The plan would mean children with lower test scores (hear: race-based economic inequality) would have a chance to attend a school with better resources.4 As reported, one white parent argued that to bring less prepared students into the local public school would create “impostor syndrome” for those children. Did he believe they would be pretending to be white or pretending to be educated? “Whether it’s based on academics, on race, on economics—segregation is bad for kids,” one principal argued. “When we’re a family, we try to look out for the best interest of all kids, not just the ones in our households.” Another white parent felt, as reported by the New York Post, “There are some really good middle schools in New York City and it shouldn’t just be rich kids who get to go to them…. School integration is scary. Even when it’s the right answer, it’s scary.” Does he mean proximity to nonwhites is a threat?
The inability of white people to see children other than white children as children is a reality that frankly leaves one hopeless about a change in attitudes regarding the perceived humanity of black people. The phrase “they are just kids” exists with the unspoken “except when they are black.” The full thought lives beneath the civility of more whites than can be imagined and many “exceptional” people of color whose economics bring them closer to their identification with white dominance and antiblack racism. There also exist blacks who are embarrassed by black and brown poverty because they see life through the judging lenses of white discrimination and understand their own exceptionalism as tenuous inasmuch as its optics are stained by a disadvantaged black population at large. We are a sad lot churning inside the repetitions and insistences of the “afterlife of slavery.”5
In addition, a bill that would have replaced the standardized SHSAT test and given the top children from all the city’s middle schools access to free magnet high schools never made it to the floor of the New York Senate. Eliza Shapiro and Vivian Wang reported that “some Asian families argued that the mayor’s plan discriminated against the low-income Asian students who are now a majority at the schools.” For example, Shapiro and Wang pointed out that of the 895 seats available at Stuyvesant High School in 2019, only 7 went to black students. Low-income black and Hispanic students are dispensable in conversations regarding segregation in both middle schools and high schools apparently. We knew the position of many white parents in policies that would integrate black and brown children, but now some Asian parents are taking on the racially coded rhetoric and positions usually heard from some whites.
The Upper West Side school principal’s vigilance in the District 3 debate is perhaps the element of surprise that my husband and I are seeking in the world of our child. Someone white who is not wholly identified with whiteness, even as he is still capable of being surprised by its Jim Crow ways.6
What is it we want for our daughter? Perhaps it’s the ability to negotiate the world with an empathic imagination. The thing that brought both my husband and me to the gymnasium is the knowledge that though the deep-seated racist systems are reaffirmed and the evidence is there for us to see, I still want the world for my daughter that is more than this world, a world that has our daughter already in it.
NOTES
1. Text As we sit across from her white teachers, I smile and nod but really only want to ask them if they actively think about their unconscious inevitable racism and implicit bias, which is unavoidable given our world, the very world I want for my daughter.
Notes and Sources In “The Power of Teacher Expectations: How Racial Bias Hinders Student Attainment,” Seth Gershenson and Nicholas Papageorge used the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (which “followed a cohort of 10th-grade students for a decade” and included a survey of teacher expectations about their students) to find that “white teachers, who comprise the vast majority of American educators, have far lower expectations for black students than they do for similarly situated white students. This evidence suggests that to raise student attainment, particularly among students of color, elevating teacher expectations, eliminating racial bias, and hiring a more diverse teaching force are worthy goals.” See also the same authors in the Economics of Education Review article “Who Believes in Me? The Effect of Student-Teacher Demographic Match on Teacher Expectations,” by Seth Gershenson, Stephen B. Holt, and Nicholas W. Papageorge.
2. And what that meant was that generations of young African-American children were pushed to achieve this mission [of integration]. And we sent them into places that were unsafe, where they were humiliated, and their egos were decimated in structures—as Toni Morrison said, “Out there, they don’t love our children.” And these generations of African-American children have felt abandoned, and there’s a chasm that has grown up between younger and older African Americans, based on this sense of younger people, of having felt that they were abandoned. And they don’t understand, why did we send them, young children, into places like that without any protection?
Ruby Sales
3. Text … white parents who are now living in the gentrified district resisted the integration of the public middle schools that are now predominantly white.
Notes and Sources According to a 2016 study by the Furman Center that tracks the gentrification of New York City neighborhoods, in the Harlem section of District 3 and adjoining areas, Hamilton Heights, Manhattanville, and West Harlem, the white population increased by 55 percent, along with the Asian and Hispanic populations. The black population dropped by 41 percent.
Michael W. Kraus, Julian M. Rucker, and Jennifer A. Richards, “Americans misperceive racial economic equality” (PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America): “The results of the present studies suggest that Americans largely misperceive race-based economic equality. Indeed, our results suggest a systematic tendency to perceive greater progress toward racial economic equality than has actually been achieved, largely driven by overestimates of current levels of equality. Although this tendency to overestimate current racial economic equality was observed among both White and Black Americans, there was also a significant status divide in the magnitude of these misperceptions: high-income White Americans’ overestimates of current racial economic equality were larger than those generated by low-income White Americans and by Black Americans across the income distribution. Further, the present results suggest that the tendency to overestimate racial equality is likely shaped by both motivational and structural factors that lead people to deny and/or remain unaware of the ways in which race continues to shape economic outcomes in contemporary society.”
4. Text The plan would mean children with lower test scores (hear: race-based economic inequality) would have a chance to attend a school with better resources.
Notes and Sources
Chalkbeat: “Another Integration Plan for Upper West Side Middle Schools Is Met with Some Support, but Also Familiar Concerns,” by Christina Veiga: “Though diversity has generally been shown to benefit students, … [a parent at P.S. 84] pointed to studies that showed negative effects when students were mixed by ability levels. ‘The research suggests it won’t work and in fact may backfire,’ he said. ‘I think mandating academic diversity and taking a one size fits all approach is a disservice.’”
5. Text We are a sad lot churning inside the repetitions and insistences of the “afterlife of slavery.”
Notes and Sources Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route: “If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.”
6. Text Someone white who is not wholly identified with whiteness, even as he is still capabl
e of being surprised by its Jim Crow ways.
Fact Check Yes, education and Jim Crow connection.
Notes and Sources Frederick Douglass to Unknown (transcribed):
My dear sir:
Washington, D.C., November 23, 1887
Pardon delay—answer to your letter made careful enquiry necessary. From all I can learn colored Lawyers are admitted to practice in Southern Courts, and I am very glad to admit the fact—for it implies a wonderful revolution in the public sentiment of the Southern States. I have not yet learned what are the inequalities between the races as to school privileges at the south—In some of the states the time allotted to colored schools is less than that allowed to whites. And I have heard and believe that in none of the states are the teachers of colored Schools as well paid as the teachers of White Schools. My own observation has been that white teachers of Colored schools in the southern states, show but little interest in their pupils. This is not strange, since they have been selected as teachers more because of their necessities, than from any interests they have shown in the progress and elevation of the colored race. [struck: bu] I say this not of all, but of those in Virginia for instance who have come under my observation.
In Kentucky I believe so far as the law is concerned equal advantages are extended to colored children for Education, and the Same may be true of other states. I think the Bureau of Education will give you all the information you may require on this branch of the subject of your enquiries, our wrongs are not so much now in written laws which all may see—but the hidden practices of a people who have not yet abandoned the idea of Mastery and dominion over their fellow man.
With great Respect Yours truly
Fredk Douglass
Cedar Hill Anacostia D.C. Nov: 23. 1887
notes on the state of whiteness
tiki torches
A year after James Alex Fields Jr. intentionally drove into a group of people protesting a Nazi march and killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, I mention to a white male friend that though there was a cross burning the fall before we arrived at college in 1981, back then I did not realize how many white supremacist terrorist acts were essentially about me. My presence, even as I was unknown and invisible to whoever set it ablaze that year, was being marked as an American target. It’s been almost forty years and my friend, sitting across from me at his dining room table, says he had no idea our alma mater was the site of a cross burning. No one had mentioned it.
This white man and I have seen each other infrequently but consistently over the years. He attends my events, which I take as support of our friendship and my endeavors. I am fond of both him and his wife, and though I’ve never visited him in particular, meeting up is always a bonus when I find myself in the Twin Cities. We have squeezed in a dinner here and there, narrated the lives of our children, and checked in with each other about mutual friends. The years pass, and we maintain the same level of comfort and familiarity. I liked him at eighteen and I like him in my middle ages, but I wonder if it’s an overstatement to think of the memory of the cross burning as a fundamental difference or a deficiency of something between us.
I say, I’m pretty sure it happened.
We both pull out our phones.
Wow, he says, having located the event in the memory bank of his search engine.
He seems perplexed by his own lack of knowledge. Wow, he repeats. As I watch him, I realize I’m seeing what whiteness does to reality or, rather, its memory. The poet Emily Dickinson scribbled on an envelope, “But are not all Facts Dreams as soon as we put them behind us—” No one he encountered—administration, faculty, friends, upperclassmen—thought a cross burning was worth mentioning, important enough to mention, or if it was mentioned, it was not done in such a way as to break open an understanding that would cement it in his memory.
I begin to wonder who among my white college friends knew about the cross burning and still remembers it as part of their college experience and American life. I can count the people I’m still in touch with from college on one hand. I decide to call a close white friend who I think might recollect the moment, but, in all honesty, my expectations are low. This friend remains someone I like to check in with regularly. And, oddly and fortuitously, when I ask her about the cross burning, it turns out she’s the one who reported it. She witnessed the act and saw those who carried it out. Perhaps, though I don’t remember this, she was the one who told me. Could our closeness in college be attributed in part to an understanding of what remains possible given our history?1 Even as I held myself at a distance from the event, it remained as part of the landscape in which I passed my college years.
My friend has the looks and pedigree of a WASP. There’s natural blond hair, blue eyes, and a family that dates back to the Mayflower. She knows it, I know it, we all know it the minute we see her. Hers is a world of New England prep schools, our shared formerly gentlemen’s college, and Ivy League graduate institutions. We have little in common beyond our schooling, but still we remain close. She was leaving a Black Student Union party on Homecoming weekend when she encountered the burning cross. That she saw it did not make her conscious of black people since she already had an integrated life, but it no doubt helped to make the conversations between us less work.
I wonder if white people don’t develop friendships with people of color, especially blacks, because they don’t want to be implicated in or confronted by white violence against black people. Imagine going to a black friend’s house and sitting down to dinner with a tall glass of lead-tainted water.2 I am being fanciful, I know (white people don’t need to give black people a thought most of the time), but if I follow this line of logic, I imagine the violence complicates all the misguided aspirations for a postracial anything. Then the white person would have to negotiate actual clear and present danger even as others insist that blacks need to just “rise up.” My friend’s proximity to predominantly black students at the house party brought her literally face-to-face with white terrorism. I wonder how she processed it all.
What happened? I ask her. What happened, and what were you thinking?
In 1980, when I was a freshman in college, one of my best friends, and the person I roomed with sophomore year, was a black man. We went to a lot of parties together, and one evening we went to a Black Student Union party in one of the dorms on campus. It was open to anyone, so as a white woman, I was welcome. I left the party early, and as I was walking out of the building into the dark of a grassy area next to a stand of trees, I saw two men dressed in white robes running toward the trees. They lit something on fire and a cross that had been put up that evening burst into flames as they ran off. It happened so quickly. I guess I could have chased them, but I ran back inside to where other friends were dancing and started shouting to come look. Everyone rushed to the windows and outside. Someone called security, and I don’t actually remember if we waited for security to put out the fire or if someone from the party did. It was such a shock. How could someone who lived in our community be willing to commit an act this offensive and disgusting? How could a group do this together?
As the main witness, I spent time with security describing what I saw. A few days later, I was asked to come to the administration building, where I sat down with some higher-up administrators who showed me a collection of pictures and asked if these were any of the perpetrators. It was dark, it was far away, they had sheets on. There was no way I could identify the men who did this. I was asked to the office a second time to look at another collection of possible perpetrators. Again, I told them I didn’t see any faces well enough to identify the people.
I was eighteen. I’m white. But I still understood how offensive and disturbing it was to have people light a cross next to a Black Student Union party. I’m sure it was far more upsetting to the black students.3 I could move on, but I don’t know how other students felt after that. My friend took it in stride. It’s just a few stupid guys.
The questions I have ask
ed myself since then:
Instead of running back into the party to point out the cross burning in the yard, should I have run over and tried to put it out, neutering the impact? The burners were trying to offend the BSU partygoers. If no one saw the cross, their planning and efforts would be wasted. But was it important for people to see it? Could I have just told people, and they could have seen the evidence on the lawn—a burnt cross lying on its side? I don’t know if that would have been better.
Should I have chased the guys to get a better look at who they were? I think I was a little frozen with shock, but maybe I could have gotten a better look at them, identified them, and forced them to leave the community and school.
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