[lbo-talk] FW: Use of Race in School Placement Curbed

W. Kiernan wkiernan at gmail.com
Sat Jun 30 07:02:30 PDT 2007


Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:

>

> I am not so sure. My son went to a public "integrated"

> school in Baltimore reflecting the ethnic composition of

> the city (about 65% Black). There was a lot of talk

> there about racism and integration, but at the end of

> the day the circles of friends, dating, etc. were pretty

> much segregated.

>

> I think we tend to grossly overestimate the effect of

> schools. They have some effect, to be sure, but they

> pale in comparison to the effect of community, parenting

> etc, which remain as segregated as ever.

You grossly underestimate the effect of school integration. You've probably never seen completely segregated schools like we used to have before 1964. I went to a segregated elementary school when my family first moved to Florida in 1962. I remember the day when they first integrated our school. It was the first time most of my classmates had ever gotten within arms-reach of a black kid. There wasn't a whole lot of social inter-mixing going on, but what I and my fellow students did learn was that, basically, these were kids more or less like us, not some kind of disgusting and terrifying half-animal savage boogie-men, as they had mostly believed before those first few black kids showed up.

I do not exaggerate, that was how these elementary school kids thought and talked down South in those pre-integration days. Elementary school kids! It was pretty freaky for me from up North who had never given a thought to Negroes. Which is not to say that my parents and I were anti-racist saints or anything, but we didn't sit around and ragefully obsess over them all day long like so many people did down South.

The year before the federally-mandated school integration, Kennedy had got shot in the middle of our school day. They announced over the intercom that we were to report to the lunchroom, where the school's one and only teevee set was mounted on the wall. We went in there and heard that Kennedy had been shot; a few minutes later the teevee guy announced that Kennedy was dead. The school administration called up the school buses and sent us home for the rest of the day. To give you an idea of what the racial attitudes _among school children_ were in all-white Belleair Elementary School at that time, as the kids stood around at the bus stop waiting, one of the musically-inclined Southern kids started gleefully singing, and a bunch of other kids joined in, to the tune of "Colonel Bogey's March":

The n-word-lover's dead

The n-word-lover's dead

They shot him through the head

The n-word-lover's dead

I suppose they'd inherited that attitude from their deranged hick parents. But that kind of over-the-top public racism disappeared after school integration.

Now, thanks to the Bush Supreme Court, in the next decade I expect it to bounce right back, all over the Southeast. Sherman should have burned everything, and taken no prisoners.

Yours WDK - WKiernan at gmail.com



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