Education is the Civil Rights Movement of our generation. Many are alarmed to learn that strong and loyal Democrats support School Choice. To be clear, School Choice is a series of reforms who some argue aims to disband teachers’ unions and decimate public schools. Some argue it is an equalizer in education. I argue it is both and the reason why School Choice has taken hold is because of racial apathy. More below the fold:
You should read this article in full:
Racial Apathy and Hurricane Katrina
The article details the evolution of racism in our society. We have moved from a country that was overtly racist to a country that exhibits racial apathy with essentially the same results for Black and Brown people. Racial apathy is defined as indifference towards societal racial and ethnic inequality and lack of engagement with race-related social issues.
In the current historical moment, racial apathy may be more important to the reproduction of racial inequality than are traditional forms of Jim Crow prejudice. In fact, we argue that racial apathy is a particular kind of racial antipathy that enables those who deploy it to not only explain away what racial inequality they know of, but largely avoid knowing much about it in the first place.
...Racial apathy and White ignorance, we argue, is only the newest in a long line of mechanisms that facilitate the perpetuation of the unequal racialized social system and that lead to the kind of deep chasms in access to even the most basic material and social resources....
Yes, racial apathy is laying waste to the most democratic of social institutions, public school education. Color-blind racism defined in part as a persistent belief that racial inequality in outcomes is based on the individual and/or group level shortcomings, is a symptom of racial apathy. If you have not seen this as a defense for the poor outcomes in minority children in public education, you haven’t been paying attention to the world at large or this blog for that matter.
Another point from the article:
For instance, while schools are no longer legally segregated, a range of mechanisms (e.g. housing segregation and school funding structures) produce a public school system that remains highly segregated and unequal (Kozol 1991; Lewis 2003; Orfield and Gordon, 2001; Orfield and Yun, 1999). These separate and unequal schools are no longer defined in explicit racial terms, and the outcomes they produce are no longer seen as a result of the biological inferiority of minority groups. Instead, schools are defined geographically, believed to belong to a discrete local (often segregated) municipalities, and unequal school outcomes are believed to result from the differential investment in education that various families and communities make, that is, cultural inferiority. Thus , in the place of Jim Crow practices and ideologies of the past, new racial structures emerged....In essence, dominant racial groups deny the humanity of the disadvantaged by separating themselves and viewing the disadvantaged as "intrinsically different and alien."
So when the problem of differential outcomes in public school of minority children is defined as a cultural defect due to parenting, this has successfully alienated many parents and distracted the masses long enough to alleviate the burden of public schools to follow their mandate – to educate every child no matter their background. This has been an undercurrent in minorities’ fight to achieve equality in our society. Yet, we are faced with actors who are acting in bad faith when they respond to our demands of better outcomes that they are doing their best but it isn’t their problem that poor and minority children lack the accouterments of white middle class values. Nothing can be further from the truth and this is why public schools across this country are under siege, be it by VAMs or School Choice. Many in this society have said that these same children and parents demonized, when placed in alternative settings are achieving despite a concerted effort to convince others that they couldn’t. That is a bitter pill to swallow. It is a divide that places a core democratic principle front and center.
This is why School Choice has grown increasingly more popular among minority Democrats. Many AA Democrats are forming bi-partisan agreements with Republicans around this issue. It is a worrying trend because I believe that any party that finds the key to help minority children to achievement will make headway into the minority electorate. Let me clear up another misconception. Minority parents are not as unsophisticated as many think. So the attempt to paint this burgeoning movement as astrotruf is wrong and I believe based on the belief that minorities have a plantation mentality which is patently false. The adoption of the belief that some kids are uneducable is becoming a wedge issue among Democrats and is leading to Republicans’ ability to exploit the desperation of minority parents for their children to receive a quality education.
I will leave with this question, if the public schools are failing minority children at alarming rates, why are Progressives in general and minority Democrats in particular motivated to support those schools? Do you believe that offering the same results or worse does our country any good?