When my Dad went to the all black schools there was an evironment that encouraged excellence and a sense of community: your teacher was probably a black woman that lived in your neighborhood and attended church with your parents; the man who owned the corner store you walked past everyday probably got drunk with your Dad on fridays after work; everybody looked out for everybody etc. Your school may not have had the most up-to-date books but the teacher cared about you personally and truly wanted to see you do well.

Once my Dad got to the all white high school everything changed. All the black kids had to leave school together at the same or else they would get beaten up by groups of white kids; the teachers were openly hostile; the counselors suggested you attend the local trade school instead of going to college etc.,

While my father attended school over 30 years ago and things have definitely changed alot since then, what I am trying to say is that making sure that the classroom is racially mixed is not more important than making sure the classroom is an environment conducive to learning.

I’m all for voluntary desegration and people moving to whichever community they want to move to and being able to send their children to whatever community they want to send their kids too. However, there are advantages and disadvantages to a homogenous (racially, culturally, and otherwise) learning environment. After desegration black people were able to expand their businesses into other communities and they moved to wherever they liked, but on the other hand, the teachers in black communities now are almost all white people who don’t live in the neighborhood and much of that sense of ‘we’re all in this together’ has now been lost.

What I mainly take issue with is the statement that black kids did better before integration. It is wrong, blatantly wrong, but I don’t want to ignore the other insights in the post because they are useful.

While isolation is a real problem, the most recent data I saw from the 1990s indicated that 80% of Black teenagers go to predominantly black high schools.

I think around 50% of black teenagers went to high schools where more than 80% of the students were black.

I don’t know the figures for how many black students go to schools where most of their peers are white, but if 80% are going to predominantly Black high schools, the number is really low because it is going to be a small portion of the 20% left.

I don’t see what you see in the essay. I think Nora’s expanding on the costs that have been paid in order to attempt integration — because it led to isolation, it also meant that children lost the ability to create as many positive definitions for themselves, instead defining blackness through the negative stereotypes offered by others. I think the college scenario is offered as a counterexample: in a place where black people can create blackness as a positive, they can enact positive-ness for each other.

I read Nora as saying that she thinks real, comprehensive integration that is accompanied by improvement for black people in real, substantive ways — an integration backed by enacted anti-racism — would be a good thing. But in the meantime, black children have been asked to give up the positive benefits that were caused by segregation, but also denied many of the benefits that are possible with real, comprehensive, positive integration.

I think that was an easier pill to swallow when there was a possibility that the eventual, better benefits of real, comprehensive integration were oging to happen someday. But now that the supreme court is busy undoing the work that’s already been done, the sacrifice of the positive benefits that existed in the unideal state of segregation have been lost,a nd not replaced by the better vision.

I certainly don’t think Nora is trying to bound anyone’s acheivement. She reports having been one of the children who “acted white” — but it would be problematic for her to deny that there were costs to that experience.

That’s how I read it, at any rate. Nora might be better able to answer further questions herself. Not that I don’t welcome hearing what you think, Dianne. I’m very interested in what you have to say, and I hope you’ll keep posting in this thread. At teh same time, you might want to consider bringing up some of your reactions on The Angry Black Woman site.

(BTW: I hadn’t read the whole essay when I posted before. I have now.)

Dianne Writes:
July 26th, 2007 at 8:56 am
Both black and white (and Latino and Asian) cultures would be much impoverished if blacks and whites (etc) segregated themselves into separate communities and never spoke, never communicated, never allowed their members to do things that were more popular in the other community…

Isn’t that sort of one of the the points? That the black community used to have much more support of academics, and that the lack of a ‘critical mass’ who supported academics (and other things) which is partly caused by integration has made that more difficult?

I don’t see the essay as a call to “keep blacks kids from doing things that are popular in other communities.” Instead, I see it as a call to “make these (good) things popular in the black community, as they once were/should be”

The larger the group, the more likely that you’ll have a critical mass of supporters for your pet project. Get enough people together and you’ll eventually find enough players to fill a baseball diamond, enough budding musicians to play in an orchestra, and enough high school math geeks to justify the BC level of AP Calculus.

But of course that depends on said people not excluding each other based on other categories. That’s where race comes into play. It makes the effective group size smaller via exclusion.

I don’t think that Nora is complaining about her experience. She is documenting that it was hard on her. Did you read the whole essay?

That having been said, this seems to me to be victim blaming. If a white woman wrote about how she regretted, say, majoring in physics in college because she was the only female physics major, the men never accepted her, and there were social consequences, people told her she was “acting male”, would we all nod and applaud her wisdom in wanting to go back to the more comfortable environment with fewer men? (Yes, yes, I KNOW RACISM AND SEXISM ARE NOT THE SAME THING! That doesn’t mean that they don’t have similar points and that similar problems aren’t sometimes caused by the disparate forms of oppression.) If people tell a black person who goes into a gifted and talented program that she is “acting white” then they are acting as part of the system that oppresses blacks and keeps them from being truly themselves. Both black and white (and Latino and Asian) cultures would be much impoverished if blacks and whites (etc) segregated themselves into separate communities and never spoke, never communicated, never allowed their members to do things that were more popular in the other community without accusing them of acting (fill in the blank).

What do you think about using something akin to the “Hebrew School” model and creating “Black School.” Two hours after school on Tuesdays and Thursdays to get away from the integrated schools and learn about black history and culture (or dealing with racism and stereotypes, or African history, or reinforcing positive messages, or whatever the heck the organizers think is most important — its not for me to say.)

It sounds like there is a lot to be gained from both multi-cultural integrated education AND learning with a minority-group-specific critical mass. So why not create both? If Jews have Hebrew School and Greeks have Greek school and Christians have Sunday school, there may be value in creating that sort of infrastructure.

I’m a semi-observant Reform Jew of Sephardic extraction, and I was doing the exact same thing while reading this. My childhood friends were also mainly from Reform or secular Jewish families, and, without quite connecting it to our Jewishness, we developed the exact same collective identity: intellectual, academic, not athletic, book-loving, interested in art and culture. We formed that sense of ourselves in such a deep, powerful way that it is still very much present in all of our lives.