For Jeff Duncan-Andrade, a lifelong educator, school founder, and professor of Latina/o Studies and Race and Resistance at San Francisco State University, the answer depends on which sort of society you envision.
But if you take the last 200+ years of American history as our collective answer to that question, the one we have envisioned is, simply put, the one we now have — a social (dis)order marked by radical inequality, mass incarceration, and entrenched social apartheid at every turn.
For Andrade, a proper education is one that “teaches kids they can transform things. They not only learn to think for themselves, they learn they can define new limits for themselves.” That sort of education, however, is rarely the one that is available to students of color.
By contrast, in those schools, the emphasis is on “order, control, compliance and accepting your station in life. What’s pounded into these kids is that to do well in school you don’t challenge, you don’t question, you don’t get too excited and demonstrate your passion for learning by jumping out of your seat. If you’re a good student, you contain yourself.”
How, then, can we transform the systems that hold us prisoner?
And what can each of us do to support a system of public schools that are equitable, vibrant, and alive?
Join us for a special Spark Series event with Jeff Duncan-Andrade this week — Wednesday, January 26th, at 3pm EST (note the earlier start time) — and if you want a sneak preview (and a better understanding of the distinction between equality and equity, and why it matters so much), see below.
Four years ago, on the eve of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I made the dispiriting prediction that, regardless of who won (and, at the time, the notion that Donald Trump would win seemed inconceivable to most of us), America was witnessing the birth of a new civic (dis)order.
Four years later, in the shadow of another election, our world is both radically different — and dispiritingly similar. So it’s notable that the storyline of HBO’s dystopian, overwrought, and prescient 22nd-century series, Westworld, once again provides an edifying parallel to the real-life drama of 21st-century American public life.
If you haven’t watched it, Westworld is a show about a question at the heart of American identity: What does it mean to be free? — albeit in the context of watching what happens to our great-great grandchildren when their robot playthings become hip to the game and decide to exact some revenge.
In 2016, the show’s first season took place exclusively in an amusement park in which people paid obscene sums to act out obscene fantasies with humanoid robots whose memories would be wiped clean after each new day in an endless loop of unconscious servitude. But in 2020’s season three, Westworld (like our own) is in freefall. It turns out the owners of the park were secretly mining the data of their visitors in order to advance their own Orwellian notion of a more predictable social order. Meanwhile, a few robots have slipped the yoke, only to discover an outside world eerily similar to the one they’d just fled. As one character puts it, “They built the world to be a game — and then rigged it to make sure they always won.”
Which brings us to our own real-world dystopia — one in which Trumpian notions of “liberation” are merely a symptom of a much deeper malaise, and the Orwellian overlay is as relevant as ever, albeit in an even more chilling way than the worlds depicted in 1984 or on HBO.
That’s because, unlike the robots in Westworld or the proles in Oceania, we are not color-blind, but color-bound. And while this has always been true — the Peculiar Institution, after all, is America’s Original Sin — the Coronavirus pandemic has laid its enduring legacy even more nakedly at our feet.
As The Atlantic‘s George Packer puts it, the virus has exposed America’s underlying conditions in ways that reveal us to be, in effect, a failed state: “in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; and around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.”
Here, too, the parallels between Real World and Westworld are instructive.
”How did you get here?” multiple characters are asked throughout the series. “Start at the beginning.”
If we take that question and apply it to ourselves, there’s only one American intersection where all roads converge — from the unmasking of our runaway wealth inequality to the bands of masked protesters demanding the country re-open so they can get a tattoo or eat a cheeseburger:
In this land — our land — freedom is whiteness (just ask Amy Cooper). And until that changes, we will remain trapped in our own endless loop of social, moral and spiritual decay.
As New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie explains, citing the 1993 work of legal scholar Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness” has always been the defining characteristic of free human beings in America. To be white, therefore, is to have control over oneself and one’s labor, and to be subject to no one’s will but one’s own. And that tie between whiteness and freedom has only strengthened over the years — from Westward Expansion to Chinese Exclusion, or from Emmitt Till to Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd.
“The great irony,” Bouie writes, “is that this conception of freedom, situated within racial hierarchy and meant to justify deprivation and inequality, has always been impoverished when compared with an expansive, inclusive vision of what it means to be free. And in the particular context of a deadly pandemic, the demand to be free of mutual obligation is, in essence, a demand to be free to die and threaten those around you with illness and death. Most Americans, including most white Americans, have rejected this freedom of the grave. But among the ones who haven’t are the people leading our government, which means that this ‘freedom’ remains a powerful — and dangerous — force to be reckoned with.”
Where to, then, from here?
In Westworld, the path forward leads to the most predictable, stereotypical end-goal of “revolution” — burn the motherfucker to the ground.
But Westworld’s characters also deliver lines that could be seen as beacons for our own desperately-required awakening. There are rare moments in life, one of them explains, “when randomness interacts with your life to create a truly free space where you can make a choice — a bubble of agency.”
This pandemic, and all it has laid bare, is our bubble. Yet as I wrote four years ago, the actions required of us include, and are not limited to, the next presidential election. And for those of us who are “white,” the reality is that the bulk of this work is ours to do — not because of some modern-day Kipling-esque fantasy about white exceptionalism, but because to unwind such deeply entrenched notions of privilege, the people who receive the benefits must be the main ones to demand that the system(s) be unwound.
To do so, however, as my friend Susan Glisson has wisely written, we must give ourselves the breathing room to question whiteness and its power over this nation. As Orwell himself once wrote, “the moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don’t let it happen. It depends on you.”
How do you develop a healthy sense of self when the society into which you’re born has been constructed to deny your very identity?
This is America’s inconvenient truth, the unwanted legacy of the Peculiar Institution, and the fly in the buttermilk of every Utopian American myth and storyline since our founding. And throughout our short and tumultuous history, perhaps no artist has better captured the knotted pathology that has ensnared White and Black America in an intimate dance of mutual self-destruction than a slender, bug-eyed boy from Harlem named James Baldwin.
He was born between the wars to a poor mother in a crowded family. As a child he struggled under the critical eye of his stepfather, a man Baldwin felt had been “defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.” As a young man he came of age alongside the growing resistance of the Civil Rights Movement, a period in which he recognized himself as “a kind of bastard in the West.” And over the course of his life — and a career that spanned six books, three plays, and scores of essays, book reviews, and electric public talks — James Baldwin became a witness to the destructive power of our racist myth-making, and the redemptive power of our capacity for love and reconciliation.
Throughout his life, Baldwin questioned how his fellow Americans could develop a healthy sense of identity in a society that spent so much energy cultivating an image that was not grounded in reality. “What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one’s heroic ancestors,” he wrote. “If we are not capable of this examination, we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.
“We made the world we’re living in, and we have to make it over.”
To make the world over, Baldwin urged us to fearlessly confront the ways in which the current racial structure was preventing all Americans, oppressor and oppressed, from discovering who we were. “One may say that the Negro in America does not really exist except in the darkness of our minds,” he wrote. “Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves.”
Black people (or, more specifically, the people in American culture that have been defined as “Black”) have always been regarded by White people (or, more specifically, the people in American culture that have chosen to define themselves as “White”) as caricatures, not human beings. But one can only begin to recognize another’s humanity “by taking a hard look at oneself.”
To recognize one’s true identity as an American, therefore, requires recognizing the full weight of our racial history — no matter how painful — and the full scope of the ways our racial fantasies and attendant myths have shaped the construction of both our individual and shared identities. “We take our shape within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth,” he wrote. To believe oneself to be White or Black is to deprive oneself of a viable identity. What binds us together is not these artificial categories of social construction, but “our endless connection with, and responsibility for, each other.”
“If we,” he wrote in 1962, “and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others — do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.
“We are walking in terrible darkness here, and this is one man’s attempt to bear witness to the reality and the power of light.”
It has been more than fifty years since James Baldwin first named the knotted pathology that has ensnared White and Black America in an intimate dance of mutual self-destruction for, well, ever. “The failure to look reality in the face diminishes a nation as it diminishes a person,” he wrote. America has failed, he said, because it has come to believe its own myths: The Dream. Equal Justice. The Melting Pot. And America’s greatest crime is its ongoing disinterest in any meaningful introspection. “If we are not capable of this examination,” Baldwin warned, “we may yet become one of the most distinguished and monumental failures in the history of nations.”
Which brings us to Green Book — which is, at its root, yet another story that invites us to whitewash our collective imagination in a soothing balm of Bizarro-harmony, one in which the white guy is now the driver, and the black guy is now in charge.
Stories like this encourage us to assume that the deep roots of our history can be lopped off like a summer haircut. They offer lazy redemption, and hey — isn’t life hard enough? It’s OK, they say to all of us, but especially to White America. All is forgiven. The worst is behind us. This is really who we are
To which Baldwin, then and now, says — screams! — NO. America’s only hope of survival lays in a liberation from the hypocrisy that has allowed generational inequality to persist, to flourish, with nary a speed bump in its way. But because these myths and distortions are embedded so deeply in our collective psyche, they require hard, uncomfortable, sustained, deeply introspective work that we remain, as a nation, completely unwilling to do.
And so, we choose Driving Ms. Daisy over Do the Right Thing.
Emmett Till becomes Tamir Rice.
Fred Hampton becomes Sandra Bland.
And Barack Obama becomes Donald Trump.
To recognize one’s true identity as an American (and a human being), we must first be willing to confront, in its full weight, the history of the Black/White experience, with all its fantasies and attendant myths. Until that happens, nothing will happen. “What is history?” Baldwin asked us to consider. “What has it made of us? And where is a witness to this journey?”
We are all witnesses. Green Book is not our story. It’s time to wake up from the Dream.
Whatever side of the culture war you’re on — and, unless you’re really not paying attention, you’re on one — this much seems clear: America is having an identity crisis.
We the people occupy different worlds. We read different newspapers, watch different TV shows, and hold up different heroes. We see one another as objects to be avoided or crushed, not reasoned with or understood. We feel increasingly certain of the other side’s madness. We have begun to lose hope, check out, and give up.
So it may surprise you to learn that a new 10-part documentary series about an Illinois high school is the Must-See TV of the moment. And yet three questions at the center of America to Me — which are literally posed at the start of the school year to a group of students still shaking off the languorous hold of the summer — strike at the root of our ongoing identity crisis:
Who are you? Who does the world think you are? And what’s the difference?
For the students of Oak Park River Forest, a diverse public high school of 3,200 students located at the edge of Chicago’s West side, these are the questions that contain multitudes. And for Oak Park’s students of color in particular, they are the questions that reveal the extent to which even a community like theirs, which was shaped by progressive housing and social policies, remains burdened by America’s original sin.
“Much of our contemporary thinking about identity is shaped by pictures that are in various ways unhelpful or just plain wrong,” explains NYU professor Kwame Anthony Appiah in his new book about identity, The Lies That Bind. And when it comes to issues of race, “not only did European racial thinking develop, at least in part, to rationalize the Atlantic slave trade, it played a central role in the development and execution of Europe’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial projects.”
This is the toxic legacy under which we labor today. It’s what makes people see Colin Kaepernick as either a hero or a villain; it’s what sparks the messianic fervor at each new Donald Trump rally; and it’s what leads one of America to Me’s many student stars, a charismatic senior named Charles, to observe ruefully that “this school was made for White kids because this country was made for White kids.”
Yet the series outlines more than one set of truths. Its title comes from a Langston Hughes poem, Let America be America Again, in which Hughes writes that “America never was America to me.” Throughout the same poem, however, Hughes yearns for the other side of the American story, the one where “my land [can] be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.” And in the same episode in which we hear Charles bemoan the racialized design of his school, we also hear a teacher tell a group of incoming freshmen that “when you come to this house, represent who you are.”
Which is it?
Is Oak Park the rare example of a multiracial community in which all people can represent who they are in equal measure? Or is it just another example of how our country’s intractable, deeply ingrained ways of thinking about race (and one another) have yielded two opposite realities for White and Black families, and a schizophrenic message of which parts of oneself are truly welcome, and which parts are too dangerous, misunderstood, and feared?
The beauty of America to Me is that its answer is always “both/and.” The complexity of the problems we face are allowed to hang there for us to wrestle with, unresolved.
In its window into a modern American high school, for example, we see cringeworthy examples of unaware teachers, uninterested students, and uneasy reminders of the ways in which American schools remain unchanged by the tectonic shifts of the wider world. But we also see what makes schools like Oak Park so magical — the sheer variety of what you can explore and experience, the quality and commitment of the master teachers among us, and the ways in which each day can leave a student feeling seen or ignored, heard or silenced. As one teacher puts it, “I don’t think people understand how life and death this job can be.” And as another points out, as if to clarify the source of the stakes, “In this community, when we mention race, all hell breaks loose.”
Of course, they’re not alone. The shadow of America’s racial legacy is at the root of how we see ourselves and one another — all of us, no matter our color, our politics or our age. And in their willingness to courageously confront the third rail of American civic life as the cameras roll, the students, families and teachers of Oak Park have provided the rest of us with a precious and timely gift — an extended window into how far we remain from having the confidence and clarity to honestly confront, and then answer, the only questions that matter:
Who are you? Who does the world think you are? And what’s the difference?
A new episode of America to Me airs each Sunday night this fall on STARZ, or online at starz.com/series/americatome.
Last night, I listened to David Remnick’s New Yorker podcast interview with James Comeyto hear what he had to say about our 45th President, but what disturbed me more was what he had to say (at ~13:30) about the phrase “mass incarceration.”
“It connotes an intentionality,” Comey explained, “but there’s nothing mass about it. Everybody was charged individually, represented individually, and everybody appeared in front of a judge. I think you can talk about those systemic problems without making it sound like there was an intentionality where law enforcement decided it was going to round up huge numbers of black men.”
Riiiiiiiiiiight. . .
Then, this morning, another white man on the radio made me cringe. This time, it was National Review editor Jonah Goldberg, who was on NPR to talk with Steve Inskeep about a new book, but who ended up talking (at ~3:30) about the recent incident at a Philadelphia Starbucks in which two Black men were arrested for, well, being Black at a Starbucks.
“If it’s bad to reduce two black guys in a Starbucks to members of a category I distrust — it’s also bad to say that I’m responsible for the stupid mistake of a Starbucks manager in Philadelphia,” Goldberg opined. “Identity politics reduces people’s lived identity to these thin abstractions.”
“And you don’t like being blamed for that as a White person?” Inskeep asked.
“I don’t like thinking of myself as a White person,” Goldberg countered.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiight . . .
Thank God, then, for the Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt (also White), who wrote a piece in today’s paper that underscores what both Comey and Goldberg — and millions of other White Americans across the country — are unwilling or unable to see.
Hiatt’s column was an informal review of the new Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, which opens later this week, and which features a stirring, disturbing outdoor memorial to the thousands of African Americans who were lynched in American towns and cities (both North and South).
The museum and memorial, Hiatt suggests, offer “an alternative, and overwhelmingly coherent, arc of the history of white supremacy” — a history that runs from the advent of slavery right up to and through the arrest of those two men at Starbucks. Until we as a country can confront the full weight of that history, says the Museum’s founder, Bryan Stevenson, we will never be able to transcend it.
In fact, in Stevenson’s view, the modern legacy of white supremacy is best seen in the inequities of our criminal-justice system. “Blacks were — and are — more likely to be suspended from school, denied parole and when freed from prison denied benefits, kept out of public housing, blocked from employment or professional licenses and, once again, prevented from voting,” Hiatt writes.
Are you listening, Mr. Comey?
Plainly, the color of one’s skin is still an arrestable offense in America, as we saw in Philly last week. So while it’s nice that Jonah Goldberg doesn’t want to be thought of as White, the reality is that we all inhabit a world that was built on these foundations, and in which those “thin abstractions” are all too real for too many of us. As Henry Louis Gates famously said, “I know race is an abstraction, but I still can’t catch a cab in New York City.”
In short, there are forces at play that benefit white people (#whiteprivilege), and forces that place black people at risk, and there always have been. “There was this hope that this race stuff would just evaporate over time,” explains Stevenson, “but it doesn’t work like that. It is a serious disease, and if we don’t treat it, it doesn’t get better. It doesn’t go away.
“We’re not doomed by this history. We’re not even defined by it. But we do have to face it.”
Like a lot of you, I’ve been consumed by the Brock Turner case, and its particularly egregious form of privilege-soaked injustice.
Then again, we’re continually bombarded by stories that make it impossible to ignore the extent to which our society perpetuates different rules for different people, based on nothing more than the color of your skin and/or your proximity to power.
This week, it’s a Stanford swimmer who rapes an unconscious woman, yet still evokes sympathy from the judge who worries about the consequences an excessive sentence might have on his future — not how a lenient sentence might exacerbate her pain.
As a human being, I wonder how we can continue to tolerate the inequity of the world we have created.
But as an educator, I wonder how our schools can become more effective at equipping young people to dismantle the conscious and unconscious ways of seeing the world and one another that hold us prisoner — and allow a rigged system to roll on, unimpeded.
So it was through that lens that I watched a powerful new film about racism, and how to become more proactive in combatting it. The film is called I’m not Racist . . . Am I? It follows a diverse group of twelve NYC high school students through a series of Deconstructing Racism workshops. And it is an urgent, up front exploration of race and privilege and power — and a powerful way to seed similar conversations in schools and communities across the country.
If you’re an educator, I urge you to screen the film at your school, and use it as a foundation for becoming more proactive in the ways in which you help all members of your community understand that racism isn’t just individual meanness — it’s the systematic inequity that comes from disproportionate collective power.
Have you heard the news? Atticus Finch is a racist.
Guess what? So are you. So am I.
I know, it’s hard to square with the images of ourselves we like to project. After all, we just took down the Confederate flag! We recoiled in horror at the images of Eric Garner being strangled! We hated George Zimmerman! We voted for Barack Obama!
But here’s the thing: being racist isn’t only about explicit acts. It includes implicit privilege. It requires complicit silence.
James Baldwin told us this fifty years ago, at the height of the civil rights movement – and just two years after To Kill a Mockingbird made its celebrated debut. “This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen,” he wrote. “That they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.
“It is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.”
It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.
The opportunity of the present moment – a moment when it has become undeniable to all but the most sand-headed White people that, even amidst all the progress, Black people are living under siege – is to finally step courageously into a new conversation about race and racism in America.
But that conversation, and the actions that follow, must begin with this admission: we are all Atticus Finch.
Up to now, we’ve taken solace with the idea that we are that Atticus Finch – the first one, the one who was a crusading attorney who stood up for what was right in the face of the pig-fisted brutality of the American South.
For some of us, maybe, sometimes we have been.
But we’re also that Atticus Finch – the new one, just revealed to us via Harper Lee’s eagerly anticipated sequel, Go Set a Watchman. And as the first reviews tell us, that Atticus Finch attends Klan meetings, denounces segregation efforts, and asks his daughter pointedly, “Do you want them in our world?”
Being that Atticus Finch doesn’t require that we attend white supremacy meetings, support police brutality, or poison our own children with hate. It merely requires that we maintain our innocence amidst the maw of institutionalized racism, and mask our complicity in that system via periodic outrages at current events that clash with the saintly pictures we have painted of ourselves.
It is striking that Go Set A Watchman, with its unflattering revision of a beloved, one-note character, should come out now, amidst Charleston, and Baltimore, and #blacklivesmatter. But perhaps, as Alexandra Alter writes in the New York Times, “if To Kill A Mockingbird sugarcoats racial divisions by depicting a white man as the model for justice in an unjust world, then Go Set A Watchman may be like bitter medicine that more accurately reflects the times.”
Harper Lee’s bitter medicine should not taste that bitter to us. As much as we would like to believe it, there are no clear heroes and villains; we are neither one nor the other.
We are both.
We have been born into a society that confers a lifetime of invisible advantages to our families. We have the opportunity to cherry-pick which injustices to our Black brothers and sisters should move us to dissatisfaction. And we have chosen, thus far, not just to maintain what James Baldwin calls “the innocence,” but what The Atlantic correspondent Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “The Dream.”
“The Dream is treehouses and the Cub Scouts,” he writes in his new memoir, Between the World and Me. “The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. The Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.”
“It does not matter if the agent of those forces is white or black. What matters is the system that makes your body breakable.”
What matters is the system that makes your body breakable.
So we are all Atticus Finch. We have beauty and prejudice and ignorance and complacency and privilege and compassion and the chance to do something or nothing. We can be forces for good or a silent and gradual force for community decay and destruction.
Who we aspire to be is not solely who Atticus was. It is not solely who we are, either.
And so we have work to do. And it will require a much more constant vigilance, and honesty, and self-awareness than we have shown so far.
On March 1, eight-year-old D.C. resident Relisha Rudd disappeared. She was, according to news reports, homeless, hungry, and in the care of a man who likely killed her. The search for her body didn’t even begin until almost three weeks after she was last seen, and, after just one week and a dwindling number of tips, police effectively stopped looking.
On September 13, eighteen-year-old University of Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham disappeared. She was, according to Charlottesville police chief Timothy Longo, a “bright, intelligent, athletic, friendly, beautiful college student who’s been part of our community for the past two years.” Hours after she went missing, state emergency management officials launched a massive search effort that was fueled by more than 4,000 tips. A little more than a month later, her body was recovered.
What can possibly account for the dramatic differences in these two stories? Both girls were filled with promise and potential. Both girls’ disappearances attracted the helpful glare of media attention. And both girls’ families deserved the closure that only a retrieval of their bodies could provide. So while I am grateful that the Graham family can now give Hannah a proper burial, I am appalled that here in D.C. – in the midst of a mayoral election, no less – the disappearance of Relisha Rudd has faded from public conversation altogether. And while I would love to say that the different outcomes of these two searches have nothing to do with race, the reality is that these two stories underscore what has been true for the duration of our nation’s history: black girls like Relisha don’t matter as much as white girls like Hannah.
Consider, for example, that whereas Graham was a college sophomore on a campus designed by Thomas Jefferson to serve as a beacon for the value of public education, Relisha’s first elementary school, Ferebee-Hope, was closed in 2013. Consider that whereas Hannah’s parents regularly appeared together at press conferences to make emotional pleas for help in finding their daughter, Relisha’s mother, Shamika Young, was a single parent who never reported Relisha missing out of fear that authorities would take away her other three children and enter them into the foster care system – a system Young herself had been shuttled through as a child. And consider that whereas Hannah had been supported, nourished and challenged by her high school and college communities, Relisha hated the homeless shelter at which she lived so much so that she would sometimes fake asthma attacks at friend’s houses in the hope that she could stay, and adults from her old school recalled her often arriving with filthy clothes, dirty hair and an empty stomach.
These are not just the differences between two girls’ stories. They are the difference between the seeds our society has decided to tend, and the seeds it has decided to discard. As the Washington Post’s Petula Dvorak has written, “what the nation’s capital has sanctioned — a miniature, shameful city of about 800 displaced and homeless residents who live in squalid, depressing conditions next to the morgue and among the clients at a methadone clinic — is fertile ground for evil.” And what the rest of us have sanctioned by our relative silence is just as malevolent – a tale of two cities, two worlds, two paths, and two girls – only one of whom matters.
We can’t begin to undo the systemic inequities that led to Hannah’s and Relisha’s starkly contrasting lives until that contrast becomes the central topic of D.C.’s upcoming mayoral election – not to mention the midterm congressional elections nationwide. And even if/when it becomes the central topic, it will require generations of effort to undo generations of injustice. We are not a post-racial society, and we have a lot of work to do.
We can, however, do something that won’t take generations, or elections, or policies to remedy.
We can find the collective will and focus to move mountains, as Charlottesville did, and we can find Relisha Rudd.
This weekend’s story in the New York Times about former NFL star Deion Sanders’ struggling charter school lays bare much of what’s wrong with the way Americans think about public education in general, and charter schools in particular.
The story begins with Sanders being approached with a “splendid business proposition,” “deep-pocketed backers,” and a state board of education that “fell over itself” to accommodate one of the greatest pro football players of all time.
Never mind the fact that being a great NFL cornerback has nothing to do with knowing how to build a great school. Unless, of course, the only goal for the school is to become an athletic powerhouse, in which case, hey, do your thing.
You can already guess how the rest of the story goes. A rapid rise in the national sports rankings. Televised games on ESPN. A steady infusion of uniforms and equipment. And a near-complete inattention to the things that actually determine a healthy school.
As one former member of Prime Prep’s board put it, parents were seduced by the promise that under Sanders’ tutelage, their children would get athletic scholarships to college and, eventually, pro contracts. “The parents wanted a 2.5 G.P.A. so the kids could play,” he said. “And it happened.”
It gets worse. In a recording obtained by The Dallas Observer, Sanders explains to a colleague how the school came to be. “Senators, political leaders that you hooked me up with, that you put me down with — that’s how we got the school. You’re talking about a nigger sitting up there that was an athlete who didn’t graduate, another nigger sitting up there saying he’s the president, that ain’t graduate nothing, and we got a school. Think about that, man.
“How in the world do you think we got a school?”
How indeed. And although the Texas Education Agency has vowed to revoke the school’s charter, the toxic mix that birthed it in the first place – our celebrity-worshipping culture, and our endemic disrespect for both the teaching profession and young black and brown children – has already spread far and wide.
Let me say that again: Deion Sanders is right. What allowed a school like Prime Prep to come into being at all was a particularly American combination of celebrity worship, disrespect for teachers, and racist indifference to the plight of minority boys and girls.
To be clear, the space for innovation that charter school laws have allowed has led to many outstanding schools, many of which I have written about and will continue to hold up as examples of what’s possible in American public education. But it has also laid bare a widespread myopic belief that starting a school is a lot like raising a pet: provide enough love (cash), food (connections) and water (shiny stuff), and the rest will take care of itself. And yet schools are not puppies; they are complex systems of human beings with incredibly nonlinear, complex tasks to complete: the holistic development and growth of every child in the building, over the course of several formative, complicated, emotionally loaded years. A school like Prime Prep, with its naïve belief that the other parts of a school could be faked in order to engender nationally ranked sports teams, underscores this point well.
A big part of what makes this possible is our historic, and growing, disrespect for the teaching profession, and for the (few) men and (many) women who make it their life’s work. Teacher/blogger Jose Vilson has made this point numerous times, most notably in response to one of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s repeated public excoriations of female teachers. “As Christie wags a finger at this woman,” Vilson writes, “the crowd cheers, signaling a societal acknowledgment that politicians can lay waste to any courtesy towards anyone, and that democracy is overrated. Surely, dissenters get jeers at any rally, but this particular type of jeer further solidified the idea that teachers’ rights are aligned with women’s rights.
“None of this othering happens without society’s consent,” he argues. “Aside from Christie’s ego, gender plays a huge role here, and if you can’t see that, then perhaps you’re part of the problem, too.”
Of course, this isn’t just about the devaluing of women in American life; it’s about the devaluing of minorities too, especially young black men. How else to explain the senseless murder this weekend of Michael Brown, a college-bound 18-year-old who was shot ten times by a local policeman – a killing that marks only the most recent example of such a tragedy, one that extends not just to Trayvon Martin, but all the way back to Emmett Till and beyond.
These cultural flash points and news reports should be electric jolts to the system, and to all of us who exist inside the bubble together, in order to underscore just how much work we have to do as a society to transcend the historical baggage we have accrued over the past two centuries.
There is a reason our society has coined the “Those that can” line about teachers, while other countries have afforded the profession their greatest levels of respect.
There is a reason the U.S. houses 25% of the world’s prisoners, despite representing just 5% of the world’s population.
There is a reason almost half of those prisoners, 150 years after the end of slavery, have black skin – and that reason is not because of an innate pathology or proclivity for violence.
And there is a reason that so many of the most celebrated new pedagogies for poor children have never been piloted in the schools of children of privilege.
Simply put, we are anchored by troublesome mindsets that are difficult to shake off: What is good for us would not work for them. What they do in the present has nothing to do with what we have done in the past. And what they do for a living proves that they are not capable of doing anything more.
These thoughts are not unrelated. They are a huge barrier to our ongoing dream of a society that can provide greater equity and social opportunity. And they are chains we will never break until we’re willing, collectively and courageously, to reckon publicly with the world that we have wrought, and the ideas about one another we continue to carry.
He was born between the wars to a poor mother in a crowded family. As a child he struggled under the critical eye of his stepfather, a man Baldwin felt had been “defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him.” As a young man he came of age alongside the growing resistance of the Civil Rights Movement, a period in which he recognized himself as “a kind of bastard in the West.” And over the course of his life — and a career that spanned six books, three plays, and scores of essays, book reviews, and electric public talks — James Baldwin became a witness to the destructive power of our racist myth-making, and the redemptive power of our capacity for love and reconciliation.
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