[[Note: This blog post is not related to SCED 4300: Literacy. If you're searching for a post in that vein, look for posts with the label "literacy."]]
I've only read one chapter into Johnathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities, but I know I am in for a ride. A bone-shattering, comfort-tearing, and terribly necessary ride.
Fair warning: I tend to fit in the "advocate" learner category - I learn by feeling and doing, and I do an awful lot of feeling. After the initial shock of the first chapter had sunk in, and the thought "There are still schools like this in America" had landed, I was furious.
But what do you do about it right? I mean, Savage Inequalities is 20-something years old? and besides, living in Utah, it's not like I can exactly force "people of color" into our public schools since not a great majority live in our state anyway. It's not my problem.
But if segregation has its roots in the institutionalized racism that has led people to live where they do (in generally mostly-white and non-white areas), and it is “not the problem” of any of those mostly-white schools to do anything about integration because “the blacks don’t live in our area,” then whose problem is it? Who is going to do the integrating? When I and everyone else decide that it's "not our problem," it becomes nobody’s problem, and the non-white communities with families in lower socio-economic conditions have no one to pull their students in to the schools with all of the funding.
What if, by making segregation nobody’s problem, we have created the problem of ongoing segregation that still exists in the United States? Segregation still exists, and in my lifetime, in all of my years in school, I have never once personally viewed an effort to integrate students of other races into the schools I have attended.
I don't know the answer - I don't know what can be done about it, but I'd like to know - How did this happen? It needs to change, and if it needs to change, where on earth do we start?
