I told myself this today that updating a blog does not have to be rocket science. All I have to do is write what I’ve been thinking about for the last week. But it feels hard after everything that happened last week in the news.
I’ve been thinking on and off about an article I read a few weeks back called, “Choosing a School for my Daughter in a Segregated City” by Nikole Hannah-Jones:
Hannah-Jones talks about the segregated school system in Brooklyn, New York as a microcosm for the education system in our country. How people buy and cram themselves into the good neighborhoods so their children can get into “good” schools. How schools are segregated as a result of housing costs (and a long history of housing discrimination) that it has left low-income primarily black and Latino children out of the more desirable, resource-flushed public schools in the area.
This is one of those articles that I read and stayed with me. Well-researched, especially on the history of segregation/integration in schools, and with a deeply personal angle, it hits all the marks of a resonant, thought-provoking article that really shook me up. When I was picking up my son, when I was reading up on the news last week, when I was cooking, when I was writing, and when talking with friends—it never left my brain because I knew Hannah-Jones spoke the truth. Our school systems are very, very segregated.
She writes, “Legally and culturally, we’ve come to accept segregation once again. Today, across the country, black children are more segregated than they have been at any point in nearly half a century. Except for a few remaining court-ordered desegregation programs, intentional integration almost never occurs unless it’s in the interests of white students.”
I saw it when we were at the wonderful Children’s Museum in Chicago. At the museum we saw groups of kids segregated by race all on their own separate field trips. There were groups of African-American kids, groups of white kids, and even a group of Asian-American kids (they were a Chinese school), who didn’t really mingle with one another. I remember how stark it was to see those divides before my eyes. I went home and looked it up online and found that Chicago is one of the most segregated cities in the country. From what I see, similar things happen in the Bay Area.
But all the events from last week and this article have gotten me thinking about the racial injustices in our country. I’m starting to see some of the links: housing, education, law enforcement. And I cannot turn a blind eye. Schools play a huge part in this. It’s easy to get our kids into the “right” school system and then completely ignore the problem, but Hannah-Jones throws down the gauntlet when she writes:
True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage, and when it comes to our own children, that can feel almost unnatural. Najya’s first two years in public school helped me understand this better than I ever had before. Even Kenneth Clark, the psychologist whose research showed the debilitating effects of segregation on black children, chose not to enroll his children in the segregated schools he was fighting against. “My children,” he said, “only have one life.” But so do the children relegated to this city’s segregated schools. They have only one life, too.
Nancy Kim Park 