduce you to – one thing.
I don’t want it anymore.
I’m not saying I don’t like the protection, the ability to be anonymous, the easy out.
But it’s not worth it if it has to come with the creation of an other.
I don’t want to live in a world where people of color are considered less than me and mine.
I don’t want to live in a world where they can be treated unfairly, beaten and brutalized so that I can get some special advantage.
I don’t want to live in a world where human beings are tattooed and numbered and sent to their deaths.
I teach mostly students of color in a western Pennsylvania public school. I write a blog about education and issues of prejudice. And I participate in social justice campaigns to try and redress the inequality all around me.
But in my quest to be an anti-racist, one of the most common criticisms people hurl my way is to call me smug:
You think you’re so perfect!
You’re just suffering from white guilt.
You love black people more than your own people.
Things like that.
Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret.
I make mistakes.
All. The. Time.
I am just like every other white person out there. But I have recognized certain facts about my world and I’m trying to do something about them.
And it’s getting worse. Hate crimes have jumped from about 70 incidents a year in the 1990s to more than 300 a year since 2001. And after Trump was elected, 900 bias-related incidents were reported against minorities within the first 10 days.
It does not make me special that I am trying to do what little I can about that. It just makes me human.
That’s it.
I am not perfect.
I am no better than anyone else.
But I am trying to do the right thing.
When I first became a teacher, I had the chance to go to the rich white schools and work with the wealthy white kids. I hated it.
I found that I had a real affinity for the struggling students, the poor and minorities.
Why? Probably because I have more in common with them than the kids who drove to school in better cars than me, wore more expensive clothes and partied with designer drugs.
Does that make me better than a teacher who stayed in the suburbs? No. But hopefully it gives me the chance to make a greater difference against white supremacy.
When I saw how unjust our school system is, I could have gotten out. Law school was definitely an option. So was becoming a technical writer or a job as a pharmaceutical ad rep.
Does that make me better than teachers who kept plugging away at their jobs but didn’t rock the boat? No way. But hopefully I have a better chance at helping change things for the better.
It was a hard battle that made me do things I was not at all comfortable doing. You try asking a public servant on camera to break the law and go to jail for what he knew was right.
Some people look at that and other accomplishments and think I’m conceited.
They say I’m a white savior hogging the spotlight for myself and keeping the very people I’m trying to help in my shadow.
That’s not my intention at all.
I wouldn’t be anywhere without the help and support of people of color.
Everything I’ve done in this fight has been with their help and encouragement.
Does that mean I’m impervious to making a racist comment? Does it mean I’ve never participated in a microaggression? Does it mean I see every racist impact of my society and my place in it?
Absolutely not.
I screw up every day.
Multiple times.
But that’s the point. You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to try.
The chapter on “White Supremacy Culture” should be required reading for every activist organization or budding civil rights warrior.
The authors offer a list of characteristics that stem from white supremacy that can affect even the best intentioned of groups and individuals. These norms are difficult to name or identify but can lead to major dysfunction:
“They are damaging to both people of color and to white people. Organizations that are people of color led or a majority people of color can also demonstrate many damaging characteristics of white supremacy culture.”
And the number one characteristic is Perfectionism.
This involves the following bullet points:
“little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing; appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the credit anyway
more common is to point out either how the person or work is inadequate
or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them
mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are – mistakes
making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong
little time, energy, or money put into reflection or identifying lessons learned that can improve practice, in other words little or no learning from mistakes
tendency to identify what is wrong; little ability to identify, name, and appreciate what is right”
Solutions offered to this problem are:
“Develop a culture of appreciation, where the organization takes time to make sure that people’s work and efforts are appreciated;
develop a learning organization, where it is expected that everyone will make mistakes and those mistakes offer opportunities for learning;
create an environment where people can recognize that mistakes sometimes lead to positive results;
separate the person from the mistake;
when offering feedback, always speak to the things that went well before offering criticism;
ask people to offer specific suggestions for how to do things differently when offering criticism.”
These are things we should keep in mind as we try to move forward in this fight.
Certainly white people can be resistant to criticism and see any and every comment or appraisal as personal or demeaning – especially if that remark is made by a person of color.
Frankly, white people need to get a thicker skin about it. We need to realize that this impulse to personalize analysis is often a psychological attempt to avoid looking at oneself and what unconscious aspects of the social order one has internalized.
However, those offering criticism must realize that context is everything. We must create an environment where such remarks are constructive. Otherwise, they’ll do more harm than good.
None of this is easy.
But if we want to be anti-racists, that’s not the job we signed up to do.
In fact, they see just the opposite effect – they earn some of the best grades, have some of the highest test scores, and disproportionately graduate from high school and achieve advanced degrees.
Moreover, there is a huge cultural difference coming from Africa as opposed to coming from the United States. Native-born Africans have to deal with the effects of post-colonialism. It wasn’t so long ago that European nations conquered and plundered the African continent for gold and resources. That era has mostly ended, but those living there still have to deal with lingering consequences. This has an effect on everything from gender, ethnicity, class, language, family relationships, professions, religions and nation states.
However, native-born Africans do not have to navigate the world of American white supremacy. The affects of being black in this country may be much more harmful than negotiating post-colonialism.
For instance, most mainland Africans enjoy intact cultures. They are not the product of families that were torn apart, religions that were displaced and entire belief systems, world views and genealogies that were stolen.
“The best inheritance that a parent can give you is not jewelry or cash or material things, it is a good education.”
This is why academics in Nigeria are widely supported, mandatory and free.
Meanwhile, in America native-born black students grow up in a much more stressful and unstable environment. This translates to academic struggles.
For one, they are the victims of educational apartheid. Brown v. Board is more than 60 years old, but American schools have become increasingly segregated by race and class. Black students receive fewer resources than whites and their schools struggle to provide the same quality of education. Moreover, they are the target – either directly or indirectly – of privatization schemes that result in less control over their own schools and the further reduction of resources through charter and voucher schools that can cut services and pocket the savings as profit.
However, the problem is not just systemic. I hate to say it, but sometimes even American teachers put up obstacles to black students success due to (often unconscious) bias.
Most teachers are white. They have certain societally reinforced expectations of black students. When these children struggle, they are more often put into special education and stigmatized for their differences.
It is no doubt that black students are more often disciplined and suspended than white students – numerous studies have shown this.
I think this is due at least partially to white teachers’ expectations. It is tempting to see black student behavior as negative in the default. We too often label them “bad kids” and then try to find evidence to support it instead of giving them the benefit of the doubt or assuming they’re smart and well-behaved until proven otherwise.
African immigrants don’t have to deal with these stigmas to nearly the same degree. They don’t get the same negative label. They have more support from close-knit families. They have more positive role models including more college graduates in the family.
Another obstacle for American born black students is a cultural imputation against academic achievement. Doing well in school can be seen as “acting white.” In order to maintain popularity and prestige, they are steered away from the exact things that immigrant Africans are steered toward.
The poverty of American blacks plays a huge factor, too. Even in moderately successful African American homes, parents or guardians are often working multiple jobs or long hours to make ends meet. This reduces their ability to oversee their children’s homework and monitor academic progress.
It seems then that the so-called proficiency gap between native-born black and white students in this country is due to generational poverty, white racism and coping mechanism in their own culture.
If we want to help American-born black students, we need to realize, first, that this problem is not due to inherent racial deficiencies. It is the product of class warfare and white supremacy.
As such, it can be cured through progressive economic policies and anti-racist efforts.
No one wants to hang out with you because of your bald head and your red suspenders and your commitment to the ideals of a defeated and disgraced totalitarian regime.
What are you to do?
REBRAND, son!
It’s simple.
No more National Socialist German Workers Party! That sounds too pinko!
You aren’t over-concerned with any one side of the political spectrum or other. You just strongly identify with whiteness — and by extension increasing the political power of white people at the expense of all others.
That’s all.
It should be obvious that this isn’t merely rebranding. It’s propaganda.
In today’s fast paced information age – where every fact is merely a Google away – that can be hard to get away with – UNLESS…
Unless you already have a readymade tool to protect propaganda from the kind of informed critical thought that can pop it like a bubble. Something to insolate the ignorance and keep out the enlightened analysis.
It was a bipartisan effort supported by the likes of Obama, the Clintons and Bill Gates on the left and Jeb Bush, Betsy DeVos and Bobby Jindal on the right.
After Obama’s success pushing them down our collective throats, many Republicans vocally decried the standards – often while quietly supporting them.
Okay, so what does this have to do with the Alt Right?
People like Steve Bannon and Donald Trump are engaged in redefining the conservative movement. Instead of circulating ideas with a merely racist and classist undertone, they want to make those subtleties more explicit.
Most aren’t about to hop out of the closet and declare themselves open Nazis or members of the Hitler fan club, but they want to make it clear exactly how wunderbar the Fuhrer’s ideals are with a wink and a smirk.
For instance, Trump’s campaign slogan: Make America Great Again.
When exactly was America great? When white people had unchallenged political and social power and minorities and people of color knew their place. That’s when.
This is obvious to some of us, but we face a real obstacle making it obvious to others.
“Do you know the two most popular forms of writing in the American high school today?…It is either the exposition of a personal opinion or the presentation of a personal matter. The only problem, forgive me for saying this so bluntly, the only problem with these two forms of writing is as you grow up in this world you realize people don’t really give a shit about what you feel or think… It is a rare working environment that someone says, “Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.”
Later, he added:
“The most popular 3rd grade standard in American today…is what is the difference between a fable, a myth, a tale, and a legend? The only problem with that question is that no one knows what the difference is and no one probably cares what the difference is either.”
“This close reading approach forces students to rely exclusively on the text instead of privileging background knowledge, and levels the playing field for all students.”
However, Coleman was dead wrong on all counts.
What you think and feel IS important. The requirements of the corporate world ARE NOT the only reasons to teach something. Being able to distinguish between similar but different concepts IS important. And context is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to understanding!
For instance, today’s spin doctor Nazis soon realized that you can’t go goose stepping down main street blindly espousing how much better it is to be white — better than, say, being black or Jewish.
But you can hang up posters in college campuses that say the same sort of thing in a cutesy, passive aggressive way. For instance: “It’s okay to be white.”
If we look just at the text, as Coleman advises, we see a rather innocuous statement.
There’s nothing racist here. It’s just a simple statement that being white is also acceptable.
However, if we add back the context, we find an indirect racial undertone.
These posters weren’t put up willy nilly. They were hung on college campuses where white nationalists wearing MAGA hats were recruiting. They were pasted over Black Lives Matter posters, accompanying drawings of Donald Trump.
In context, then, this statement doesn’t just mean “It’s okay to be white.” It means “It’s okay to be pro-white supremacist, to be pro-white power.”
And that brings up two other examples.
MAGA – Make America Great Again.
Take it out of context and it’s innocuous. It just means to increase the abstract greatness of the country to what it was at some unspecified time in the past.
If we had ensured everyone in the country had access to the best possible education, this modern Nazi subculture wouldn’t be able to make as much headway as it has.
This is yet another way that our obsession with unrestrained capitalism, neoliberalism and plutocracy has put us on a road that may end in fascism.
In confronting such an odious set of beliefs, you can justify suspending your own strongest held moral convictions as a necessary end to defeating their prejudices.
If we tolerate the intolerant, if we give them equal time to offer their point of view and don’t aggressively counter their views, they will inevitably resort to violence and wipe our side out.
This doesn’t mean immediately punching them in the face or violently attacking them. For Popper, we should let rationality run its course, let them have their say and usually their ideas will be rejected and ignored.
However, if this doesn’t happen and these ideas start to take root as they did in Nazi Germany (or perhaps even today in Trump’s America), then Popper says we must stop them by “fists or pistols.”
“We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”
Popper believed in the free expression of ideas, but when one of those ideas leads to violence, it is no longer to be tolerated. Then it is outside the law and must be destroyed.
What then do we do with our commitment to nonviolence?
Do we reluctantly agree to push this constraint to the side if push comes to shove?
No. This is the other pole we must navigate between.
He knew that his continued efforts to fight for human dignity would probably result in the premature ending of his life someday. He knew all that yet he still prescribed nonviolence.
There was simply no other way for him to exist.
Mahatma Gandhi, who influenced Dr. King and our American fight for civil rights with his own nonviolent revolution in India, went even further.
No one followed Gandhi’s advice. We fought the Germans in WWII and won. We crushed their pathetic thousand year Reich and threw their prejudiced ideals on the trash heap of history.
The scared and ignorant have rooted through the trash and recycled those same odious ideals.
The war ended, but the battle goes on.
Would that have happened had we met violence with nonviolence?
I don’t know the answer. No one does.
But it respects an important point – we can’t ultimately fight our way to peace. Not without killing everyone else. And then why would the solitary survivor wish to live?
There is an inherent flaw in humanity that continually incites us to kill each other.
We can never have true peace unless we find a way to stamp out that flaw.
Nonviolence is the closest we’ve ever come to finding a solution.
So there you have it, the Scylla and Charybdis of our current dilemma.
We must not tolerate the intolerance of the white supremacists. But we must also not allow our opposition of them to change us into that which we hate.
I know it sounds impossible. And I certainly don’t have all the answers about how we do it.
To start with, when white supremacists advocate violence of any kind, we must seek legal action. We must use every tool of the law, the courts, and law enforcement to counter them.
This requires political power. We must organize and keep them politically marginalized and weak.
In this article, I’m going to try to explain in the most simple terms I know the reality of segregation in our schools, how it got there and the various forms it takes.
I do this not because I am against public education. On the contrary, I am a public school teacher and consider myself a champion of what our system strives to be but has never yet realized. I do this because until we recognize what we are doing and what many in power are working hard to ensure we will continue doing and in fact exacerbate doing, we will never be able to rid ourselves of a racist, classist disease we are inflicting on ourselves and on our posterity.
America, the Segregated
It’s never been one monolithic program. It’s always been several co-existing parallel social structures functioning together in tandem that create the society in which we live.
I’m reminded of possibly the best description of American segregation on record, the words of the late great African American author James Baldwin who said the following on the Dick Cavett Show in 1968:
“I don’t know what most white people in this country feel. But I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions. I don’t know if white Christians hate Negroes or not, but I know we have a Christian church that is white and a Christian church that is black. I know, as Malcolm X once put it, the most segregated hour in American life is high noon on Sunday.
That says a great deal for me about a Christian nation. It means I can’t afford to trust most white Christians, and I certainly cannot trust the Christian church.
“I don’t know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me — that doesn’t matter — but I know I’m not in their union. I don’t know whether the real estate lobby has anything against black people, but I know the real estate lobby is keeping me in the ghetto. I don’t know if the board of education hates black people, but I know the textbooks they give my children to read and the schools we have to go to.
“Now this is the evidence. You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.”
As Baldwin states, there are many different ways to keep black people segregated. There are many different flavors of the same dish, many different strains of the same disease.
We can say we’re against it, but what we say doesn’t matter unless it is tied to action.
You can say you’re in favor of equity between black and white people all day long, but if the policies you support don’t accomplish these things, you might as well wear a white hood and burn a cross on a black person’s lawn. It would at least be more honest.
Segregated Schools
In terms of public education, which is the area I know most about and am most concerned with here, our schools are indeed set up to be segregated.
If there is one unstated axiom of our American Public School System it is this: the worst thing in the world would be black and white children learning together side-by-side.
They point to inequalities they, themselves, helped create and use them to push for a system that would create even worse inequality. They point to the segregation that they, themselves, helped install and use it as an excuse to push even more segregation.
And they do so by controlling the media and the narrative. They call themselves reformers when they’re really vandals and obstructionists looking to subvert the best in our system in order to maximize the worst.
School Segregation Today
Sure we don’t have very many all white or all black schools like we did before Brown v. Board. Instead we have schools that are just predominantly one race or another.
ALL kids are not divided by race. Just MOST of them.
White people and black people tend to live in different neighborhoods. Some of this is a choice. After a history of white oppression and racial strife, people on both sides of the divide would rather live among those with whom they identify.
Black people don’t want to deal with the possibility of further deprivations. White people fear retaliation.
However, white people generally enjoy a higher socio-economic status than black people, so there is some push back from black folks who can afford to live in whiter neighborhoods and thus enjoy the benefits of integration – bigger homes, less crowding, less crime, access to more green spaces, etc. But even when there is a desire, moving to a white neighborhood can be almost impossible.
State and federal laws, local ordinances, banking policies and persistent prejudice stand in the way.
In short, red lining still exists.
Real estate agents and landlords still divide up communities based on whom they’re willing to sell or rent to.
And this is just how white people want it.
They’re socialized to fear and despise blackness and to cherish a certain level of white privilege for themselves and their families.
And if we live apart, it follows that we learn apart.
The system is set up to make this easy. Yet it is not uncomplicated. There is more than one way to sort and separate children along racial and class lines in a school system.
There are several ways to accomplish school segregation. It comes in multiple varieties, a diversity of flavors, all of which achieve the same ends, just in different ways.
By my reckoning, there are at least three distinct paths to effectively segregate students. We shall look at each in turn:
Put the white neighborhoods in District A and the black ones in District B. It’s kind of like gerrymandering, but instead of hording political power for partisan lawmakers, you’re putting your finger on the scale to enable academic inequality.
However, sometimes you can’t do that. Sometimes you don’t have the power to determine the makeup for entire districts. Instead, you can do almost the same thing for schools within a single district.
That means the whiter districts get higher paid and more experienced teachers. It means they have broader curriculum, more extracurricular activities, a more robust library, more well-trained nursing staff, more advanced placement courses, etc.
Fewer funds mean fewer resources, fewer opportunities, more challenges to achieve at the same level that white students take for granted. A budget is often the strongest support for white supremacy in a given community or society as a whole. In fact, if you want to know how racist your community is, read its school budget. You want accountability? Start there.
The same holds even when segregation is instituted not at the district level but at the level of the school building.
It may sound ridiculous but this is exactly what happens much of the time. You have gorgeous new buildings with first class facilities in the suburban areas and run down crumbling facilities in the urban ones – even if the two are only separated geographically by a few miles.
Like any parasite, charter and voucher schools only survive in the proper environment. It usually looks like this.
Sometimes no matter how you draw the district lines or how you appropriate the buildings, you end up with a black majority and a white minority. That’s a situation white parents find simply intolerable.
White children must be kept separate and given all the best opportunities even if that means taking away the same for black children.
Once again, this creates the opportunity for a resource gap. The charter and voucher schools suck away needed funds from the public schools and then are subsidized even further by white parents.
The quality of education provided at these institutions is sometimes better – it’s often worse. But that’s beside the point. It’s not about quality. It’s about kind. It’s about keeping the white kids separate and privileged. It’s about saving them from the taint of black culture and too close of an association with black people.
Second, the situation can work in reverse. Instead of dividing the whites from the blacks, it divides the blacks from the whites.
This happens most often in districts where the divide is closer to equal – let’s say 60% one race and 40% another. Charter and voucher schools often end up gobbling up the minority students and leaving the white ones in the public school. So instead of white privatized and black public schools, you get the opposite.
And make no mistake – this is a precarious position for minority students to be in. Well meaning black parents looking to escape an underfunded public school system jump to an even more underfunded privatized system that is just waiting to prey on their children.
Unlike public schools, charter and voucher institutions are allowed to pocket some of their funding as profit. That means they can reduce services and spending on children anytime they like and to any degree. Moreover, as businesses, their motives are not student centered but economically driven. They cherry pick only the best and brightest students because they cost less to educate. They often enact zero tolerance discipline policies and run themselves more like prisons than schools. And at any time unscrupulous administrators who are under much less scrutiny than those at public schools can more easily steal student funding, close the school and run, leaving children with no where to turn but the public school they fled from in the first place and weakened by letting privatized schools gobble up the money.
The result is a public school system unnaturally bleached of color and a privatized system where minority parents are tricked into putting their children at the mercy of big business.
3) Tracking
But that’s not all. There is still another way to racially segregate children. Instead of putting them in different districts or different schools, you can just ensure they’ll be in different classes in the same school.
However, it most often results in further stratifying students socially, economically and racially.
Here’s how it works.
Often times when you have a large enough black minority in your school or district, the white majority does things to further horde resources even within an individual school building or academic department.
In such cases, the majority of the white population is miraculously given a “gifted” designation and enrolled in the advanced placement classes while the black children are left in the academic or remedial track.
It enables bleaching the advanced courses and melanin-izing the others. This means administration can justify giving more resources to white students than blacks – more field trips, more speakers, more STEAM programs, more extracurriculars, etc.
And if a white parent complains to the principal that her child has not been included in the gifted program, if her child has even a modicum of ability in the given subject, more often than not that white child is advanced forward to the preferential class.
CONCLUSIONS
Segregation is a deep problem in our public school system. But it cannot be solved by privatization.
In fact, privatization exacerbates it.
Nor is public education, itself, a panacea. Like any democratic practice, it requires participation and the economic and social mobility to be able to participate as equals.
Schools are the product of the societies that create them. An inequitable society will create inequitable schools.
Segregation has haunted us since before the foundation of our nation.
They don’t want their children to be educated among black students – maybe SOME black students, maybe the best of the best black students, but certainly not the average run of the mill brown-skinned child.
This has to stop.
There are plenty of benefits even for white students in an integrated education. It provides them a more accurate world-view and helps them become empathetic and prize difference.
