Racism (Does It Ever Get Old?)

So I’m sitting here at my shining new computer waiting for
parents to arrive, what with it being parent-teacher
conference day and all, and it’s becoming more and more
obvious that this time around I’m going to have a lot more
time to catch up with myself. “Why aren’t any more
parents coming in to see me?” I ask myself. “I’m so
lonely! But alas, I saw all the white parents and parents
of exceptional black students during the first hour of the
day, and now I have nothing left to do but read and blog.”
The race card never gets old for me, because on the one
hand it’s so absurd that racism plays such a big factor in
education and on the other hand it’s so absurd how naïve
I was about racism before moving down to Mississippi.
I’ve finally finished reading Savage Inequalities, and the
segment in which the author interviews some students at an
affluent suburban high school haunts me as if I’m looking
into a mirror that portrays myself ten years younger. For
these students, for myself, racism and poverty are
intellectual puzzles that only the bourgeois have the
leisure to ponder. In other words, racism is a problem in
the same way that finding the solution to an integral is on
a Calculus exam, and when speaking of racism in such a
sheltered setting such students do not even realize that
racism actually means that the mostly black public school
across the street does not have enough textbooks for
students because the taxpayers don’t really care. The
young girl interviewed in the book incessantly responds to
possible solutions to the racism and poverty challenges in
education by claiming, “I don’t see how that helps
me!” I distinctly remember having a very similar argument
years ago in one of my own classes in a mostly white
Catholic school. “It’s not all about you!” I want to
scream, which is of course the way Kozol wants us to feel.
If she or I were one of the struggling minority
poverty-ridden students, we might see exactly how much those
“crazy” solutions like cross busing would alleviate
certain problems.
(Someday, naturally, I will find either a private or damned
good public school to send my own children to even should I
work at a struggling high school myself, much like most of
the parents interviewed in the book. If I sent my children
to a struggling, poor, minority public school, would I be
taking a bold first step towards reintegration and solving
one of society’s most pressing social injustices or would
I simply be sending my children to certain failure with no
positive social gain whatsoever?)
Back to the issue: I’ve seen mostly white parents today.
At first I began to think that maybe there’s a difference
in the cultures, that for some reason we might make a
fallacious superficial observation that white people care
more about education than black people. But, because I’m
not a superficial thinker like good ol’ John Gibson at Fox
News, I’m willing to see through this observation. As I
thought a little more about it, I realized that I saw a good
number of black parents today as well, but they were mostly
parents of above average students. So it’s not
necessarily a race issue as a poverty issue. The parents I
see, white or black, are relatively articulate, caring
individuals who obviously are among the middle to upper
classes. The parents I don’t see, judging on my knowledge
of the students’ personal lives, are parents who can’t
take a day off of work to meet with teachers, who lack the
skills to help out with homework, who don’t realize that a
good education is the way to a better life, who don’t
realize that there is something better, who were never told
that their involvement is critical to their children’s
success, etc. How are they supposed to know in the first
place that there’s a cycle to be broken, and how are they
supposed to know how to break it?
The overarching point is that perhaps it is not a racist
issue directly so much as indirectly. America does not shut
out black people from education because they are black and
will threaten America’s whiteness, America shuts out the
have-nots from education because we cannot all be haves in a
capitalist economy. It just so happens that blacks started
out as the consummate have-nots, and they remain the
consummate have-nots in America specifically because
education is the way to escape this condition and it is
denied them by the choice of the haves. For those who
control money and society, it’s a simple question with a
simple answer: why not keep the class struggle a race issue?
Race is an additional way to separate the poor from the
rich – if the schools ever became reintegrated, we’d
have an awful hard time telling who’s rich and deserves to
go the good school. This way, we can just look at
someone’s skin color to know that he belongs to the
have-nots and therefore should remain a have-not, rather
than figure out who needs to get bussed where. It’s an
aristocracy of heredity and money rather than talent, but when have the aristocrats ever called a spade a spade?