Two weeks ago was the 60th anniversary of the integration of the first black student in New Orleans Public Schools and that brave little girl was Ruby Bridges. (I wonder her thoughts on the now more segregated and non-public schools of New Orleans today...but anywhoo.) She is also the infamous subject of the famous 1964 Norman Rockwell painting, “The Problem we all live with'' which so eloquently captures the essence of the hate and racism of this country’s legacy all wrapped up in a 6 year old little girl just trying to go to school. Recently, this classic portrait was also just adapted by t-shirt artist, Breia Goeller, to include Ruby’s shadow overcast by a more emboldened adult Black woman, Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris, whose figure is on the move, paying homage to the women who paved the way for Kamala’s victory to be possible. However, this adaptation, while aspirational and inspiring, mis-represents the state of our country on issues of race, class, and how opportunity is accessed for marginalized communities, as if to suggest, “We have arrived”. But this is the same premature excitement Black America had when President Obama, the first Black president, was elected to office in 2008 when Black America mistook an election of a Black president for Black political, racial and economic power that never materialized. We can’t make the same mistake again. Racial representation does not equivocate to shared ideals, objectives and goals where when one of us wins, we ALL win. But it sure nuff’ feels good seeing that Black melanin represented in one of the highest offices in the land and wanting to celebrate this monumental accomplishment for what it is and not what it purports to represent. This Thanksgiving, I am most thankful for the progress that we have achieved as my own Black daughter can witness a Black woman in that seat. Yes , Lord! However, representative victories are not the same as actual victories and Black America can not continue to be content with a fraction of our people “making it” when it is vital that we ALL make it. I am not saying we cannot turn up for this major WIN, but my challenge is that we also take a more critical lens in this moment at the real problem we all live with THEN as we STILL do NOW and really evaluate our next steps so we don’t get lost in a pyrrhic victory, where we lose more than we gain. Let’s face facts: Racial segregation in schools has not improved in the 60 years since Ruby Bridges brave steps and maybe even worse now because it is orchestrated through more subversive de facto housing discrimination and persistent income inequality in Black areas. Sadly, even in New Orleans, where they restructured the schools away from automatic neighborhood assignments toward choice Charter schools, which have still largely remained segregated with white families opting out of them into more selective private schools. Also, schools are not just more segregated but they are also still underperforming their white counterparts. Like right here in the Black mecca, Civil Rights capital of the world, Atlanta, ONLY 1 in 5 Black students read on grade level in comparison to 4 in 5 White students respectively. The reality is racial integration was not the promised land that Black folks were sold to believe and in schools it was even more so a gross failure in southern Black communities where their entire neighborhoods were ravaged by white flight and less systemic economic investment. The truth is systemic racism is the “problem we all live with”, as Norman Rockwell coined in 1964. By- in-large, this problem stays alive and well, because of our own collective investment in the meritocracy narrative that this country has sold bait and line. The narrative sounds a little like the three little pigs where there's a big bad wolf who will eat you up if you don’t work hard and be strong. Thus, justifying why only a few Black folks, like Vice President Elect Kamala Harris, make it because of their own personal responsibility and hard work while diminishing the role of this country’s systemic barriers and traps, that are the true wolves, that have set the masses of Black folks up to be consumed from the outset. The primary issue with this narrative is everyone celebrates the lone pig that survived the wolf, yet blatantly chastises the pig's siblings for their poor choices that condemns them for their own demise by the wolf. Sadly, this narrative is most detrimental and pervasive in our schools, even 60 years later, where America's meritocracy myth has thrived the most under education’s ruse as the great equalizer. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates shares in his novel Between the World and Me, “...No one directly proclaimed that schools were designed to sanctify failure and destruction, but a great number of educators spoke a great deal of personal responsibility in a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.” Nowhere is this more true than in segregated Black schools across this country that largely justify the failure of millions with “oh, they just didn’t work hard enough” to explain away the centuries of structural racism and barriers that held them in their clinches long before they even walked the planet. Unfortunately, this framework of personal responsibility, as a solution to Rockwell’s “problem”, has helped to garner societal acceptance, not just from Whites, but of Blacks even more so, to justify mass incarceration of Black bodies, deplorable living conditions for poor Black families and exploited low-wage and dangerous jobs disproportionately helmed by Black bodies because “they did not work hard enough so this is what they get”. This narrative is a disservice to our Black children and very much dangerous when weaponized in the hands of influential people ( I am looking at President Obama, Bill Cosby, and Tyler Perry and others who espouse the tenants of meritocracy and personal responsibility to explain away the successes and failures in Black communities without regard to the systems that shape the context in which they live). Either way, right now history is taking note, yet again, at where we are and how we solve this problem in each generation. While it feels good to see some progress to this problem in over 400 years, with the election of a Black woman as the U.S.V.P., we can’t be content with the pyrrhic victory of an election that does not yield tangible results in the lives of Black children and their families. We can no longer accept tokenism representation as Black political and economic power. We can no longer cherry pick a talented tenth of Black children to succeed as we wholesale fail the rest of the ninety ( this is how integration in America’s schools was started by the NAACP and we just keep doing it even though it doesn’t work). We can no longer believe and sell the toxic spoils of the meritocracy myth to our children as truth. We must demand more of our leaders and systems, even our Black ones, who no longer signify a WIN for all of us when THEY MAKE IT, but when their WORK shows up for all of us ( Black folks), Kamala included, so we ALL CAN MAKE IT. #Period
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The past 2 weeks has been a true roller coaster as we all have held our breath to find out who our next President will be. Whew, I was/am biting all the nails over here. But I am back now, tired and worn out, but I am back. I know everybody is ready for the world to change now, but nope, we all still got work to do. Now is the time that we plan how we truly “build back better” as Biden promised on the campaign trail. In the heat of a surging pandemic, millions of Americans unemployed and half the nation's children in some form of virtual learning, we have our work cut out for us. However, the reality is “the Harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few”. We were able to get a record turn out to vote (which was EPIC) but for more sustained action at school board meetings, local neighborhood meetings and PTAs we are coming up short to mobilize all of this momentum. But I am here to share voting is not the end of political power, it is only the beginning. However, partly due to human apathy and partly due to systemic oppression, civic action has been trivialized into meaningless hashtags and a vote every 4 years ( not much fanfare for local elections frfr). But the sad reality is there has not been dedicated education to civic activism in schools beyond voting and the three branches of government, but then we wonder why parents and community members don’t understand what’s happening at local school board meetings. BUT I ASK, WHO IS TEACHING THEM WHAT IT ALL MEANS AND HOW THEY CAN ENGAGE WITH IT? NO ONE. I sit on my neighborhood’s executive governance board and my local high school’s executive governance board. However, no one has shown me how it all works and what I should be doing to serve my constituents and fellow neighbor’s better. I mean we can complain all day that only 20% of the people are doing 80% of the work but that dismisses that there could be people who want to help but just have no clue where to even start. I have a Masters degree in Public Administration and Policy, but I still don’t understand all of the tools and structures that are being used against or for the school and community I serve. So, I imagine that the “laborers are few”, in part, because no one has reached out to them to explain how all of this stuff works that can help and benefit their kids and families. But this is how the system is designed to disenfranchise and marginalize poorer and blacker communities, who disproportionately have less time and resources than their wealthier and whiter counterparts, from learning HOW the system works in order to leverage it to their advantage. Sadly, even for me, as a black kid in a black school, I only learned about the three branches of government and what my President or Congress did ( which was all about a bunch of white guys that did not seem relevant to my life). I really never learned about how change works on County Commissioner boards, Boards of Assessors ( that determine home values which could explain low homeownership rates among blacks urggh), or State School boards. I never understood or learned how to lobby or petition to make change in my own schools or neighborhoods. But now that I am on these boards and see the blatant lack of training and tools given to them, I see why we do not have laborers showing up to work as well as the cumbersome processes that exist to even get people in the work. So what do we do? If we want more laborers, then it is imperative that we start by:
Yes, lots of work for us to do. So as a great deal of us just celebrated a big presidential victory, we now must ask ourselves where are the laborers and WHO will teach them what we need to do next. How do we fight and win for our kids in local school boards and city councils across this country? How do we get them to show up beyond the voting booth, but to the everyday meetings in our neighborhoods? How do we make that work matter too? Do we need to change the time or format of the meetings? Do we need to make the meetings more accessible for diverse groups and audiences? No matter the answer to these questions, let’s not wait another minute. Let’s start today. If you just voted in this election and want change at your local school or in your community, focus on DOING THE NEXT BEST STEP FORWARD to get active in your community. For some the next best step is finding out when is the next neighborhood meeting, reaching out to your local school board representative or checking on your local Senior facility to see how you can help. But whatever you do next make sure you find a way to bring other laborers along with you because this work requires all the laborers we can get. |
AuthorEducator, student advocate and community activists. Archives
October 2021
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