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| The Problem We All Live With, Norman Rockwell
One of the most disheartening experiences for those who grew up in the years when Martin Luther King Jr. and Thurgood Marshall were alive is to visit public schools today that bear their names, or names of other honored leaders of the integration struggles that produced the temporary progress that took place in the three decades after Brown v. Board of Education, and to find out how many of these schools are bastions of contemporary segregation. It is even more disheartening when schools like these are not in deeply segregated inner-city neighborhoods but in racially mixed areas where the integration of a public school would seem to be most natural, and where, indeed, it takes a conscious effort on the part of parents or school officials in these districts to avoid the integration option that is often right at their front door.
Jonathan Kozol, "Still Separate, Still Unequal"
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Monday, January 21, 2013
Monday Meh, MLK edition
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i spent nine miserable years in school in Mississippi during segregation - I couldn't wait to graduate and leave.
ReplyDeletethe Ol'Buzzard
I guess whether or not one was in school during those years, MS wasn't much of a playground.
DeleteIn Detroit for the past 30 years we have had segregation, a boundary set by school district lines with Blacks mostly living in the city and Whites mostly living in the burbs.
ReplyDeleteWhat will be interesting is the next twenty or so years as those formerly predominantly white districts assimilate the black population that moved out of the city when the housing market crashed. Integration has finally come to Detroit Metropolis.
The white families will get vouchers to keep the status quo, if some of the Powers-That-Be have their way, I guess.
DeleteKozol never gets old, does he?
ReplyDeleteI was actually reminded of another quote I saw from the unlikely source of Konrad Lorenz, who claims that the degree that humans will go to to avoid discomfort borders on vice.
In Canada many claim a view of neutrality in the realms of racism, but it is there in the same avoidances of aboriginal children and youth.
I wonder how long it will be that difference engengers fear?
I fear too long.
thanks for the thoughtful post.