Black or White They’re Just Kids: They Need Us & We Need Them!

This is the 3rd segment of our series of articles on education, racism and the performance gap.

It is incredibly difficult for a white person to understand what it is like to be black. Sadly, most white people are perfectly content to know as little as possible about such things. For others like my white daughter and son-in-law, who are parents of a black son, it is imperative that we understand as much as we possibly can.

My wife and I have three grandchildren. The eldest is a little girl who was adopted by that same daughter and son-in-law. She is of Mexican descent with beautiful, thick black hair, brown eyes, golden brown skin, and a smile that lights up the world. The second is a little boy whose skin is a beautiful, rich brown with eyes to match, who has his sister’s smile, and who came out of his birth mother’s womb with a natural Afro. Our youngest grandchild is the biological child of my youngest daughter and her husband. She is the palest of whites, bordering on pink, and her hair is as red as her father’s beard. She is also beautiful with a smile that is second to none.

These children represent our family’s beautiful rainbow and, like all grandparents, we love them so much that it hurts.

When our daughter announced that they were adopting a black infant we knew he would face challenges but we did not yet grasp the whole of it. From the events in Ferguson, Baltimore, and elsewhere we have become painfully aware of the dangers our sweet and beautiful little boy will face; not because of anything he has done but only because of the way the color of his skin will affect the attitudes of a huge population of Americans.

We shuddered after reading such powerful articles as “I Never Knew How White I Was Until I Had a Black Child,” which you can find on Rosebelle’s Blog; and more recently, “7 Ways Racism Affects the Lives of Black Children” by Terrell Jermaine Starr on the website Alternet.

I have spent my entire lifetime striving to understand why our world is so full of hatred over issues as insignificant as the color of one’s skin. I still struggle to understand why differences in eye or hair color are perceived as different shades of beauty while differences in skin color can produce such hatred and mistrust.

I was blessed to be born to parents who taught that we are all children of Creation and that we were blessed to live in a country in which we are all considered equal under the Constitution.

I was equally fortunate to live in a neighborhood and attend an elementary school where I learned to be friends and playmates of my black classmates before I ever learned of the existence of bigotry and racism.

When I first witnessed the hatred that my white friends had for my black friends, I was devastated. Innocence was forever lost but I never lost my perception of diversity as something to be cherished as beautiful.

Later, at the age of 20, I was privileged to spend a summer working in a churchyard in Philadelphia, providing a place for kids to gather and play, safe from the reaches of the gangs whose territories sandwiched our little oasis. All were African-American. While I was responsible for the 30 to 40 different boys and girls between the ages of 8 and 16 who chose to play in our churchyard and game room, I played with them far more than I supervised.

For the first nine years after college and the military, I worked as a juvenile probation officer where I supervised a multi-racial group of boys and girls between the ages of 9 and 17. Later, I was one of the founders of a local Boys and Girls Club where, once again, I was privileged to be around and play with a diverse group of children.

What I learned during these significant chunks of my life was that whether black, white, or shades of brown; rich or poor; male or female they are all just kids.

They all laugh when they play or act silly; cry and bleed red when they get hurt; get mad when they lose; celebrate when they win; get embarrassed when they are made fun of; yawn when they get sleepy; respond to love and affection with love and affection; and, suffer egregiously when abused by their parents or when bullied.

They all have the ability to learn; they all are curious about the world around them; and, they all get discouraged and feel humiliated when they fail. They all suffer great loss of self-esteem when they give up on themselves after repeated failure and no longer believe in their ability to compete. That we give up on them only adds to the tragedy.

They all deserve our respect not only as individual human beings but also as members of their unique cultural traditions all of which add beauty to the world. The only difference, once they arrive at school, is their level of preparation and motivation.

They all deserve the absolute best we have to offer and the very fact that so many of them fail provides irrefutable evidence that they are not getting our best and that what we are doing does not work for everyone.

Whether we are teachers, principals, policy-makers, or deans and professors of schools of education we must be willing to pull our heads from the sand and stop defending the indefensible. The fact that so many children are failing, particularly minorities and the poor, is not a predisposition of birth or a fact of nature. Such incidence of failure is nothing more than an outcome of a flawed system of human design. The performance gap between white children and their black and other minority classmates is an outcome our traditional educational process is structured to produce.

This flawed system is not the fault of teachers and other professional educators. Rather, the culpability of educators is the result of the fact that they are the people in the best position to identify and remediate this flawed educational process but they hold back as if they are afraid to act. It is critical that we understand that this lack of action is not because they are bad people or incompetent professionals rather it is because they have succumbed to the belief that they are powerless.

Teachers must be challenged to accept that powerlessness and hopelessness are functions of choice. They are equally free to choose to be both hopeful and powerful.

The over-riding truth, as we move deeper into this exponentially complex 21st Century, is that we need each and every one of these kids just as desperately as they need us.

Our ability to compete in the world marketplace will require the absolute best of every single American and if we do not pull together as one beautifully diverse nation of people—the proverbial melting pot—the results will be tragic for all of us, black, white or any of the colors of the rainbow. We will no longer live in a world where being an American is something of which we can be proud. Neither will it be a world where our children and grandchildren can feel safe and hopeful in rearing their own children.

The final segment of this series will be devoted to showing professional educators one way in which we can irrevocably alter the reality of public education in America.

Racism, The Achievement Gap, and Public Education, Part 2

This is the second of our series of articles that are offered to address the issues that face children of color and also white children who live in poverty in this the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world.

We begin with the simple idea that it is time to draw a line in the sand and say that we will no longer tolerate a world in which some Americans are denied access to the American dream. This demands that
we shift our focus to those things over which we have control and not squander our precious time and energy fretting about things that are outside the power of individual human beings to change.

It is like being stuck in the mud. Do we complain about our plight or start digging ourselves out.

We cannot, for example, go back and change several hundred years of history in which black men and women were brought to this continent in chains, nor the first 100 years following the Emancipation Proclamation during which black Americans were forced to live as second-class citizens, nor the 50 years since Civil Rights laws were passed; legislation that raised the expectations of African-American and other minorities but without altering the reality in which so many live in poverty, powerlessness, and hopelessness.

We cannot go back and change the reality that has greeted the millions of Latinos who have migrated to this country in recent years, whether legally or not.

We cannot legislate changes in the hearts of so many white Americans that are laced with bigotry and prejudice, whether blatant or subtle.

Neither can we legislate a change in the hearts and minds of those police officers who are predisposed to act with bias and excessive force. The best we can do demand that our communities hold abusers accountable and tighten our entrance requirements.

We cannot erase, through legislation action or executive orders, the economic disadvantages that have led generations of Americans to rear their children and live in poverty. Recall that President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty a half century ago and ask yourself if anything has changed. Most of us would say things have gotten steadily worse.

We have not been successful in our attempts to legislate an end to the institutional racism that has plagued and continues to plague black men, women, and children and the families of other minorities; institutional racism that is invisible to the overwhelming majority of white Americans. Civil rights laws have been on the books for a half century and have been routinely enforced and upheld by our nation’s courts of law, yet still these realities persist.

We cannot undo the damage that has been done to minds and egos of generations of children who have been victims of an educational process that has taught them how to fail nor can we undo a long history of academic failure that has led generations of young parents to relinquish their belief that an education is a ticket to the American dream and provides a way for their children to escape the clutches of poverty.

As much as we might wish to do all of the above they are not within our power and no amount of complaining about the injustice of these realities will alter that fact. The more we dwell on things we cannot change the more immersed we are in our paradigms of powerlessness and hopelessness.

We are not powerless, however, and we need not be hopeless. We have it within our power to draw a line of demarcation in the sand and say “no more!” All it requires is that we begin doing things differently from two strategic fronts, simultaneously.

We must alter, once and for all, the balance of power that drives legislation and policy making in the American political landscape. How we do this will be the topic of the next series of articles we will be writing but it begins with the reality that the conservative political power structure in the U.S. that, today, is driven by conservative “tea party” ideology, does not represent anywhere close to a majority of the American people. The problem, of course is that the majority of Americans have stopped participating in their own governance because they have given up hope that anything they do will make a difference.

In a recent post, Phyllis Bush, a great friend to public education, talked about choosing collaboration over competition. If the following groups of Americans would come together to form a political coalition they would have more than enough political clout to turn both our federal and state legislative branches upside down and also our federal and state executive branches.

Who would make up this coalition? The answer is all of the people whose political needs and interests are being ignored by those currently in power. They include:

• All African-American; Hispanic-American; and other ethnic, racial, and religious minorities; and also those who face discrimination due to sexual orientation;

• All professional educators working in public schools throughout America;

• All parents who depend on public schools for the education of their children; and,

• All of the men and women in America who work for a living and who are union members or who would belong to a union had that right not been taken from them.

We need to leave the tradition of Republican and Democrat behind. The reality, today, is that it is the Tea Party and their conservative supporters versus the people. Maybe we need to call it the “People’s Party,” making it clear, however, that this is not a socialist or communist agenda.

The other strategic front is American public education. We have the power to begin changing, from the inside out, the forces that keep poor and minority children from getting the education they need to break out of poverty. We can do this, however, only if we are willing to open our hearts and minds and re-examine our fundamental assumptions about the way we structure the educational process at work in American schools; about the way we teach children.

All that is required of us is that we be willing to step back and think systemically about the way the process is structured and how it produces outcomes that are so devastating to precious young lives.

If we do this honestly, and without feeling the need to excuse ourselves from blame or responsibility, it is so very easy to do. We should not waste one nanosecond worrying about blame or fault. What we can do—what we must do—is accept responsibility for doing things differently, beginning this very moment.

There is a simple but powerful axiom that we must keep at the forefront of our minds:

“It is not until we accept responsibility for the problems in our lives that we begin to acquire the power to solve them.”

Clearly the key is public education. If we are able to provide all children, not just affluent white children, the knowledge and skills they need in order to carve out full and productive lives for themselves then we can begin narrowing the performance gap until it disappears forever. We can begin by identifying outcomes that are acceptable to us and that will give all children an opportunity to fulfill their God-given potential. Then, it is simply a matter of structuring the process in such a way that it can and will produce those outcomes. We will show the reader exactly how this can be done in our last segment. Before we do so, however, there is one last point of discussion we must consider in the upcoming third post in this series.