The whiter the school...the better the education. I work within a city school system which is predominately black, and it is obvious to me that the environments constructed for these black students are disproportionately disadvantaged to that of the surrounding predominately white school districts. I thought segregation ended in the 60's. Apparently, our society has figured out a way to protect the privileges of the majority, with little regard for the under-resourced and underexposed students of the inner cities. The cities aren't faced with challenges because blacks chose to move to these areas. Blacks have always been there. Over the last 50 years whites and now middle class blacks have moved away from the cities for better living, working and educational conditions. In doing so, they've taken the resources, businesses and tax base from the cities. Cities are left with lower income families, and less tax revenues which fund the schools. Structures or policies that prohibit or disable minority groups from equally accessing opportunities, resources and services is racist. Racism as it's been historically known has evolved. It's masked by exclusionary programs which claim to be economically based in their creation and implementation. The economics of our society is one of the most racially polarizing constructs that highlights "the haves and have nots." I blame the Fair Housing Act and Welfare programs of the 1950s. The Fair Housing Act provided whites with a means to escape integrated cities, and Welfare created a culture of "second class citizenry" amongst a concentrated population of people in the inner cities, which typically happens to be black. If we're all supposed to have access to equal education, why are urban schools performing far worse, graduating fewer students and contributing to the "school to prison pipeline" far more than their suburban counterparts? Is this arrangement intentional or a byproduct of simple economics? How can educational racism be removed from our society, to insure that all children have equal opportunities to learn and inevitably compete as adults, regardless of where they live?
Urbanizer
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ReplyDeleteWell Damon i don't know how to fix it but i think these problems were created when we the "whites" decided that we wanted to continue with racial segregation and we created projects and built into the parts of the city that improved the suburban and tax producing areas of the cities. So in essence we did this to ourselves without seeing the consequences on the future. Also in richmond I think we thought out the whole city in order to segregate the communities, We built I-195 and the interchange so that we could forever separate the lower class black projects from the upper and middle class white suburbs. Im sorry that it happened but as of right now we are still trying to recuperate from the racism of the past. Hopefully we will see the end of racism for good as the last old racist white kkk member dies in the near future but you at your job are doing a great job to ensure that the underprivileged children get what they need. And in the bigger picture you are doing more than you ever know about advancing your race and moving out of the racism of the former generation. I think that as time goes on we will emerge a stronger more unified civilization once we realize that the color of your skin and the amount of money you make doesn't determine what kind of person you are. In closing my friend i am going to recommend you to my blog at http://musigmachi.blogspot.com/. I think you will find some interesting and important issues brought up.
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