On Education, Policing and Institutions That Were Never Meant to Serve the Black Population
This week, a police officer was called on a black Yale student who had fallen asleep in the common area of her dorm while studying.
https://twitter.com/BrennaSimonSays/status/994403438736928769
“I have every right to call the police,” you see another white woman say in a video recording of the encounter. “You cannot sleep in that room.”
“We determine who is allowed to be here and who is not, regardless of whether you feel you’re allowed to be or not,” one of the white officers says to the young woman.
If you dig a little more, you discover that the white woman in the video who declared her “every right to call the police” has done this before, calling the police on one of the black student’s friends, who got lost in the building a few months back. Ironically, the woman considers herself an advocate for human rights with a particular interest in perceptual and social cognition.
Which makes this thread all the more poignant:
https://twitter.com/MsKellyMHayes/status/994372632190640133
And it brings to the forefront the idea that the right of black men and women in this country to simply exist and live equal lives to their white counterparts is so threatening to the existing power structure for some, that it justifies the trivializing of the lives of some to maintain the comfort of others. And you see this from the founding of this country, where black folks, even free black folks, were killed and beaten for trying to learn to read and write in the earliest days. Eventually, after slavery, schools started to open up for these students, but they were never adequately resourced to afford the same levels of education. Later, lawsuits sprung up to demand black students be entitled to receive the same education — integration was never about an idea that black students were better off if they could be around white students, it was about the idea that black students would be better off if they could have access to the same education that white students had — but residential segregation still enabled de facto school segregation, when it wasn’t coded into policy.
In the schools that were more mixed, either through bussing or through families managing to break through discriminatory lending and real estate steering and zoning practices to integrate neighborhoods, you see clear discrepancies in how discipline is applied to suspend students of color and keep them out of the classroom. There is persistent over-policing of black neighborhoods, as the institution is primarily leveraged to reinforce social norms and remind the people living there to stay in their places, thanks to both Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs and Bill Clinton’s crime bill. And the students face the same over-policing in schools, with more arrests for minor infractions compared to their white counterparts continue to plague black students.
But for the overwhelming majority of black students, they’re stuck in segregated, underperforming schools. Schools where the teachers are dedicated to the mission, but where the cities and districts and states have failed to uphold their basic responsibility to maintain the upkeep of the schools and provide enough desks for each child and current textbooks. Where, in places like Flint — or even Baltimore — the students can’t even drink the water that comes out of the fountains. Where, even when they’re able to get an influx of money from private donors and hope to add in something like a science lab to enhance the opportunities for the children in those schools, they have to apply that money to cover the failure of the system to provide schools in good condition. And states like Maryland continue to hide behind funding models that rely on local income taxes as an excuse why children in Baltimore City have grossly disparate educational experiences from those in the county that surround them — there isn’t enough money coming in from local taxes to put more into the city schools, so they’ll continue to be in disrepair, despite the fact that the state as a whole is the richest in the country, based on median household income.
Policing as an institution in this country started with slave patrols and the definition of the “public order” police are sworn to defend still remains largely subjective. Schools, too, were founded on a premise of exclusion.
When you couple all of these things with the implicit and explicit biases that prevail in this country, it is no wonder that students of color are still falling behind in a system that was never created for them to get ahead. And dancing around the issues is not helping — last week, I accompanied my daughter’s class on a field trip to Mt. Vernon, home of George Washington. One of the babies (fourth-graders, but they’re all my babies) asked one of the re-enactors why George Washington held slaves for the entirety of his life, if he was supposedly morally opposed. The actor politely acknowledged it as a good, but complex question and eventually settled at the conclusion that it’s just the way things were, the laws of the time dictated as much.
Which is an absurd way to explain it away. What he should have said is that giving up his slaves while he was alive would have interrupted Washington’s comfort, and freeing them upon his death would have interrupted his children’s comfort because they’d lose some of their inheritance. (Though Washington did free some of his slaves upon his death, some came with his wife as dowry, and he would have had to sell some of his property to buy their freedom, which would have affected his children’s inheritance, the actor explained.) Or, more simply, even though he allegedly thought it morally repugnant, when morality and maintaining his own comfort and power collided, his own self-interests prevailed.
This is the narrative it’s time we taught. It’s time for white doctoral students at Yale to realize their comfort and sense of power doesn’t trump the comfort and right to exist of the students of color in their dorm rooms, and for white gentrifiers to be taught that their desire to live on a block does not trump the right of the people who have been there for generations to live their lives as they always have. It’s time to teach future educators that if they wish to really make a difference in the lives of children, they may have to sacrifice some of their own comfort and what they know as true to go out and experience things through the eyes of their students, and it is time for educators at all levels to stop selling a historical account that is comfortable and palatable at the expense of truly teaching lessons and having conversations that can move us all forward, and closer together.
However, all of this would require those in power and with the authority to hold others accountable to sacrifice some of their own comfort and their own power to ensure everyone has a seat and at the table and an equitable plate, depending on his or her own dietary preferences. Equity and inclusion in education isn’t about everyone having the same plate, or experience — it’s about making sure everyone has enough based on his or her needs. And that might mean those who can afford more might have to give up some comforts to provide an equitable education to those who don’t have the local property tax bracket to support it, or better yet, agreeing to live next to them and sending their children to the same schools so their privilege might elevate others, too.
images CC0 via Pixabay.
