The white (wo)man's burden

I wanted to link to the comments about school systems and white flight in PoJ's recent post up to the main page, because it's a great topic, because the discussion is really good, and in order to provide a fresh new thread for it to continue. (There are a couple of comments before the one I linked to, but it was here that the discussion really got going.)

And then, when John Emerson sent me an email noting that my embarrassing gaffe of confusing Dominica with the Dominican Republic had been reproduced by "Clifford Fucking Geertz" in the NYRB, I couldn't help laughing. I mean, of all people.

So, thanks to Dr. Geertz for providing a nice introduction to a discussion of institutionalized racism, ignorance, and education. The fact of the matter is, as Peggy McIntosh's well-known article White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack points out, in this country, at this time, it's really impossible not to operate within a racist nexus, and therefore to perpetuate racism. And, imho as a white liberal (more or less), one of my pet peeves is that pesky problem of white liberal guilt. The problem with feeling guilty is that one wants, naturally, reassurance (guilt is so terribly uncomfortable), which can end up taking different forms: defensiveness and denial mostly. "My decision to do X has nothing to do with racism, because I'm not racist" or "people are way too sensitive about racial slurs, c'mon, get over it already" or "well, most of the people I know aren't racist (in the actively, consciously bigoted sense), so the problems you're pointing to probably have nothing to do with racism." And so on.

Now, I truly think that one of the best ways to get past that paralyzing and annoying and counter-productive guilt bullshit is just to learn to recognize onself as part of a larger whole; and, in my own education, learning to think past guilt (not, of course, always successfully) was probably one of the best things I ever learned how to do.

A vivid memory. When I was in fourth or fifth grade, I was in a bilingual program, Spanish/English. This was in lieu of putting me in honors, which my parents saw as a covert way of perpetuating segregation in a "desegregated" school--they also refused to let me advance a grade, so I was often fairly bored in school, and they compromised by putting me in the bilingual program, figuring that even if the math I learned wasn't new to me, the language would be. As the only native English speaker in my classes, then, I was often tapped to help tutor (the teachers had a pretty progressive pedagogy, where students would work together and help teach each other things--it wasn't all top-down education). One day, I was set up with a boy, whose name I don't remember, who was new to the classroom and who had very little English. And we were told to talk for the next ten minutes about anything we liked, but to do so only in English, so that he could practice. So, we talked a bit, and then I ran into something that he didn't understand, and I tried saying it in different words, but he still wasn't getting it--there was some key word, I don't remember what, that was a stumper. So I switched over and gave the Spanish translation of the key word, and continued, in Spanish, by asking if that was enough and he understood what I had been saying now? And he, relieved, replied in Spanish, yeah, that helps, thanks. Anyone who's ever had to learn a second language knows how much work it is to talk in a language you don't know well even for just ten minutes, and what an enormous relief it is to be able to switch back into a language where you can actually express yourself.

And the teacher heard us, and came over, and said, "hey, I asked you two not to speak Spanish!" And my conversation partner said, "well, she did it first!" And I, being about nine years old, got scared and said, "no I didn't!"

And the teacher, who was himself Latino, said to my partner without any further enquiry, "don't lie." I can still remember the look of anger and betrayal that kid gave me. And I realized, suddenly, that the teacher had believed me, and not this other kid, because I was a "good student"--and that a lot of my "good student" status in this class had to do with the fact that I was the brainiac white kid, who'd been deliberately put in this classroom, and that the teachers thought my presence there was terribly progressive (while the other kids were there because they "had" to be), and, well, all those things made me something of the teacher's pet. And that this wasn't my fault, and that the teacher--who was a really good teacher, actually, very fair-minded--wasn't being unfair on purpose; it was just the way things are. And that my conversation partner knew that too, and was really pissed off at me because I could get away with speaking Spanish and he couldn't, precisely because it wasn't my first language.

This is one of my most vivid memories from elementary school. There are others, very similar--the fact that I won class president in the sixth grade because I delivered my speech and put up posters in both English and Spanish--all the candidates were white, though the school was pretty mixed, and I was the only person who campaigned to the brown kids as well as the white ones. Or the time my best girlfriend and I were walking down the hall, and she suddenly veered away as a boy, walking the other direction, reached out and grabbed my crotch--and afterwards, pissed off, I said to her, "how did you know he was going to do that?" and she said, "oh, him? Everybody in the neighborhood knows he's like that" and I realized that I wasn't in that particular neighborhood, and so I didn't know. Or the time, the same year, that the seventh-grade pot dealer, teasing me, told me that he'd give me whatever I wanted "on the house," because unlike the other white kids I was "cool." And when I said hell no, I don't smoke pot, he laughed and said, of course you don't, because you're a schoolgirl, and I realized that I had this weird kind of insider status on both sides of the fence.

And I wouldn't have learned those things if I'd been in honors math class instead of the bilingual classes, or if I'd been in the "safe" schools on the other side of town. In high school, my parents broke down a bit and sent me to the Catholic school a few blocks from my house, which was much whiter--and most of my friends were the few students of color, and most of the guys I dated lived on the "bad" side of town, and the white kids were always amazed that I felt comfortable driving over there to see my boyfriends. My best friend, who is currently teaching at one of the best liberal arts colleges in the country, went to a "better" college than I did, and we both waited tables over the summers, and when customers would chit-chat with us and I said I was in college, they believed me, but they said to her, "oh come on, you *wish* you went to Big Ivy." A lot of that shit is invisible to most middle-class white kids--through no fault of their own--and when I used to tell those stories in some of the classes I taught, the white kids would start out saying, "oh, I'm sure that the teacher wasn't being racist, he just didn't hear you speaking Spanish but he heard the other kid"--until I said, "and what about this story? And this one? And this one?" And the students of color would say, "I was that brown kid, and the teachers *never* believed me," and then the white kids would say, "really? wow," and get kind of quiet and say, well, maybe yeah, after all. And then sometimes they'd start to see that there were things they just *did not know* that the brown kids did, and that not knowing was not their fault, but that nonetheless, it was a kind of ignorance, a kind of racism.

So I'm really glad, actually, that my parents had the guts not to protect me from the "bad" kids, or the drug dealers, or the boys who would grab my crotch in the halls (and yes, white students also deal drugs--the coke dealer in my high school was a white boy--and they also sexually harass girls, but it would have been very easy for my parents to hear those stories when I was in middle school and react by wanting me to be in a "safer" school). Because, really, when I was academically bored, I would just pull out a book and read after I'd finished the class work, and with two parents who were teachers, we did a lot of stuff at home that made up for the academic failings of my schools, but I would not have learned some of the things I learned at a "better" school. I wouldn't have seen my parents working with black and Latino parents to improve the schools I was in, and I wouldn't have seen how much easier it was for my parents to get teachers and principals to make exceptions for me (like putting me in the bilingual program, or letting me read my own books during class) when similar exceptions weren't made for other kids.

And those things were a pretty damn important part of my education.

Update: a couple of links.

1. Landismom's story of her decisions about where to put her kid in daycare--noting that nowadays, it is often the suburbs that are more integrated than the cities, what with the cost of housing.

2. An article from last May, that still stays with me, about one woman's experience integrating white schools after Brown v. Board:

Josephine's relatives worried for her safety. "She is going to get killed, that was my first thought," said Spencer Dungee, a cousin. He organized carloads of friends to patrol the school the first few mornings, just in case.

But Josephine and her parents apparently did not fully appreciate the danger.

"I thought the school would be able to take care of one child," Boyd said. "But we found out differently, in a hurry."

Any outburst, even tears, her parents had told her, would hand her tormentors a psychological advantage. Only once did she allow herself to be provoked. On that day, a white boy pushed her into a locker and passed along a crude message from his father, saying he had had sex with her mother the previous night. Josephine pushed back; a teacher broke up the scuffle.

The teacher did not want to hear about who had started it, Bradley said. "If you pass another lick," she warned Josephine, "you will be sent home."

"Why wouldn't he be sent home? " Josephine asked.

"Because you're the perpetrator," the teacher answered.

There were times she wanted to quit, like the days she had to go home to change her food-splattered clothes. Down the road in Charlotte, Dorothy Counts, the first black student at Harding High, had been pulled out by her parents the first week, after white students pelted her with rocks and shattered the rear window of the family car.

But Josephine persisted, feeling the weight of obligation. She learned that Greensboro High, with its expansive campus and big gymnasium, was nothing like Dudley. The books she received were new, while the worn texts at Dudley typically bore six or seven signatures. The science lab, she noticed, was fully equipped with microscopes. Dudley's had three.

Josephine was an outcast in two worlds. She began the year eating lunch alone in the library, and put aside any interest in school clubs and activities. Meanwhile, many of her black friends kept their distance. The boys she had dated her junior year no longer seemed interested. Her cousin, Spencer, escorted her to the Dudley prom.

"It was hard to understand then," Bradley said. "But I understand now that jobs of parents could have been in jeopardy had their children been noted to be friends of mine."

Bradley doesn't remember a thing about June 4, 1958, the day she became the first black student to graduate from a previously all-white public school in North Carolina. A telephone caller had warned there would be a coffin waiting for her at Brown's Funeral Home if she attended the ceremony. She went anyway.

No kid should have to go through that--and the woman profiled chose not to send her daughter to a school where she would be the only black child, not wanting her to have to repreat her mother's experience. But it's worth keeping this sort of thing in mind when we talk about not wanting to put our kids in any but the best, safest schools--the cost that black parents and their children were willing to pay to try to change things.