Segregation Now
Segregation Tomorrow
Segregation Forever
It’s fitting that a podcast that made me cry brought me to finally begin using Medium to blog my thoughts, since I don’t think I could harass my Facebook friends with this long of a post any further.
George Wallace circa 1963 would be proud if he could see what we have wrought in this country.
Over the last week I’ve been thinking for a long while about the state of our country. While our politics have everything to do with why this country is broken in many ways, they are not the subject of this long winded post I sat down to write last night.
No, the reason I’m bringing segregation up today is because I have been shaken to my core about the status quo and how this country has always worked, and for the foreseeable future will continue to work.
What happened to me this last week you might ask? Simply put, I listened to a podcast about how to fix education.
This one to be specific: The Problem We All Live With
This particular story from This American Life tells a story we all know too well. There’s a reason the podcast is titled after the famous Norman Rockwell painting “The Problem We All Live With”.
The story is one we all know, because it’s the story of being educated in the United States of America. I don’t need to tell you that our public schools are in shambles, our education system is the joke of the world, and that we’re effectively neglecting a generation of students who are now ill equipped to carry the banner of progress forward as we march relentlessly through the 21st century.
What I do need to tell you though is that the names of the school districts in this story are completely interchangeable with the ones I grew up knowing as a kid.
As I listened to it the podcast depicts the state of schooling and an unlikely (and accidental) opportunity for some black and brown youth in the school district where Michael Brown attended school to get out of their crummy schools and horrible environment, and get a shot at a real education and a future for themselves.
The funny thing is, we all know about this issue, because we all have the same economic stratified environments no matter where we are. Growing up, the all white schools (meaning the ones with all the money) were more or less the ones where I went to school. I was part of the Acalanes Union High School District (for High School), and the Walnut Creek School District (for elementary and middle school).
As I listened to this story, I stopped, and started to think about how I could swap out “Normandy School District” which is where Michael Brown and other countless black and brown youth go to school, for a similarly under resourced district from my own backyard, “Mount Diablo Unified School District”. At the same time, replace “Francis Howell School District” with “Acalanes Union High School District”.
My heart weeped, and sharpened in anger when I heard a particular part of this story where this replacing act really hit home…at a parent meeting to discuss the future of the Francis Howell district after learning that, in compliance with a little forgotten law, they were about to receive an influx of about 1000 students from the Normandy district.
Why did I weep? Because I could totally and completely imagine parents in my community saying things like the statements below. Things that I absolutely recognize to be racist, utterly shameful, and plainly un-American.
As this public comment period at the Francis Howell district meeting with parents began underway, these were just a few of the things said. You really need to listen to the podcast in full, but I transcribed these comments because I couldn’t turn away as I heard them coming out of my iPhone’s speakers:
“When a child who is coming from an underperforming school with low test scores, comes into a math class at Francis Howell, how will they possibly cope?”
“Once Normandy comes in here, will that lower our accreditation?”
“I’m hoping that their discipline records come with them, like their health records come with them.”
“We don’t want the different areas…coming across on our side of the bridge, bringing with it everything we’re fighting today against.
“This is what I want to know from you. In one month I send my three small children to you, and I want to know, is there any metal detectors?
Because I want to be clear, I’m no expert, I’m not you guys, I don’t have an accreditation, but I’ve read. I’ve read and I’ve read and I’ve read so we’re not talking about the Normandy school district losing their accreditation because of their buildings, or their structures, or their teachers.
We are talking about violent behavior that is coming in with my 1st grader, my 3rd grader, and my middle schooler that I’m very worried about. And I want to know if you have no choice like me, I want to know where your metal detectors are going to be, and I want to know where your drug sniffing dogs are going to be, and I want…this is what I want, I want the same security that Normandy gets when they walk through their school door.
I want it here. I want that security before my children walk into Francis Howell, because I shopped for a school district. I deserve to not have to worry about my children getting stabbed, about taking a drug, or getting robbed.”
“We have to follow the laws. We don’t have to like it, and we don’t have to make it easy. Has anyone considered changing our school’s start times? Making it less appealing?”
“We have both worked and lived in underprivileged areas in our jobs. This is not a race issue. I just want to say to the first woman who came up here and cried this was a race issue, I’m sorry, that’s her prejudice calling me a racist because my skin is white, and I’m concerned about my children’s education and safety. This is not a race issue. This is a commitment to education issue.”
What horrifies me is that these folks are sincere, they are probably kind hearted, and they probably had no clue that one of the prospective transfer students, the subject of the podcast, was actually in the audience and hearing all of the hateful things being said about her as a student from Normandy.
Anyone in my community could have probably uttered some of the same racially tinged things that were uttered in that school district parent meeting in Missouri.
So in a way, we’ve slid backwards over the last 25 years.
We’ve slipped into a state of separate facilities for different groups of people. We’ve re-segregated our schooling system and now, what matters most in this country is not how hard you work or your will to succeed.
What matters most in the United States of America, the land of opportunity, is what zip code you were born into.
