The Absence of Discussion

I admit I was pretty skeptical about Survivor breaking up the initial tribes by race when I first heard about it. But then I was singularly intrigued. I had seen enough years of Survivor that I had faith in the intentions of the show's producers, and now that the show is around halfway done, I think my faith has been justified. The racial element of the show has been handled with sensitivity and reflection by the producers and the participants.

In fact, I'm a little disappointed that the tribes didn't stay segregated longer. They mixed them all up just a few episodes in, causing the "controversy" to die down and taking away another great opportunity (and a a very popular forum) for America to confront its racial demons.

"Before we gave up on integration, we should have tried it," wrote Jack White, a columnist for Time magazine, nearly ten years ago. I think it's interesting that so many people got so upset about contestants on a reality TV show being separated by race when the real reality is that much of our society is that way. Maybe Americans didn't want to confront how separate we really already are -- and now they don't have to.

Last week, we were asked as a staff what the achievement barriers are for our students in English language arts. I commented that, among other things, the fact that our students are ethnically, socioeconomically, and linguistically segregated and isolated is a significant barrier. Another teacher replied that while being poor and living in a predominantly Spanish speaking community were factors, he didn't think being separated ethnically had much to do with it at all. You wouldn't expect a school that was 95% white, he said, to be low achieving, just because those kids are ethnically isolated, so why should a bunch of Latinos, just because they go to school with a bunch of Latinos, be any different?

I understood the point he was trying to make. But take this excerpt from Jonathan Kozol's must-read book The Shame of the Nation:

"Even many black leaders," notes education analyst Richard Rothstein, weary of the struggle over mandatory busing programs to achieve desegregation, "have given up on integration," arguing, in his words, that "a black child does not need white classmates in order to learn." So education policies, instead, he says, "now aim to raise scores in schools that black children attend."

"That effort," he writes, "will be flawed even if it succeeds." The 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education) decision, he reminds us, "was not about raising scores" for children of minorities "but about giving black children access to majority culture, so they could negotiate it more confidently... For African Americans to have equal opportunity, higher test scores will not suffice. It is foolhardy to think black children can be taught, no matter how well, in isolation and then have the skills and confidence as adults to succeed in a white world where they have no experience."

Hence the idea of separate being inherently unequal. In fact, when I first started teaching at Garfield, increasing the diversity of our school was one of our explicitly stated "master plan goals" though it never received any attention. When our first charter expired at the end of the 5 year period and a new charter was drawn up and renewed, the goal of increasing diversity had been dropped altogether. The topic has never been brought up since.