My White Friends Can’t Tell Me They’re Not Racist Until They’re Comfortable With Their Kids Attending Schools With Black Kids

©By Dr. Rhonda Sherrod

The first thing I noticed when I moved to Mississippi was the appalling dual system of education. “Jesus,” I thought. “I didn’t think it was possible to get worst than Chicago, even in the deep South.”

But there it was. One didn’t have to know much about the city of Jackson to know that this or that elementary school was for Black kids. If it was a hideous, dilapidated, rundown schoolhouse with a cracked-up rough looking “playground,” obviously, it was for Black kids.

Many of my peers in the graduate programs where I attended school were, like me, older students returning to school for credentials to begin a second career. When I questioned my white schoolmates about where their children were enrolled, I learned that their kids attended private high schools that put them on a trajectory to go to Ivy League universities.

As I got to know my job colleagues and neighbors, all “nice white people,” we began to engage in deeper, more substantive conversations. That’s when I questioned them — all avowed good people “without a racist bone in their bod[ies]” — about how they could be comfortable laying their heads on a pillow at night with the knowledge that Black kids were attending schools that they would never, ever, under any set of circumstances, allow their kids to attend. The hemming and hawing was…