The Shame of The Nation

I just finished reading The Shame of The Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling In America by Jonathan Kozol. Talk about depressing. I have been thinking about race in this country a lot lately. I've been thinking about the way that polls show that most white Americans do not think race had anything to do with the government response to Katrina, but most African-Americans think that it did. This can only really be because African-Americans know things about the way they are treated in this country that white Americans do not know. Terrifying things.

Like most white Americans, I am sure that the cocoon of privilege in which I live renders me clueless of the reality of these different Americas, but I am not as clueless as some. I grew up in an often multiethnic household due to my mother's tendency to temporarily acquire other people's children when they needed a place to stay, and I attended a well-integrated inner-city magnet high school in Dallas that did a very good job of the desegregation it was set up to do (I don't think they all did). I have noticed how clueless many of the people who I know and love..people who firmly believe in equality...are about its continued absence and it has troubled me. I am certain that I am similarly clueless and that what seems like a big difference in awareness to me is the subtlest of shades of difference to someone who is really aware. Someone who has to be. We do live in different countries, right here beside each other.

I still feel that I benefited greatly from living my adolescence in an environment of diversity and it troubles me that so few people are experencing that diversity today. Most, if not all, of the desegregation court orders that were still in place even in the seventies and eighties when I went to grade school and high school are not in place anymore, and the integration they so briefly brought that benefited so many people who went to school under their rule, is also mostly gone. Housing practices, "neighborhood schools", trade programs, curricula that divide the privileged from the people who are seen as products...so much separates us now. It's wrong and we have to fix it. We have to do the hard and sometimes frightening work of bringing our worlds together again. We have to.

Where do we start? I think we all have to start in different places, but let's all start. I'm going to start with a little research and an article (or several) about desegregating Texas schools. You think where you can start. We have a lot of work to do.