Sixty Students

Facing financial meltdown, the Detroit public school system has been ordered to close half its schools, raising class sizes to as high as sixty students per high school class. Just another present to the people from our enlightened leaders in Washington.

It's not fair, of course, to blame this crisis entirely on the present Republican Congress. Detroit's public schools, like most big-city public schools, have been in freefall for decades.

But then, it's not inappropriate to suggest that the slash-and-burn mentality the current Republican Congress has brought to our nation's capital is the same that has failed our public schools over the past half-century.

To speak bluntly, our nation's leaders don't give a shit about poor black kids in Detroit's public schools. They never have. And witness the results.

I looked up the statistics on one of Detroit's public high schools, Barsamian Preparatory Center. (It was first on the alphabetical list.) Almost 100% of its students are black. Almost 80% receive free lunches. Its attendance rates are around 55%. Over 60% of its students lack proficiency (as defined under No Child Left Behind) in all subjects, including reading, math, and writing. That's actually a lot better than the district as a whole, where the below-proficient population is over 80%. And anywhere between 50 and 60% of the students in this "preparatory" high school drop out before completing their degrees.

Apparently, what they're being prepared for is the reality of being poor and black in America: no one gives a shit about you.

I have a prediction for the 60 students in each class at schools like Barsamian Prep. 30 will drop out and end up either dead on the streets, hooked on drugs, living off welfare, or working at minimum wage. Of the remaining 30, 10 will rely on public assistance, 10 will find low-wage employment, 5 will go to community college and obtain work as lab techs or clerical laborers, 4 will go to state schools and possibly manage to claw their way into the middle class, and 1 will go to Harvard, where, feeling hopelessly alienated and out of place, he'll commit suicide.

And our elected leaders in Washington will be chauffeured home to their mansions and townhouses, and wash their hands for dinner, and congratulate themselves on a job well done.

White Protest, White Privilege

My good friend and fellow blogger Ed Palm has commented, both in his blog and in emails we've exchanged, that he considers much of the virulent right-wing reaction against Barack Obama's policies (and person) to be racially motivated. I've sensed the same--although, having been guilty of a fair degree of Bush-bashing myself, I'm not sure his political opponents were any kinder than Obama's.

But a recent counterfactual column by commentator Tim Wise has convinced me that--whatever the racial dynamics of anti-Obama sentiment--it is solely because of their race that the various groups fomenting such sentiment have been able not only to get away with their extremist agenda and terroristic threats against the president but to be lauded by many as latter-day champions of American freedom. Wise's essay hinges on the simple thought experiment: what if all these "patriotic" groups were non-white? How would we think of them then? Here's a snippet from the essay:

"Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters--the black protesters--spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protesters--these black protesters with guns--be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose."

The column is brilliant, exposing piece by piece how much of what we whites like to consider our God-given rights are in fact race-given rights--rights we have "earned" because of the color of our skin, and rights that are denied others because of the color of theirs. Having recently written an essay on race myself (forthcoming in the journal Smash Cake), I stand in awe of Wise's incisive critique not only of the white protestors but of the entire edifice of white privilege. I'll say no more here, because Wise says it all much better than I could. I'll simply end by saying that his is an essay that all thinking people should read. Its truths, to borrow a phrase, I hold to be self-evident.