Intergration Killed Black Education.

Last summer, my boss David -a truly phenomenal human being- said to me one of the best things a progressive minded person can do is start a school. The Supreme Courts decision on desegregation's makes this statement ever more relevant.

Background.

Concluding its current Term with a historic ruling on race in public policy, the Supreme Court divided 5-4 on Thursday in striking down voluntary integration plans in the public schools of Seattle and Louisville. Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., wrote the majority opinion in the combined cases. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy did not join all of the majority opinion, but joined in the result. Kennedy suggested in a separate opinion that the Chief Justice's opinion, in part, "is at least open to the interpretation that the Constitution requires school districts to ignore the problem of de facto resegregation in schooling. I cannot endorse that conclusion."

Recent History

By the early ’90s, support in the federal courts for the central work of Brown — racial integration of public schools — began to rapidly expire. In a series of cases in Atlanta, Oklahoma City and Kansas City, Mo., frustrated parents, black and white, appealed to federal judges to stop shifting children from school to school like pieces on a game board. The parents wanted better neighborhood schools and a better education for their children, no matter the racial make-up of the school. In their rulings ending court mandates for school integration, the judges, too, spoke of the futility of using schoolchildren to address social ills caused by adults holding fast to patterns of residential segregation by both class and race.

Now The Libertarian is my L-school best friend. And I wanted to Karate chop his @ss on Friday while we were talking about this topic.

Him: Do you think that the all black journalism program discriminates against whites?
Me: The question is how do you define discrimination? So, In this instance No.
Him: How so?
Me: Because white people are not underrepresented in Law, Medicine, Business
or anything else.
Him: What about a basketball camp for chinese players only?
Me: Basketball isn't nearly as fundamental to life as education. And Black people have a legacy in this country that the Chinese, and for that matter anyone else. We are this countries oldest residents and most recent citizens.
Him: Do you think that should be the role of the government?
Me: If not them, then who the f*ck else is gonna do it?

Just by nature of his gp analysis, the governement shouldn't be involved in the citizens day to day affairs as little as possible.
I feel him on that in many instances, JUST NOT in this one.

But peep this.

If integration is an institutional problem, doesn't it require and institutional solution?

Institutional racism occurs where an institution adopts a policy, practice, or procedure that appears neutral on its face but has a disproportionately negative impact on a racial or ethnic minority group.

Sweet Jesus lit a fire underneath my @ss earlier this week when he
told me that BLACK PEOPLE FAILED WHEN THEY DECIDED TO LET THEIR
CHILDREN BE EDUCATED BY WHITE PEOPLE and PRESUMED THAT THEY WOULD RECEIVE A BETTER EDUCATION THAN THEY WOULD HAVE IN SEGREGATED SCHOOLS.

Peep how Juan Williams neo con @ss in the New York Times reflects on Thurgood Marshall's analysis re Brown v. Board:

If black children had the right to be in schools with white children, Justice Marshall reasoned, then school board officials would have no choice but to equalize spending to protect the interests of their white children.

What ended happening is that the Black kids ended up in schools w/ the poor white kids.

The education was STILL halfed @ss and damn near criminal.
Black people underestimated that white people would sacrifice THEIR poor by having them attend school with Negros.

Here is the rub yall. Again. I am going to have to fight to stay in school.
So this issue has IMMEASURABLE significance for me.



I AM THE PROTOTYPICAL BOOTSTRAPPER.
I have taken eery opportunity that has been handed to me since
my FIRST PREP SCHOOL SUMMER PROGAM IN 7th GRADE and
RAN WITH IT.


So if IM HAVING PROBLEMS what the hell is the fate of the average Black/Brown kid?

Whenever I am in a disagreement with a school administrator about my progress,
standing or capability, I always ask myself,

"Would they be saying this to me if I was their child?"

"What advice would they be giving their daughter?"


I call it the daughter test. As in "would you like a particular young man if your daughter brought him home?"

Speaking of schools making decision as if their OWN children were students, there is a charter school in Manhattan that is removing the parent-boardmembers
and replacing them with boardmembers with public relations experience and fundraising experience.
My question is what happens to the level of parental engagement once they are removed from the board? How is their voice going to be heard?

How can people, who are NOT the parents of a children, care about said children?
The last forty years of public education have said that that is damn near impossible.

What bums me out abut the decision and the conversation with The Libertarian is that
he will be in a position of power one day.

And I wonder if he will take my point of view regarding Black people and their lack of access to power into consideration when making decisions. In researching this post I came across a solution to Black Here is an idea.

IF YOU WANT BLACK PEOPLE TO TALK TO THE POLICE, CREATE MORE BLACK JUDGES.

For one reason, minorities are seriously underrepresented in the legal profession. For instance, only 4% of the nation’s lawyers are Black even though Blacks represent 13% of the population of the United States . This lack of representation has far ranging effects including limited access to power. Ever notice how many of the power brokers in the United States are lawyers?. Perhaps a more significant effect is ever growing distrust of the legal system by racial minorities, in significant part, because of the lack of lawyers and judges that look like them.

Affirmative action and test scores have been turned on their head at Lowell high school in 'Frisco. Lowell has had to figure out a way to reduce the number of chinese kids admitted. They were scoring too high on the admissions exam. Lowell is like the Stuyvesant of San Francisco. 'Erry body wanna go but only the selected few get in.

Proponents also point out that the majority of volunteer work and fundraising is done by the parents of Caucasian students, and the school would suffer were these parents' children to leave Lowell.

White mommas make a big @ssed difference at a school.
Our friend Jeff "Egg recepient #2" Chang, breaks down the Lowell situation here.

The bug out is that Asian students out score Blacks, White, Latinos on standardized tests across the boards so white people get heated, but have no room to talk because they STARTED THE standardized testing in the first place.

Led by Berkeley professor Ling-chi Wang, Asian American progressives pressured these universities to review their policies. Audits at Brown, Stanford, Harvard, and U.C. Berkeley later confirmed that campus officials made secretive decisions that negatively impacted Asians’ chances of being admitted. Asian admits were required to have higher test and grade scores than whites, giving whites a distinct advantage in a supposedly open competition for admission. (Not surprisingly, after the audits were made public, Asian admissions usually leaped.)

======
======

What is the racial make up of your high school?

What is the racial make up of your kids school?

Why do you think the civil rights leaders were so SHORT SIGHTED with regard to integration and public education?

======
======