Social Issues in Education

Essay 1- Jonathan Kozol- The Shame of the Nation

Jonathan Kozol, in his tour of American schools, has discovered a disturbing truth: America has an Apartheid school system. Since the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education, the schools in America, while desegregated for a while, have slowly resegregated back to the comfortable way things used to be. Many things led to this resegregation, and many things must be examined to determine what can be done to alleviate this situation for the future.
First we must examine the causes of resegregation in American Schools since the decision of Brown v. Board of Education. Kozol notes in his book that everything was going well in the effort to desegregate the schools until the late 1980s when President Bush took away a lot of the anti- segregation laws, thinking the problem was solved. However, the problem was far from over, in fact, we were about to see a recession back into the dark places of segregation, and even apartheid schooling. Since the black population was not considered equal long enough to gain a social and economic standing in the world before the segregation was restarted, the cycle was bound to repeat itself, and the blacks would be stuck in this subpar education system. Their lack of a financial medium has taken away their only source of resolve in this situation by themselves. You see, the blacks aren’t necessarily segregated with the same kinds of laws that they were segregated with back in the 1960s. They are segregated by wealth and power, and these are chains that are not easily broken given the educational system they have to work with. In fact, “the desegregation of black students, which increased continuously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has now receded to levels not seen in three decades” (Kozol Location 275-279). What makes it worse today is that no one is willing to see this segregation, or even try and fight it. The whites have fled to the suburbs, leaving the blacks to fend for themselves in the crumbling inner-city infrastructure. Since the whites have cornered the financial market, the blacks have few ways, if any, to fund their schools. School improvement is funded by the community, and if the community has little money to share, then the school suffers. When this issue is presented to the whites however, they refuse to share the wealth that “they worked so hard for.” They ask, why can’t they work for their money? What they fail to notice is that the blacks DO work for the money they earn, and they sometimes work two or three jobs for it. But, how are they supposed to rise out of these ashes if they don’t have the proper schooling to excel in the type of America we have today, where it is becoming harder and harder to find a job with even just a bachelor’s degree. It is as if America has already decided who they want to succeed in life. The schools will offer AP classes to schools with a majority of White students, but hairdressing classes to schools with a majority of black students. They have already assigned worth to these students, and they have determined that some students are worthier than others. Why won’t the school boards of America do something about the sometimes as much as $8,000 difference in the amount of funding given to each child per year from the inner city to the suburbs. It is understandable for there to be a little difference between the suburbs to the inner city, but this difference is way too much. The school system has already hindered these students enough, and more needs to be done.
Whether we want to admit it or not, America does in fact have apartheid schooling. Apartheid is defined as being the segregation of nonwhites based on political, legal, and economic discrimination. The economic discrimination is the most prominent of these causes to look at when looking at our schools. It is the economic status of these students that causes them to have schools with “teachers with the least seniority and least experience,” and “foul odor[s] fill[ing] much of the building”(Kozol Location 345-360). These are not the conditions that the whites from the suburbs learn in, and if ever these conditions were in a predominantly white school, their parents would come unglued until someone fixed it. In America, we are reluctant to call this apartheid schooling because of our big egos and the reputation we have made for ourselves as a “Land of Opportunity.” But really, if we are the Land of Opportunity, then why is it that a lot of our students never get the opportunity to go to college, and they are hindered from the youngest age from reaching that goal. I think that we as American can live with our schools being segregated by this economic factor, but we fail to recognize that this economic factor is directly correlated with race. Until we recognize that we can’t fully solve the problems at hand. Even though we supposed to have solved all these problems in the past, we haven’t and we are very reluctant to admit that we still have problems.
The only way to solve these problems is to change both our attitudes, and our laws to make the playing field more equal. One way that we can make a step towards changing the makeup of our schools is to redraw some district and school zoning lines to make the schools more diverse. However, this would not go over well until our attitudes change and we become more open to change and the good things that can come of it. The government could increase some funding for schools in need. No school should have walls falling down with leaks in the roof and air that never works. Our students, of both races, can learn so much from each other’s cultures if we only let them.

Race Matters Ch. 5-8
5. Cornel West talks about the black plight as it relates to Affirmative Action, black-Jewish relations, black sexuality, and Malcolm X’s campaign for equality. West believes that Affirmative Action’s attempt in leveling the playing field for blacks is a valid one that should be continued, but not used as a crutch by those who are striving for equality. Affirmative action is a stepping stone, but it is not perfect. Malcolm X is looked at in this book as a very strong voice in the public and a leader in the movement for black self-love. Cornel West also details the history of Black Antisemitism as another factor of White supremacy in America. The issue of Black sexuality can be related back to White Supremacy and a lack of black self-love (which can be attributed to White Supremacy).
4. -“The quest for black identity involves self-respect and self-regard, realms inseparable form, yet not identical to, political power and economic status.” P97
-“It is downplayed by blacks because they focus on the astonishingly rapid entrée of most Jews into the middle and upper middle classes during this brief period- an entrée that has spawned both an intense conflict with the more slowly growing black middle class and a social resentment from a quickly growing black impoverished class.” P106
- “Much of black self-hatred and self-concept has to do with the refusal of many black Americans to love their own black bodies-especially their black noses, hips, lips, and hair.” P122
- “The only legitimate response to white supremacist ideology and practice is black self-love and black self-determination free of the tension generated by ‘double-consciousness’.” P140
3. double-consiousness- according to W.E.B. Du Bois, this is the level of enlightenment that blacks have that are a part of the white culture and see themselves through their eyes and have to fit in their own black culture. However, Malcolm X believes this applies not to all blacks, but only those that are caught in between the two cultures.
House Negroes- “those that love and protect the white master”
Field Negroes- “those that hate and resist the white master”
2. -W.E.B. Du Bois thought that blacks are not just capable of what little things the whites put aside for them, but also they are capable of everything that whites are able to do, and possibly more. I think Du Bois is has a lot of the same ideas and feelings that Malcolm X has, however I believe that Malcolm X is a lot more enraged about the plight of blacks in America. It is important to note that Malcolm X’s platform happened over 30 years after Du Bois’s platform.
-I have thought about all the roles blacks were given in TV and the media throughout the 60s and beyond. It has changed, but there are still some remnants of the roles the public was OK with giving the black people, like the comedian roles and the black people that needed help from the white people to survive.
1. What would West think about Obama and how he has conducted himself?

I am quite the movie buff and I love this type of study- pop culture in the media and social issues in the media, so this post may be quite long.. : )

Two summers ago, I took a Popular Culture class at HBU and as a part of the course we examined the major Social Movements of the 60s in movies and TV shows. One of the movements we studied was the Civil Rights movement and then what came after that in movies, the Hip Hop culture. Both of these had a lot to do with the roles black people held in TV shows and movies. Often, when there is a multi-racial cast in Hollywood, the black person is the comedic relief. The most current example I can think of is the new Bruce Willis movie, Cop Out. Bruce Willis is known as this hard core action hero but in this movie he is paired up with Tracy Morgan, a black comedic actor. Instead of the black actor being the serious action hero, he is the comedic relief. Of course there are the serious black actors, but they are fewer and much farther between than the black actor who picks the roles that fit into the stereotypes. Hollywood's highest paid actor is Will Smith, but to really see Hollywood's values as it pertains to the roles black people should fill, one should look at Will Smith's roles in the past. Among his top 10 highest grossing movies are Men in Black I and II, Hitch, and Sharktale. In all of those movies Will Smith is the comedic relief. Don't forget that that specific type of role is how he got his start on the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Of course, there are exceptions to this, namely Morgan Freeman or Forrest Whitaker. What this teaches us is that Hollywood doesn't take the black actor seriously enough to give them serious roles that are Oscar worthy. All the TV shows that I see now that have a purely black cast are comedy shows, like all the Tyler Perry TV shows/movies.

All this to say, blacks clearly have not gained equality when it comes to the entertainment industry. Who knows if the black actors choose these roles, or if these are the only roles offered to them, but in any case, these are the results. It is hard to look at the black women roles in TV and movies because they not only have to combat the race issues, but also sex issues in the entertainment industry.

5. West talks about the problems that black people face today in American society. What makes West different is that he doesn’t just blame society for those problems, but he also attributes some of the blame to the black population and their attitudes towards the problems they face. Some of the problems that the black population is directly responsible for include the lack of black leadership, the lack of conviction among the people that something must be done to alleviate their plight, and their complacency with how things are. He believes that if we can get the entire population to see the suffering they are enduring as something that can be changed and if we can change the attitude of the white population to believe that the race problem isn’t just a social problem but a moral one, we can fix the race issues in America today. To West the racial issue transcends every faction in American lives from social and political, to moral and ethical and we should use each of those factions to get rid of the race matters in America today.

4. “To engage in a serious discussion of race in America, we must begin not with the problems of black people but with the flaws of American society- flaws rooted in historic inequalities and longstanding cultural stereotypes…The implication is that only certain Americans can define what it means to be American- and the rest must simply ‘fit in’.”(P6-7)

“The fundamental aim of this undermining and dismantling is to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning, to understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles…” (P 38).

“Where there is no vision, the people perish; where there is no framework of moral reasoning, the people close ranks in a war of all against all. The growing gangsterization of America results in part from a market-driven racial reasoning that links the White House to the ghetto projects.” (P 48)

“There has not been a time in the history of black people in this country when the quantity of politicians and intellectuals was so great, yet the quality of both groups has been so low.” (p 53).

3. Afrocentrism- a contemporary species of black nationalism, puts black doings and sufferings at the center of discussion.

Nihilism- the lived experience of coping with a life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness, and lovelessness.

Conservative Behavioralists- promote self-help programs, black business expansion, and non-preferential job practices. Their projects rest on a cultural revival of the Protestant work ethic in black America.

2. In one of my classes at AJ Moore we showed a movie on the Lost Boys of the Sudan called The Lost Boys. This was a movie about the movement of a group of boys from the Sudan to America and the culture shock they experienced when trying to go to school and get jobs and make a life for themselves. The boys had a certain idea of what the black people in America were like and it was the stereotypical view of gangster black people. When they played basketball with some neighborhood black people they were talking later about how aggressive they were which shocked them. They also said that they probably were reaching in their pockets and stealing from them while they were playing basketball. Generally the boys from the Sudan thought all black people in America were gangster robbers that are really bad people. West talked about all the general views people have of the black population and how hindering that can be for the people that think they can’t get out from under the stereotypes.

In a Pop Culture class I took at HBU, the professor talked about the gangster image that is now so popular in black culture. He cited the roots of this get up in black history all the way back to when black people would perform right after they were granted freedom. What blacks would do to entertain the white folk was dress up in exaggerated clothes that were too big with makeup and would almost look like rodeo clowns. Ironically, today the gangster get up is marked by large clothes that are 3 sizes too big for them and pants that are falling down. It is interesting to see where this image comes from, and I would guess that most black people that follow this image don’t know where it comes from either. This also relates to why they wear their pants so low. When people are sent to prison, their belts are taken away and their pants fall down as a result, so wearing their pants low was a sign of having been in prison. It is interesting that the black people are hanging on to all these things that are markers of their chains that the white people have given them in the past.

1. How would West respond to Kozol’s issues that he points out in his book and the solutions and causes for them?