Think, Say as We Do.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, had trouble in school. He saw no point to being in most if not all his classes, and felt a major disconnect in his life and his education. Still today, throughout the news we can see the differences between African and white Americans in our schools. According to an article by Vox, segregation in schools still occurs regularly. An example used in the article was a county school district that was effectively gerrymandered to segregate wealthy white families from surrounding minority group and poorer neighborhoods. The county that was separated had a makeup of 22% non-white students and 7% poor; the surrounding areas had a 22% poverty rate seen in schools and 55% non-white students. The segregates argued that schools were already too full, they argued, making this segregation okay
On page 25 of his book, Coates writes, “If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left… I suffered at the hands of both, but I resent the schools more.” Here he was talking about the parts of life holding him back. The streets held him back by preventing him from getting ahead in the world, society restricted his opportunities. Education held Coates back by filling him with “weaponized history,” as he writes it, historical tidbits the schools indoctrinated into Coates to make him continue to submit. The segregation of schools leads to this, rich white schools continue to teach their students to think better of themselves and worse of the poorer schools around them.
A page later, Coates says, “I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them.” For almost all of Coates’s life, he could see through the bias and rhetoric coming from his would-be educators. Schools are already known for their biased teaching, with local and state governments controlling what can and can’t be taught and said to the students. Looking back at the Vox article, it’s very unlikely the children of the segregated school area had any idea that they were being separated by invisible walls and pushed away from fair education.
We often learn about segregation as a historical event, focusing on topics such as Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement. It becomes easier to separate ourselves from the ongoing harm of segregation if we simply view it as a thing of the past. However, as you discuss in your post, housing segregation often still limits African American people's access to high-quality schools and other resources. How might you connect this ignorance of modern segregation to Coates' idea of the Dream?
ReplyDeleteIf you're interested in learning more about how segregation impacts people close to home, here's another great article: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/03/chicago-segregation-poverty/556649/