I’ve spent a lot of time in New Orleans and this is a tough thing to say but I’m going to be really honest. The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster. And it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that we have to do better.
The word bitch jumped out at me from the floor of my son’s classroom, and I did a double take as I went to the teacher’s desk.
It wasn’t graffiti but an exercise in classification of males and females of different species of animals (i.e., male ducks are drakes, female ducks are ducks) that a child was still in the process of doing and would have to complete tomorrow. It wasn’t just that the bitch on the floor was the only one of all the classification cards that was handwritten; it just seemed strange to see a term that has, in my mind and in the minds of many others I know, “bad word” connotations in my son’s first grade learning environment.
I recognized the exercise for what it was and moved on…but I still wondered what the reaction would be from parents who asked their kids how school went that day and got an answer telling them that their young ‘un just learned the term for a female dog. Do you go into your child’s understanding of the term and the context in which it was learned, or do you go with a possible gut reaction of you learned a bad word in school and your brain and mouth need to be scrubbed clean!
That sort of internal war is not all that farfetched. I had to battle this recently when my son bounded into our car after school and proudly informed me that he’d found the anus of a leaf insect, aka, a walking leaf, in school that day. The still-living juvenile inside of me hears the word anus and giggles, bursting with the need to crack endless jokes or just to say the word anus over and over again and laugh uncontrollably. The parent in me that knew what was going on in the classroom complimented the kid on his discovery – but the juvenile still smiled while the parent said it.
I explained this to my husband that night after the little guy went to bed, and he said he wouldn’t have been able to hold back on the anus jokes himself. I’m glad I was the one in the car.
However, I’m still bothered by something that the little guy said when we went to pick up a friend’s daughter from another school last Friday.
“Mom, are you sure she’s here?” the kid asked me as we walked past all the students headed for their buses to find the little girl we knew from the synagogue.
“Yes, she’s here, honey,” I said absent-mindedly, preoccupied with trying to find a kindergarten-aged child in all the hubbub.
“But all the brown people go here!” he said.
I asked him to repeat what he’d said, then chose not to address his observation right away. “She’s definitely here, kiddo, we just have to ask where she is.” I told him, striding into the school building with him in tow, then, after asking many questions of teachers throughout the halls, finally connecting with the girl’s teacher and getting the child into the car with us.
The school had a majority black student body. The little girl was white. Ignorant white supremacists still raging all over this country would be horrified, sure. I was horrified – and I still am – at my own internal dialogue when I walked into the school…and at my reluctance to try to discuss my son’s observation with him and discover his internal dialogue on entering the school.
My first thought on pulling up to the school: well, this girl probably won’t be staying here for all her school years.
My relief at my son not bringing up the “brown people” comment after we found the girl: oh, he was just making an observation, I guess. If it comes up again, I can talk to him about it then.
Much as I don’t want to admit it, I have to take a cold, hard look at myself at times like these and realize I’m not as enlightened and free of prejudice as I want to be. The double standard still screams quite loudly within when it has the chance: a black child in a majority white school is somehow a mark of diversity and indicates how the child is somehow moving up in the world, but a white child in a majority black school is somehow being cut down a notch, or it speaks to a possible lack of money or just plain laziness on the part of the parent whose child is in that school.
These are the stereotypes that I must fight with all my strength.
The hypocrisy of it all is complete and utter bullshit that I wish I could erase from my brain. The mother of the child we picked up that day is single and is starting a new job. In all the time I have known her, she has been applying to the “academically better” schools within the current “system of schools” and hasn’t been able to get her child in. All the teachers I spoke to within the walls of that school were a helpful, friendly bunch who cared about the children entrusted to their care; the learning environment within seems to be doing right by all the kids there. Including my friend’s little girl.
And the fact that I didn’t bring this up with my son immediately afterwards says that I am also a damn coward. Fact of the matter is, he saw that traditional public school and made the judgment that a white girl couldn’t possibly be going where all the “brown people” were going. This kind of thing is starting to sit in his psyche, too, despite the numbers in his current school’s population showing that over half the student body is black. As a family, we need to counter this, as this is how prejudice starts.
To be sure, the schools here do have a long way to go and we cannot go back to the way things were before 8/29/05 – but we cannot make the mistake of saying that just because we got the old wood out, we can rest on the new and be confident that it is doing right by us. It is still valid to question what is being done in the name of reform and how it is affecting our kids and those who work closely with them.
But we need to do our homework and dig even deeper. The Federal Flood did not wash away prejudice. It didn’t eliminate racial or class differences. The decentralization and privatization of the public schools is the same old story in a new guise. To quote the Big Man here (even though he speaks of something not directly related):
There is no racial Messiah. All we have are us and God. The sooner we realize that, the sooner we can start improving things.
I need to sit down with my son and face my fears and his budding cultural, categorical prejudice. And this probably won’t be the last time I attempt to effect some change within us and trigger some actions born of that change. This has to be ongoing if we are all to strive for the equality and the change that must be. And it’s going to be hard. But I find it is even harder to have these terrible, irrational, prejudicial thoughts burning within.
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice post, Liprap. It reminded me of a recent study reported in Newsweek (http://www.newsweek.com/id/214989):
It was no surprise that in a liberal city like Austin, every parent was a welcoming multiculturalist, embracing diversity. But according to Vittrup’s entry surveys, hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race. They might have asserted vague principles—like “Everybody’s equal” or “God made all of us” or “Under the skin, we’re all the same”—but they’d almost never called attention to racial differences.
They wanted their children to grow up colorblind. But Vittrup’s first test of the kids revealed they weren’t colorblind at all. Asked how many white people are mean, these children commonly answered, “Almost none.” Asked how many blacks are mean, many answered, “Some,” or “A lot.” Even kids who attended diverse schools answered the questions this way.
Thanks for that, D. Learning that now makes me even more determined.
“As a family, we need to counter this, as this is how prejudice starts.”
I think this exact same thought when I hear folks excuse overt and latent bigoted behavior with “Oh, I”m sure they didn’t mean anything by it.” That’s not the point – if we don’t talk to our kids and other people openly about this, they go around thinking it’s ok and, later on, resort to worse acts of bigotry to rebel against the PC taboo.
“we cannot make the mistake of saying that just because we got the old wood out, we can rest on the new and be confident that it is doing right by us.”
An easy, tempting way out of thinking, isn’t it? New doesn’t fix inherent inequality.
Liprap – I hope every parent reads yer post and explains it to every child. Some ways of thinking have become so ingrained into society that even today, in 2010, the specters of the past show up when we least expect.
Some who read this may say, “Oh well, it’s because you’re in the south” – an equally ignorant point of view – this happens all over; north, south, Euope, UK…in places we laud for being “forward thinking” and “civilized”.
Of course one of the biggest problems (as ye pointed out) is that parents AND educators need to have open discussion with the younger generation to stem the tide. This does not exclude or excuse the same open discussion happening with the OLDER generations (though kids may show less respect for them than previously, they still learn their habits).
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds. (Bob Marley)
If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. (Archbishop Desmond Tutu)
liprap, i can tell you from experience, you have to start talking with them when they are very young. it’s difficult to deal with the outside world and all it’s hatred – but you can and you must teach unconditional love to your children. what they learn as small children will carry them threw life. i’m sure of it.
The “reformed” school systems we have are not fighting prejudice and racism, not alleviating them, but compounding and reinforcing them. It’s our hard job as parents to take our children in hand and have The Talks.
Kudos to you, Liprap. Your concern means that your son will benefit. Like said previously, it’s the kids whose racial epithets and moronic statements are ignored who we have to worry about.
But what do you do? Is a talk, or several talks, enough when the world you live in is largely white? [Not specifying you here, Liprap.] How do you tell your child, convince your child, that brown people are equal when they only see brown people driving buses, sweeping classroom floors and getting arrested on TV? Do you diversify your friends? Hang out on a different block for a parade? Change soccer leagues? In the highly stratified society we have, in America and especially in NO, what do you as a white parent do? I’d like to hear.
This ain’t an easy topic to discuss. What I find most interesting is how willing you are to examine it on a public internet forum, but you call yourself “a damn coward” when it comes up with your own child. That’s a strong fear response in regards to family, and believe me, I can relate.
I also find it important that you link your inner conversation to matters of public policy. The past is never dead, and the legacy of past injustice lives on. A lot of individuals I know choose to gloss over that fact, when making their cultural assumptions. One of the most insidious beliefs I’ve ever encountered is the constant and unspoken acceptance that “black schools” will never be held to the same standard or deserve the same support as “white schools.”
Remember, those stereotypes you must fight “with all of your strength” were designed and culturally transmitted that way for that reason. Jim Crow and segregation were far more than just laws on the books (and it ain’t like they been off the books that long). Culture matters, especially a culture developed and propogated for 400 years, and fighting it is like swimming upstream.
That’s no excuse, I know, but we’re really the first generation where there are enough people having this conversation to really make the sea change needed that will change that culture irreversibly. That’s what makes the local “reforms” so infuriating – their “changes” miss this point almost completely.
Because, let’s face it, if our governments treated “white schools” the same way they treated “black schools,” there would be rioting and protests all over suburbia.
Thank you so much for a compelling, revealing and gut wrenching look inside of all of us, trying to make sense of a crazy world, still convulsing in change during insane times.
It be a wonder we have gotten so far, if not for those long & difficult conversations with budding and innocent minds, like the one you’re having after writing this post.
Bless your heart.
Thanks for writing and sharing this. You’ve got this mother’s brain twitching thinking about how I might approach such conversations with my young one. And indeed, I’m totally shocked that I hadn’t thought about that before. We know we need to talk with our kids about sex. But I think most of us fail to talk directly about racial inequities and social justice, especially as it relates to our immediate environment. As parents, we have the primary responsibilty to teach our children well. But I’m also thinking we should talk to our schools and ask them not if, but how they talk about social justice in the classroom. And do they have any resources for helping parents have these conversations.
This is a very thought provoking post and hope you will consider submitting it to the T-P’s op-ed page so that it may have a larger audience.
I am so quoting you in my homework! ;o)