Skip to main content

What Really Degrades Us





This post is my response to the person who took aim at my writing last week with the following:

 I can never take you seriously because 95% of the stuff you talk degrades a white man even if it has nothing to do with race.  It's like you live a breath it.  After awhile people just dont pay attention to what you say anymore.

 Imagine how freeing it is to know that no one pays attention to what I say anymore. I could say anything!

 Recommended reading: (H/T Dan Reed, Just Up the Pike)

Bethesda Magazine, Caitlyn Peetz

Racial Equity Concerns Surface at Public Forum on School Redistricting 

The Daily, a podcast from Michael Barbaro

Why did New York’s most selective public high school admit only 7 black students?

As we contemplate (yet again) the prospect of redistricting in Howard County, it’s crucial to put our purpose front and center. Does the redistricting process have a mission statement? It should. And it should be trotted out before each meeting and during each meeting and after each meeting if necessary. And the gist of it should be that our goal is to foster/create/sustain the best schools for everyone’s children.

No qualifiers. No “yes, but as long as it doesn’t change my neighborhood.” Or “As long as my child gets the good stuff.” And, absolutely, positively NO “As long as it doesn’t change my property values.” As far as I am concerned, if anyone tries to use these qualifiers perhaps someone on the committee can jot them down, put them in a ceremonial urn, and at the end of each meeting they can burn them.

The goal of the Howard County Schools and its citizens is to foster/create/sustain the best schools for everyone’s children.

 If your response to this is that your child might lose something, then you are essentially saying that your child is benefiting from systemic inequities and you are invested in keeping it that way. It’s that childish, plaintive voice of Peanuts character Sally Brown as she dictates an enormously selfish letter to Santa:

All I want is what’s coming to me. All I want is my fair share.

 If maintaining your “fair share” means that other people’s children get consistently inferior and limited learning experiences, then that is a picture-perfect definition of structural/systemic inequity.

From the Bethesda Magazine article, we see demands for de facto segregation:

"White families are being punished"
“They won’t be able to keep up and they won’t study."
"It’s not our fault those children don’t have opportunities. You can’t put that burden on us."

Sound familiar? And Montgomery County claims to be a progressive, diverse community.

Kind of like...Howard County.

Degrade: to lower the character or quality of.

If we aren’t working for everyone’s children, it absolutely is our fault that “those children don’t have opportunities.”  No one is degrading us here, we degrade ourselves.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...
1 comment
Read more

F ³: We Are Not Entitled

  A college student went missing. His family and friends were distraught. The community was encouraged to be on the lookout and spread the word.  Days passed.  They must have been agonizing days for those who cared about the missing student. Thoughts that foul play had been involved cannot have been far from their thoughts.  Then, at last, the student was found. Alive. The news was shared with the public.  So. Much. Relief. A family had been reunited with their child. Even though we know that life is complicated, I think it is okay to accept this as a happy ending and leave it at that.  But the world of social media says no. For every expression of joy at the news came questions and even judgement. It became clear to me that some folks felt entitled to an explanation. They wanted the backstory. It’s as though they felt that, by enlisting the help of the public on social media, the authorities now owed them all the details. Television dramas often weave curr...
2 comments
Read more

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...
1 comment
Read more