That’s a great question – one I’ve asked myself. The response, even from other Black people, has been that it’s not realistic.
Why? Part of it has to do with simple math. Wilmington has a shortage of tech talent (seriously, if you’re a software developer, you’re guaranteed to get a good high paying job here). There are multiple programs devoted to teaching coding to young Black and/or underresourced youth, but it will be about a decade before those students are at the senior developer level. So we need to draw new people to the city to fill the jobs, and while it would be great if those senior positions could be filled with nonwhite talent right now, there is currently also a huge shortage of developers of color. So, while the goal is to get local Black kids into these jobs, right now with the city’s shortage of senior developers and the general shortage of Black senior developers, nonblack talent has to be courted. The face of tech can and likely will change in Wilmington over the next 10-20 years, but filling the current jobs means courting everyone – and white developers often aren’t receptive to moving to a predominantly Black city (that’s not to say that we don’t have white devs here who are proud to work here, but they’re already here and know how great our city is).. So that’s a conundrum. Unfortunately, courting ONLY Black talent isn’t viable at this point. (ETA to clarify – forefronting the city’s blackness, even minimally, is often perceived by white people as only courting Black people).
Sometimes, it’s not just a realistic numbers game, but basic racism. Downtown Wilmington has an art school. It’s been struggling to get enough students in the past few years – the dorms are only half full. Art schools are notoriously mostly white (I know, I went to art school at Temple – a highly integrated Philadelphia college with a relatively integrated art school that is still mostly white).
I mentioned to a Black friend who had done business with the school that it has the opportunity to market itself as a school within a Black community (as it stands, the community is considered as a bug, not a feature). There are NO predominantly Black art schools in the US. Why not use the demographics of the area to draw more artists of color to the school? Marketing it as a diverse art school, from my point of view, could be its saving grace. We’re located between Baltimore and Philadelphia, and DC and NYC just beyond. It seems like a no-brainer to me.
My friend laughed out loud when I suggested it. The school’s administration is almost all white, except for the Director of Events, who was hired within the last year.
Their recruitment basically says that it’s a good school despite being located in a Black area. I mean, they don’t say that. But my friend has seen the tours and how they assure white parents that it’s “safe” (i.e, it’s not connected to its Black surroundings). She said, and I believe her, that the school would sooner shut down than become a “majority minority” school.
Ah, so they’re looking for a very specific form of talent I see. Yeah, I see the problem. Of course there is tech talent that is neither Black nor white, but Asians are scarcely less racist against Black people than white people are.
Man, if I were an art student I would SO want to go there. Shutting down rather than become a majority minority school is pretty much the history of education in the United States huh 😂
For example, the valid concern that diversity quotas value color
over merit is valid, but can skip into the bias that white people are
the most qualified. And the concern that racism against white people is
culturally acceptable is a rational concern, but then there are white
supremacists who equate it with genocide.
In conclusion, it is my personal conviction that untainted
individualism is they key to being unracist. Everybody respect Muslims
and people of Middle Eastern descent, ship Finnrey, and recognize that
Rogue One is not anti-white because it only has one white male hero
(Galen.)
So there’s a lot to unpack here, but first of all, it’s a false dichotomy that the right believes in individual merit and the left doesn’t. What many on the left do is acknowledge the reality that bigotry against certain groups cuts against the merits and achievements of individuals from these marginalized groups. I’m not sure how that translates into the kind of collectivism that is apparently opposed to individualism. Also if you think the only problem with the American dream lies in the distant past… well. Let’s just say it’s very much an ongoing problem.
At least you recognize the gap between theory and practice when it comes to individualism. In fact, talent and work ethic leading to success is far from the reality for many groups, to the extent that believing that individual merit will prevail in every case has been found to be detrimental to the long-term well-being of marginalized youth (link).
Colorblindness is the ultimate aspiration, yes, but it is not the reality we currently inhabit. We can’t just decide to be colorblind, we have to acknowledge and correct the systemic racism that both leads to large-scale inequalities and infects our own individual perceptions with bias and bigotry. Insisting that you are colorblind without realizing all the ways you are not amounts to self-deception and, in interactions with marginalized people, gaslighting. We don’t get to the mountaintop by pretending we are already there. First we have to realize where we actually are, which is a pretty deep pit in many ways. Only then can we start climbing upward.
Individualism vs collectivism is a very valid aspect of race studies (and it really has little to do with right vs left – white people across the political spectrum are individualists when it comes to things like education).
The main reason the US education system is so segregated is because the vast majority of white people see it as a way to get the most for their children and themselves. The Black community doesn’t see it that way – education is something has the potential to lift the entire community. (For more on this, check out the Speak Out with Tim Wise podcast Episode 48: “Educational Inequality is a Feature not a Glitch: Racism and Schooling in America”). White parents generally aren’t interested in improving the community as a whole through their children’s education, especially when they isolate themselves in “safe” suburbs (but not always – see Brooklyn NY).
Black communities, especially poor communities, know that the better their children do collectively, the better off the community will be. That is not the goal of the school system, which, historically has worked to sustain the inequity. It’s no surprise that white parents don’t want their kids in Black schools. They understand that Black schools aren’t meant for success. The whiter the school, the higher the chance that their kid will get theirs. Even some of the most liberal parents buy into this and are unwilling to challenge the status quo out of fear of disadvantaging their kids by not giving them every advantage.
In fandom, this dichotomy plays out like this:
Someone makes an observation about how measurable fandom patterns show that fans will choose an alternate all white ship if the canon has an interracial pairing.
Immediate reaction: I’m not racist! I love CoC actually! You can’t make assumptions about a person you don’t know just because they ship my OTP!
It wasn’t about individuals, but that will be the reaction every time. Who cares if there’s a cycle of racism? I’M not racist, and a lot of people I know who participate in that thing are nice, so it’s probably not racism at all.
I didn’t realize that collectivist aspect! I’m mostly used to “collectivism” being used as a pejorative by right-leaning people as meaning entitled, expects to free ride on others’ effort etc. I really wish more groups of people would see community improvement as a worthwhile goal because there is only so much individualism can do.
On the other hand, doesn’t white America’s individualism also result in a kind of communal uplifting, albeit at the expense of other groups? It looks like, in seeking individual advantage, white parents as a whole have used segregation as a group strategy.
And YES on this allaboutmeism spilling over into fandom racism defenses, I hadn’t even thought about that! It seems to be mainly a white people thing even among people who deny or minimize the existence of fandom racism, because in my experience fans of color who deny fandom racism at least engage at the same level and try to present community-level arguments, even if they’re wrong. It is by and large white fans who turn discussions about large scale phenomena into a trial of their own individual virtue.
ok but that alphabatical order one – what that kid did was way harder than the original task and demonstrated the same skills so i hope they got a goddamn A+
In 1969, a group of children sat down to a free breakfast
before school. On the menu: chocolate milk, eggs, meat, cereal and fresh
oranges. The scene wouldn’t be out of place in a school cafeteria these
days—but the federal government wasn’t providing the food. Instead,
breakfast was served thanks to the Black Panther Party.
At the time, the militant black nationalist party was
vilified in the news media and feared by those intimidated by its
message of black power and its commitment to ending police brutality and
the subjugation of black Americans. But for students eating breakfast,
the Black Panthers’ politics were less interesting than the meals they
were providing.
“The children, many of whom had never eaten breakfast before the Panthers started their program,” the Sun Reporterwrote, “think the Panthers are ‘groovy’ and ‘very nice’ for doing this for them.”
The program may have been groovy, but its purpose was to
fuel revolution by encouraging black people’s survival. From 1969
through the early 1970s, the Black Panthers’ Free Breakfast for School
Children Program fed tens of thousands of hungry kids. It was just one
facet of a wealth of social programs created by the party—and it helped
contribute to the existence of federal free breakfast programs today.
When Black Panther Party founders Huey P. Newton and Bobby
Seale founded the party in 1966, their goal was to end police brutality
in Oakland. But a faction of the Civil Rights Movement led by SNCC
member Stokeley Carmichael began calling for the uplift and
self-determination of African-Americans, and soon black power was part
of their platform.
At first, the Black Panther Party primarily organized
neighborhood police patrols that took advantage of open-carry laws, but
over time its mandate expanded to include social programs, too.
Free Breakfast For School Children was one of the most
effective. It began in January 1969 at an Episcopal church in Oakland,
and within weeks it went from feeding a handful of kids to hundreds. The
program was simple: party members and volunteers went to local grocery
stores to solicit donations, consulted with nutritionists on healthful
breakfast options for children, and prepared and served the food free of
charge.
School officials immediately reported results in kids who
had free breakfast before school. “The school principal came down and
told us how different the children were,” Ruth Beckford, a parishioner
who helped with the program, said later. “They weren’t falling asleep in class, they weren’t crying with stomach cramps.”
Soon, the program had been embraced by party outposts
nationwide. At its peak, the Black Panther Party fed thousands of
children per day in at least 45 programs. (Food wasn’t the only part of
the BPP’s social programs; they expanded to cover everything from free medical clinics to community ambulance services and legal clinics.)
For the party, it was an opportunity to counter its
increasingly negative image in the public consciousness—an image of
intimidating Afroed black men holding guns—while addressing a critical
community need. “I mean, nobody can argue with free grits,” said
filmmaker Roger Guenveur Smith in A Huey P. Newton Story, a 2001 film in which he portrays Newton.
Free food seemed relatively innocuous, but not to FBI head
J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed the Black Panther Party and declared war
against them in 1969. He called
the program “potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities
to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for,” and gave carte
blanche to law enforcement to destroy it.
The results were swift and devastating. FBI agents went
door-to-door in cities like Richmond, Virginia, telling parents that BPP
members would teach their children racism. In San Francisco, writes
historian Franziska Meister, parents were told the food was infected
with venereal disease; sites in Oakland and Baltimore were raided by
officers who harassed BPP members in front of terrified children, and
participating children were photographed by Chicago police.
“The night before [the first breakfast program in Chicago] was supposed to open,” a female Panther told historian Nik Heynan, “the Chicago police broke into the church and mashed up all the food and urinated on it.”
Ultimately, these and other efforts to destroy the Black
Panthers broke up the program. In the end, though, the public visibility
of the Panthers’ breakfast programs put pressure on political leaders
to feed children before school. The result of thousands of American
children becoming accustomed to free breakfast, former party member
Norma Amour Mtume toldEater, was the government expanded its own school food programs.
Though the USDA had piloted free breakfast efforts
since the mid 1960s, the program only took off in the early 1970s—right
around the time the Black Panthers’ programs were dismantled. In 1975,
the School Breakfast Program was permanently authorized. Today, it
helps feed over 14.57 million children before school—and without the radical actions of the Black Panthers, it may never have happened.
some highlights from my students’ romeo and juliet modern interpretation projects:
– someone made a username for friar laurence with 420 at the end – the same kid who put 69 in romeo’s username like i wouldn’t know what either of those things mean – the girl who added ‘clean’ at the end of all the songs on her juliet playlist like lmao girl i know spotify doesn’t have the clean version – the kid who said romeo and juliet killed each other – the weird dichotomy of kids who put love story on their playlist vs the kids who choose bad blood – the kid who wrote ‘get a room’ as tybalt’s comment on romeo’s couple pic – the kid who said ‘romeo is probably one of those douches who follows a ton of people so they follow him back and then he unfollows all of them’ – the one who legitimately used the word ‘alrighty’ do kids say this in their text messages???? i thought i was the one talking like an elderly person but okay – the one who made romeo’s username ‘montagoose’ – the only kid who acknowledged that posting about your secret relationship on instagram was a bad idea – the girl who wrote that romeo would unironically say ‘#blessed’. she’s right. – the one single solitary girl who wrote mercutio as gay as shakespeare did (she’s also the only one who used mercutio at all which is a tragedy but whatever) – the one who wrote romeo’s insta bio as ‘thus with a kiss i die… LOL RIP ME 😂💀’ – the one who made benvolio’s username benvoliYO
Black girls deserve to learn free from bias and stereotypes.
Most black girls experience this hatred at schools. And classmates are not the only problem, there is no support from teachers, too. That’s why they get so affected by their school experiences. Black kids deserve to be treated just like everybody else, they want to study, they want to learn something ,too. However due to prejudice they are 5 times more likely to be suspended than their white peers and it can ruin their lives forever.
National Women’s Law Center created this video to change the situation. Join the movement to help black girls feel normal and get the same opportunities everybody else has.
“Teachers are often unaware of the gender distribution of talk in their classrooms. They usually consider that they give equal amounts of attention to girls and boys, and it is only when they make a tape recording that they realize that boys are dominating the interactions.Dale Spender, an Australian feminist who has been a strong advocate of female rights in this area, noted that teachers who tried to restore the balance by deliberately ‘favouring’ the girls were astounded to find that despite their efforts they continued to devote more time to the boys in their classrooms. Another study reported that a male science teacher who managed to create an atmosphere in which girls and boys contributed more equally to discussion felt that he was devoting 90 per cent of his attention to the girls. And so did his male pupils. They complained vociferously that the girls were getting too much talking time.In other public contexts, too, such as seminars and debates, when women and men are deliberately given an equal amount of the highly valued talking time, there is often a perception that they are getting more than their fair share. Dale Spender explains this as follows:The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women.In other words, if women talk at all, this may be perceived as ‘too much’ by men who expect them to provide a silent, decorative background in many social contexts. This may sound outrageous, but think about how you react when precocious children dominate the talk at an adult party. As women begin to make inroads into formerly ‘male’ domains such as business and professional contexts, we should not be surprised to find that their contributions are not always perceived positively or even accurately.”
As a teacher, I give girls what I hope is a lot of attention. I don’t know if I give girls their fair share, but I aspire to, especially after noticing that boys are willing to use their greater share of teachers’ attention to get girls who they feel aren’t being quiet and docile enough punished. I have therefore acquired a reputation for “caring more about the girls.” This has had two marked results: Some straight boys have gotten more hostile toward me, and most girls have gotten more confident around me. This makes me think I’m doing something right.
Longer thoughts on how this phenomenon relates to sexual harassment in classrooms, if you’re interested: The girls figured out I won’t report them if they hit boys who are sexually harassing them, I’ll only report the boys. This led to an increase in how often girls got the last word and boys got smacked in my classes, and, also, to a DECREASE IN HOW OFTEN GIRLS GOT SEXUALLY HARASSED. The sexual harassers seem to have been depending on the sort of “equal blame” and “retaliation is never warranted” and “don’t hurt others’ feelings” perspectives so many schools try to instill in kids; the sexual harassers were usually the ones bringing me into the situation by saying, “Miss, she hit me! You should write her up!” Once they figured out I was only ever going to respond, “If you don’t treat girls like that, they won’t hit you,” the girls got more confident and the sexual harassers largely shut the fuck up.
In schools, fighting against sexual harassment is often punished exactly the same as, or more severely than, sexual harassment — a lot of discipline codes make no distinction between violence and violence in self-defence, and violence is ALWAYS the highest level of disciplinary infraction, whereas verbal sexual harassment rarely is. Sexual harassers, at least in the schools I’ve been in, rely heavily on GETTING GIRLS IN TROUBLE WITH HIGHER AUTHORITIES as a strategy of harassment — creating an external punishment that penalises girls for and therefore discourages girls from fighting back. Sexual harassers are willing to use their greater share of floorspace to ask to get girls who won’t date them punished. By and large, teachers do punish those girls when they swear or hit. Schools condition girls to ignore sexual harassment by punishing them when they speak up or fight back instead.
Once the sexual harassers in my classes understood that girls wouldn’t be punished for rejecting them, they backed off around me. And there started to be a flip in what conversations I get called into — girls are telling me when boys are being nasty (too loud and dominant), instead of boys telling me when girls are being uncooperative (louder and more dominant than boys think they should be).
As a girl who would not be shut up and would not tolerate teasing or abuse from boys in my class and was several times sent to such higher authorities for it, reading this is extremely, extremely vindicating. I was lucky, though, because being a particularly bright, advanced student for those grades, they generally took my side and I never got into any severe or lasting trouble. Again ,this was luck, and shouldn’t be the rule.
L.J.'s Obsessions 