Sunday, October 28, 2007
Frustration
It has been more fifty years since the Board v. Brown decision. Where have we come? We have made gains, but are they enough? I feel ever more frustrated everyday with the current state of the union. We are weak when it comes to defending the rights of every child to receive a quality first-class education. I have recently been reading the book "Savage Inequalities." The book goes into first-hand detail about the the grotesque inequalities in some of America's schools. It discusses how in some African American communities, kids go to school in the winter with classrooms where the furnace is either broken or over-working. Where have we come? I don't think that Thurgood Marshall would appreciate the still apparent discrepancies in schools serving white students and schools serving black students. I do not think that the countless civil rights attorneys that spent endless hours coming up with arguments to break down the manacles of segregation in schools would be happy to see that segregation within schools is the new way that the races are being kept apart. Their work in many cases is becoming in vain. I think about all of this, and I become FRUSTRATED!
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2 comments:
This really should make people think that even though a court ruling desegregated schools by race, they are still segregated by class. When people grow up in a poor neighborhood, chances are they will not get the quality of education that a person will get if he or she grows up in a rich neighborhood. If if both the kids in the example go to public schools, chances are that the rich kid will go to the better school. Facilities should be provided that are fair to all, not the ones that pay a lot of taxes. Even if racism is gone, discrimination based on class is taking over.
Thanks for your comment! I agree that people really should think that schools are still segregated. I think that because racism and efforts to ensure segregation are not as blatant as they used to be, people think that they problem is over, that's far far away from the truth. America is still fighting off the same demons that it was fighting off in the 60's, the only difference now is that the enemy is stronger and more covert.
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