Modern Segregation

Everday I entered my high school, I was boldly greeted by a giant banner that hung in the entrance, reading “Lowell High School, Winner of the 2012 Blue Ribbon Award” with a poster on the side of the wall listing all the other achievements my high school had received. Lowell is a famous public school in California for its high-level academic ranking in the US, achieved through the unique admission process, where students had to take a placement test, and a score at or above a certain threshold would determine admission into the school. We had amazing resources, teachers, and support from the government as well as a solid and generous alumni association. Lowell, according to the US News Report 63% of the student population is of Asian descent, with the next highest at 17% being of Caucasian descent, and the rest of the 20% consisting of Black, Hispanic, Native American, and mixed races. Every year, there would always be an article in the news of Lowell attempting to bring in underrepresented populations. Whether that would be changing the admission process or transferring students from other schools, every attempt was always met with great resistance in fear of ruining the school’s representation.

Lowell’s attempt to diversify the student population is similar in concept to busing, the concept that Nikole Hannah Jones, an investigative journalist, spoke about on an episode of “The Daily” podcast, titled, “The Myth that Busing Failed: Brown vs Board of Education and School Segregation.” Jones speaks about the preconceived notion that busing, the action of the practice of assigning and transporting students to schools in an attempt to reduce racial segregation in schools. Back in times where racial segregation as a policy was recently deemed unconstitutional by the ruling of Brown vs the Board of Education, busing was done by loading children on buses from school districts that held a majority of Black people and then driving them to schools that consisted a majority Caucasian in an effort to reduce segregation. People were strongly opposed to this either because of their own discriminatory ideals or because they thought busing was an act of tyranny. In the present, this sentiment has translated into today’s social media conversations on twitter, triggered when Kamala Harris went after Joe Biden regarding the practice. Jones states, “And almost universally, people were saying, busing was a failed policy,” in regards to the views on twitter (Jones, The Daily, 2019). People on Twitter didn’t the see results of busing.

There was also a problem regarding racial segregation happening in the Northern States, but not in the same manner as the South. In the podcast, Jones states, “ The North has long liked to separate itself as not being racially backward like the South,” and so the North saw Brown vs Board of Education Ruling as explicitly written into the law (Jones, The Daily, 2019). However, they believed it shouldn’t occur to them. Where it was believed that segregation shouldn’t occur within the same facilities or same neighborhoods, gerrymandering and housing policies occurred to reflect racially segregated schools and districts. Jones stated, ”…most white Northern communities did not actually believe Brown v. Board of Education applied to them,”(“Jones, The Daily, 2019). Minorities in the North rightfully called out the hypocrisy of Northern White citizens for reflecting a segregated community. Being able to uncover this side of history, in a time where we still view the Southern States as very backward minded, with backward and problematic policies, while the Northern States were almost seen as a safe haven of equality and liberation for minorities, is important to tell a whole truth. Revealing the discriminatory behavior and dark reality of both North and South opens the eyes of the public to the fact that racism, although presented as individual cases by the media, is a display of a flawed system and society that still places American minorities on a conceptual scale, lower than their White counterparts.

Nikole Hannah Jones also speaks on another podcast called The American life in an episode titled “The Problem We All Live With” regarding a story of the Normandy school district, where the stripping of accreditation due to lack of staffing, facilities, and failure to meet educational standards opened a new opportunity for the children of Normandy to get their education at a majority White school 30 miles away called Francis Howell. This created an unintentional bussing system, where children of Normandy were picked up at 5:45 AM to be sent to the other school district. Bussing, as mentioned before, came under a lot of fire for being a failure in the past, and this event was no exception. Just the Northern States had claimed to separate themselves from the racist South, parents of Francis Howell that would be receiving Normandy children protested that Normandy students were going to bring violence, drugs, and crime, whilst ultimately denying that it was connected to race. In class, we discussed the institutionalized racism, where we minorities, particularly Black people, as a violent threat. In the case of Martin Brown, he was shot unarmed three weeks after he had graduated from the Normandy school district. Jones states, “ Michael Brown became a national symbol of the police violence against black youth…” as an individual case that displays the whole of society’s conceptually innate bias and fear against minorities just as the parents of Francis Howell displayed (Jones, The American Life, 2019). The constant fear mongering done onto society was being recognized.

However, where busing was seen as a danger and failure, it actually was successful. When Black children were sent to be integrated into White majority schools, they suddenly had access to better quality and higher quantity amount of resources. As Jones states,” There’s a lot of data that shows that black students going through court-ordered integration, it changed their whole lives. They were less likely to be poor. They were less likely to have health problems. They lived longer,” and there was no significant evidence that White students were ever adversely affected by this (Jones, The American Life, 2019). Lowell High School knew they had the resources to support underprivileged students, providing quality education for free, and to give students a new opportunity at a better life, yet still an ongoing issue.

Many students at the NGS house who receive tutoring go to the public schools around Marin County, coming from lower-income families. The student that I’m personally tutoring goes to San Rafael High school as well as several other students that my peers are tutoring. I had a conversation with my student after we finished with the session about her school, where she opened up to me about her teachers and her struggle to find passion in her learning. She enjoyed math, even if it was hard because the teacher is passionate about education. This particular teacher believes in the power of education and freeing of the mind through knowledge, but unfortunately, my student couldn’t say this about the other teachers, where she felt they were teaching just to keep a job. With my experience at Lowell, I want to be that great resource that my students can go to for help. However, it’s unfortunate the lack of integration that still occurs in public and private schools, and the academic gaps it creates between schools prevent students from achieving their full academic potential. Through NGS, I hope to serve these students to not only to increase their academic standings in their classes and give them the tools they need to be successful in the classroom but to encourage them to use this knowledge to go out and change the status quo.