So: if you're poor and black, live in a blighted community, and happen to want your kids to get an excellent education in public school, you're pretty much fucked.
In many places, zoning makes it such that if you wanted to go to another school, you'd have to PAY for it, unless you get some sort of legal loophole like that featured in last week's "This American Life," in which a school system in Normandy, Missouri loses it's accreditation, thereby activating legislation allowing students to attend other (much better) area schools, free of charge. You can see the transcript of the program here:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/transcript.
To be fair, there are some solutions to the fact that black and brown kids are getting educationally shafted.
Some indicate that what we really ought to do is encourage the voucher system, in which parents can lobby their local or state government for money that will be used to pay for private (or out of district) education.
Others suggest what we ought to do is pad poorly performing schools with more money, the idea being that capital will in itself make schools that are fundamentally underperforming more able to "do better."
"This American Life" focused it's broadcast last and this week on integration as the key ingredient to solving the "achievement gap" that exists. They point to evidence that shows that in schools that have a mix of different races, African-American and Latino students perform better. The question of WHY this is the case isn't really discussed in the "This American Life" piece, but, to their credit, it IS asked.
In listening to opponents of the integration being forced upon Normandy, and the proponents of steps taken to integrate schools in Hartford, CT , I couldn't help but feel that for many, the failings of black and brown people in school are an indictment of black people themselves. Black and brown schools are bad because black and brown people are bad. They (black and brown people) are violent and vile. They don't posses work ethic and they have a ass backwards disposition toward work.
As a black man, it's this understated yet viscerally present characterization of the intrinsic nature of black and brown people that makes me wary and maybe even a little resentful of integration. As the NPR piece points out, true integration "works" in the sense the achievement gap is reduced. But I often feel that the assumption is that the REASON it works is because white folk, benevolent and pure, tame the savages into academic mediocrity (a real improvement from academic shittyness!). In doing so, they get to "learn about other cultures" too!
Even white liberals, allies as they are sometimes called, too often get caught up in a rhetoric that denigrates black thought and experience. Look at the criticism of the the way in which the Black Lives Matter campaign have interrupted campaign stops of Bernie Sanders. Lectures on how "proper" and "logical" discourse radiate on social media from white liberals everywhere. The implication is once again that black folks, intrinsically, aren't able to think. That our experiences are trifling. That our ideas are Neolithic.
Separate but equal doesn't work, but it's not because black and brown people are fundamentally fucking stupid. It's not because we don't have talented black and brown teachers. It's not because our kids are naturally inept. Our struggles in school are linked primarily to the systemic oppression that we continue to endure at every turn. I could go more into that, but many more intelligent than I already have.
I'm all for integration, but it's not because I love white folk and need them to learn. It's because on a systemic level, no one CARES about black children (or black people, for that matter). If black and brown children are in class with white people, and their future is tied to white people's future, then at least they'll have a chance. Dark skinned minorities don't need taming, they need opportunity.
