If you're looking for evidence beyond Katrina of the racism present in the U.S., Jonathon Kozol's article "Still Separate, Still Unequal" is required reading (in this month's Harper's). It's a harrowing tale of the return to gross educational segregation and inequality that has occurred since the mandates of the Brown v. Board of Education decision were dismantled by federal courts in the early 1990s. It's no surprise to urban blacks (and also hispanics) that institutionalized America doesn't care about them, doesn't care about even their most basic necessities:
"Can we talk about the bathrooms?" asked a soft-spoken student named Mireya.
In almost any classroom there are certain students who, by the force of their directness or the unusual sophistication of their way of speaking, tend to capture your attention from the start. Mireya later spoke insightfully about some of the serious academic problems that were common in the school, but her observations on the physical and personal embarrassments she and her schoolmates had to under go cut to the heart of questions of essential dignity that kids in squalid schools like this one have to deal with all over the nation.
Fremont High School, as court papers filed in a lawsuit against the state of California document, has fifteen fewer bathrooms than the law requires. Of the limited number of bathrooms that are working in the school, "only one or two . . . are open and unlocked for girls to use." Long lines of girls are "waiting to use the bathrooms," which are generally "unclean" and "lack basic supplies," including toilet paper. Some of the classrooms, as court papers also document, "do not have air conditioning," so that students, who attend school on a three-track schedule that runs year-round, "become red-faced and unable to concentrate" during "the extreme heat of summer." The school's maintenance records report that rats were found in eleven classrooms. Rat droppings were found "in the bins and drawers" of the high school's kitchen, and school records note that "hamburger buns" were being "eaten off [the] bread-delivery rack."
No matter how many tawdry details like these I've read in legal briefs or depositions through the years, I'm always shocked again to learn how often these unsanitary physical conditions are permitted to continue in the schools that serve our poorest students—even after they have been vividly described in the media. But hearing of these conditions in Mireya's words was even more unsettling, in part because this student seemed so fragile and because the need even to speak of these indignities in front of me and all the other students was an additional indignity.
Without even basic services like adequate bathroom facilities and safe food, one can imagine (see Kozol for the gruesome details) how impoverished or non-existent the means of appropriate education are. And why do our urban black children get so much less than our white children?
"If you close your eyes to the changing racial composition of the schools and look only at budget actions and political events," says Noreen Connell, the director of the nonprofit Educational Priorities Panel in New York, "you're missing the assumptions that are underlying these decisions." When minority parents ask for something better for their kids, she says, "the assumption is that these are parents who can be discounted. These are kids who just don't count—children we don't value."
America doesn't care about black children. America doesn't have any place for black children. And black children know it:
"It's more like being hidden," said a fifteen-year-old girl named Isabel I met some years ago in Harlem, in attempting to explain to me the ways in which she and her classmates understood the racial segregation of their neighborhoods and schools. "It's as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don't have room for something but aren't sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don't need to think of it again."
But let's not overexaggerate. One segment of institutionalized (overwhelmingly, white) America does have a place for black (and hispanic) children:
Mireya, for example, who had plans to go to college, told me that she had to take a sewing class last year and now was told she'd been assigned to take a class in hair-dressing as well. When I asked her teacher why Mireya could not skip these subjects and enroll in classes that would help her to pursue her college aspirations, she replied, "It isn't a question of what students want. It's what the school may have available. If all the other elective classes that a student wants to take are full, she has to take one of these classes if she wants to graduate."
A very small girl named Obie, who had big blue-tinted glasses tilted up across her hair, interrupted then to tell me with a kind of wild gusto that she'd taken hairdressing twice! When I expressed surprise that this was possible, she said there were two levels of hairdressing offered here at Fremont High. "One is in hairstyling," she said. "The other is in braiding."
Mireya stared hard at this student for a moment and then suddenly began to cry. "I don't want to take hairdressing. I did not need sewing either. I knew how to sew. My mother is a seamstress in a factory. I'm trying to go to college. I don't need to sew to go to college. My mother sews. I hoped for something else."
"What would you rather take?" I asked.
"I wanted to take an AP class," she answered.
Mireya's sudden tears elicited a strong reaction from one of the boys who had been silent up till now: a thin, dark-eyed student named Fortino, who had long hair down to his shoulders. He suddenly turned directly to Mireya and spoke into the silence that followed her last words.
"Listen to me," he said. "The owners of the sewing factories need laborers. Correct?"
"I guess they do," Mireya said.
"It's not going to be their own kids. Right?" "Why not?" another student said.
"So they can grow beyond themselves," Mireya answered quietly. "But we remain the same."
"You're ghetto," said Fortino, "so we send you to the factory." He sat low in his desk chair, leaning on one elbow, his voice and dark eyes loaded with a cynical intelligence. "You're ghetto—so you sew!"
"There are higher positions than these," said a student named Samantha.
"You're ghetto," said Fortino unrelentingly. "So sew!"
-- Jessica Wilson
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