I've been thinking a lot about school: what's its purpose, who does it serve, how can it be an equalizing force that dismantles white supremacy? I think about these questions often, but lately even more so. The beginning of the school year always has me revisit my personal statement that I wrote for admission to the credential program at Chico State and rereading bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress (in bits, usually as a form of procrastination).
Yesterday, Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential candidate. News programs have created tabloid-magazine-like timelines of their relationship, replaying the clip from the Democratic presidential debates in July 2019 where she condemned his resistance to integrated busing. As the clips are replayed, commentators focus on the conflict between the two that played out on the debate stage instead of noting that Kamala Harris's experience with integrated busing further thrusts the inconvenient racial truth in our faces that we refuse to look at. The long fight for school integration and equality is hardly "long" in the scope of human history. Harris was part of the second class to be integrated at her school. 200 years of American life (if we're counting from 1776) built the racist, segregated public school system that Harris integrated in the 1970s. That system is even more segregated today than it was then which suggests that it is going to take more than a few summers filled with protests and performative Instagram posts to dismantle and rebuild it.
School segregation fuels American inequality. One can argue that the systems that we operate in are meant to perpetuate inequality, Nikole Hannah Jones agrees that the systems are unfair, and adds that those systems are upheld by individuals' everyday decisions. Hannah-Jones is the creator of the 1619 Project which has earned her notoriety and a Pulitzer Prize, but I first started reading and exploring her work on school segregation in 2015 with her segment, This American Life: "The Problem We All Live With," She followed months later with an article on New York City's public schools, her decision to send her daughter to one, and the racist arguments that fueled conflict amongst gentrifying parents who wanted to control the demographics of the school by further segregating them. It should be read by every teacher and every parent of a school-aged child, and especially if you as a parent or teacher have ever wanted to teach or send your child to a "good school" (what defines your idea of "good"?).
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With our current moment's shouts and calls for racial equity, I'm thankful for Nikole Hannah-Jones's most recent article in The New York Times Magazine that articulates the need for reparations as the truest form of racial equity in order to create equality. Beyond money, reimagining public schools and the neighborhoods that they exist in is going to require policy changes, the work and decisions of families, and will also require people in power to promote and enforce laws that promote public schools and their funding, not shaming, deregulating and privatizing them. In response to Betsy DeVos's Senate confirmation as the Secretary of Education, Hannah-Jones wrote:
"Democracy works only if those who have the money or the power to opt out of public things choose instead to opt in for the common good. It’s called a social contract, and we’ve seen what happens in cities where the social contract is broken: White residents vote against tax hikes to fund schools where they don’t send their children, parks go untended and libraries shutter because affluent people feel no obligation to help pay for things they don’t need. 'The existence of public things — to meet each other, to fight about, to pay for together, to enjoy, to complain about — this is absolutely indispensable to democratic life,' Honig says.
If there is hope for a renewal of our belief in public institutions and a common good, it may reside in the public schools. Nine of 10 children attend one, a rate of participation that few, if any, other public bodies can claim, and schools, as segregated as many are, remain one of the few institutions where Americans of different classes and races mix. The vast multiracial, socioeconomically diverse defense of public schools that DeVos set off may show that we have not yet given up on the ideals of the public — and on ourselves."
If we want to know what to do to move forward, we also have to look back to learn about the policies that have entrenched us in racism. We also must enter the conversation that has been happening for centuries, ready to listen, learn, and most importantly: take action. We should be reminded now that there integration happened because of a Supreme Court ruling and federal support and enforcement. Could we really trust our federal government to exercise this kind of moral action in our current climate? If we take the work seriously now and do not give up, then we'll produce even more candidates who not only look like Kamala Harris but are representative of more than gender and race. These future candidates will be mirrors of the society that we have built on the principles of equity if we start now.
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