Atlanta touts itself as the Black mecca and iconic civil rights home that has a wealth of opportunity for blacks to be progressive and achieve the illusive “American Dream”. However, as an educator who has seen the grips of hunger in poverty in my student’s eyes, I know this is only a fairy tale. The glaring reality is that Atlanta has grown wealthier, yet whiter, since the days of our civil rights leaders and we have rested on a bygone era that has left black families, schools and communities behind. The facts remain that the median household income for a white family in the city is $83,722, compared to $28,105 for a Black family. That’s nearly a 3-to-1 ratio. Atlanta’s poverty rate is 24%, with the vast majority of them being children, which translates to 1 in 4 people are living in poverty, yet 1% of Atlanta’s top earners make $345,000 or more. We are one of the most segregated cities now than we were 60 years ago where resources, relationships and opportunities don’t flow equitably to the communities that need it most. Sadly in Covid, these facts don’t get better and this gap is only getting wider and deeper without any targeted intervention from even our Black elected leaders and business community. Yes, let me say this is also an indictment of their flawed leadership and indifference to the struggle of poor Black folks as well. Yet, these facts have not led to any changes or red flags of the systems that perpetuate these inequities, but has by- in- large transformed the narrative of poverty as an individual man-made flaw and not a structural systems one. This transformation has left systems and institutions unscathed and standing, while people have been made to believe they are broken when their pursuit of the American dream fails. Well I am here to waive the red flag and sound the alarm for all my families and students that are unable to do so. I am sounding the alarm that we have a system failure - and not human failure- when Blacks are 50% of Atlanta’s population, but make up 73% of the poverty rate and 80% of students who cannot read at or above grade level. This is not an individual flaw. This is systems working exactly as they were designed to fail Black people ( even with Black people manning the ship). I am waiving the red flag that in Southeast Atlanta, with the highest concentration of poverty, our schools are failing our students due to a lack of resources, intentional planning and strategic coordination with other institutions for long overdue investment. Right now, my community is about to lose over 350 families and students in the Thomasville Heights Elementary School (THES) community (which translates into $5.2 million+/year in school funding) because no one has invested in the Forest Cove/Four Seasons Apartments community (which contributes 99% of all THES students) and now they are set to shut down and displace hundreds of families. This will have ripple effects felt all throughout the Southeast Atlanta corridor in our schools, future development and our families. But there doesn’t seem to be any strategic coordination between developers, the city, the philanthropic community and schools on how we mitigate this issue for these families, our schools and community. Yet, parents, teachers, and students will be blamed for their poor choices if these families end up homeless in need of more governmental subsidy. This is how we perpetuate the meritocracy myth and self-righteously tell people to pick themselves up by their bootstraps while stealing the boots right off of their feet. So what needs to happen? My birthday was last week and while I host an Angel Tree gift donation for families every year on my birthday ( you can donate HERE to give a gift), this is not the answer to systemic problems where we charitably give to a resolution. I believe there needs to be more system-level investment and strategic partnership across institutions to invest in communities and Black people in the highest tracts of concentrated poverty.
All of this stuff is a part of a larger, more complex system that does not care how hard one works, but is already predisposed to favor the privileged in how it operates. We cannot be naive to believe otherwise. But there are things we can do to transform it and hold it accountable as well as the people caught in its traps. As the award winning city for highest income inequality, history is watching us, how will we respond Atlanta?
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AuthorEducator, student advocate and community activists. Archives
October 2021
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