Editor’s Note: Good Faith Media is committed to strengthening faith and democracy, “protecting both and compromising neither.” A strong democracy depends on robust support for public schools. This week, we are highlighting that commitment with a series of articles focusing on the history and current state of the U.S. public school system.
From legally segregated to exclusive private schools, white supremacist tantrums have resulted in the taking of the best land, entire buildings, all the new books and the most resources to their side of the tracks. Hoarding the earth and “the fullness thereof,” racism continues to pollute the minds of those racialized as white, who feel entitled to special treatment as the cool kids of the world and further extends the timeline for when we can all sit together in the cafeteria.
And the questions remain as put forward by Beverly Daniel Tatum in “‘Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?’ And Other Conversations About Race,” “Why should Whites who are advantaged by racism want to end that system of advantage? What are the costs of that system to them?”
If this sounds like a homework assignment, it is. The work of togetherness, of whole-making, will require an all-hands approach followed by courageous truth-telling—not simply a show of hands.
“Too often we think the work of fighting oppression is just intellectual. The real work is personal, emotional, spiritual, and communal,” Bettina L. Love wrote in “We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom.”
Because when and where do we draw the line on oppression? While you’re thinking of an answer, just follow the redlining of America’s neighborhoods, which dates to the Great Depression.
You will notice a pattern of discriminatory lending practices that segregate African American and immigrant communities and protect the interests and wealth of European Americans. All hands in, this was not just the work of banks and other lending institutions as well as homeowners’ associations.
Churches were in on it, too. Richard Rothstein records numerous examples in “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.”
He wrote: “The violent resistance to the Sojourner Truth public housing project for African American families in Detroit was organized by a homeowners association headquartered in St. Louis, the King Catholic Church, whose pastor, the Reverend Constantine Dzink, represented the association in appeals to the United States Housing Authority to cancel the project. The ‘construction of a low-cost housing project in the vicinity… for the colored people… would mean utter ruin for many people who have mortgaged their homes to the FHA, and not only that, but it would jeopardize the safety of many of our white girls,’ Reverend Dzink wrote, adding this warning: ‘It is the sentiment of all people residing within the vicinity to object against this project in order to stop race riots in the future.’”
While Dzink tells on himself, this is all very telling. Government agencies and faith-based institutions conspire to deprive U.S. citizens of the right to homeownership, which results in the residential resegregation of communities with underfunded schools due to redlining. This vicious cycle is an indication that these systems of oppression are running smoothly.
“Inequality is endemic.” This is what EdBuild, a nonprofit that investigates school funding inequities, said about American public schools. “In fact, almost 9 million students in America—one in five public schoolchildren—live virtually across the street from a significantly whiter and richer school district. For every one student enrolled in a whiter and richer district in our study, three of their neighbors are left behind in lower-funded schools serving far more nonwhite students.”
Happy Public Education Week?
Still, my public education saved me, as did the teachers who ensured I was tested and later sent to a public school for the gifted. They even sent a special bus to transport me back and forth.
Those educators went to great lengths after my mother wouldn’t let me skip a grade. They ensured I didn’t miss a beat or an opportunity because of my environment.
bell hooks wrote of a similar experience. “Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be,” she wrote in “Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.” She continued, “School was the place where I could forget that self and through ideas, reinvent myself. School.”
At Brown Barge Middle School in Pensacola, Florida, I learned Latin and played violin. It was here that I first committed words to paper and wrote my first poem, which I still have. It was a nearly otherworldly experience and so very different from my previous learning environment.
Books, specifically, delivered me from the fate of an impoverished imagination. It started on a bookmobile in Escambia Arms Apartments. They brought the public library to us since it was not within walking distance.
Yet, and still, my public education continues to take me places, especially outside of the boundaries of white supremacy and the belief that I don’t deserve the best this world has to offer. It turns out it’s something you can teach. And since some people want to ban books, let’s commit this to memory.
To further our mutual understanding, click here to read “The Unfinished Battle for Integration in a Multiracial America – from Brown to Now” by Gary Orfield and Ryan Pfleger.