This is my first post on the Black Tuesday Blog...hopefully you'll like it: actually, I hope you don't.
In a recent search of google news I discovered that the Supreme Court has voted to eliminate affirmative action programs in the public school system. This is only years after the windfall decision to eliminate affirmative action programs in all public instituions of higher learning. What this means for anyone who is not a white male--and in primary school just white--is that now, thanks to the glories of white flight, good schools can no longer give you entrance into their school for the purpose of creating diversity. Without directly saying it, the Supreme Court has singlehandedly rejected the importance/relevance of an ethnically diverse student body to a rounded education. To the rest of us, non-white people, that means that the ignorance that somehow survives the already "diverse" educational system will only get worse. Get ready for it.
Under normal conditions, as a "black nationalist", the idea in and of itself doesn't bother me. I've long thought that it was a stupid idea to bus black kids out of their neighborhoods to go to school with a bunch of white kids, without first improving the schools that remain in the black community. If the government doesn't improve the inner-city public school system, how does integration really benefit anyone. So granted, integration didn't do anything but make sure white kids knew a few black kids. Good. Okay. We're on the same page. The problem with the Supreme Courts decision is multi-faceted: It eliminates the only real benefit that came with integration--an answer to the ignorance component of racism (to the detriment of the long traumatized black children who integrated, but that's beside the point), it results in de facto segregation--the long-standing way of the North--thanks to the post-Civil Rights white flight phenomenon (which has actually existed as long as n****'s been free), it cripples the very root of the Civil Rights movement--Brown v the Board of Education, and it sets the tone for a reversal of all of the economic and political progress that had been made in the last forty years.
What I want to emphasize is the Brown v BOE decision and the economic and political progress component of my thinking. Look at it like this: Brown vs the Board of Education was meant to prove that segregated schools were mutually detrimental to both black and white students. Racially segregated schools are inherently unequal. That is still the case today when you look to inner-city schools versus suburban schools. Even with de facto segregation you can still observe the disparity between the white haves and the minority have-nots. By suddently arguing that it is more important to return to region-based student selection (which is likely to be what it becomes) than it is to use race-based student selection, the doors are opened to treat regional racial demographics as the ultimate out for white communities who don't want blacks. What will inevitably happen, is that black parents who want their children to get an education in predominantly white communities will have to prove that their children are academically superior enough to be around the white students--thereby affirming white superiority--and find their own way of getting there--because the government will inevitably no longer bus a bunch of minorities from the inner-cities to outside communities for their education. If the government were to invest in poor communities, it wouldn't be so bad. But they won't. Nothing will change except demographics, and whites will have all the reason in the world to reduce integration to pure tokenism. (As if it wasn't that way already.)
My other main point is this: over time, twenty/thirty years or so, the inferior education of inner-city schools will reach the point that it will again become a 1950's style academic divide. It is a statistical fact that the more educated an individual is, the more likely they are to vote. By leaving all of the minorities in communities which are notoriously non-voting, and then under-educating those children, when they become adults, there will be an entire generation of lost voters. You've disempowered an entire generation of minorities by one single action. You've also economically disempowered an entire generation of minorities by one single action. This is not to suggest that the world is better because a few black kids get into white schools, but rather, the world is worse when very few minority students, from academically inferior communities are rejected entrance into academically superior communities simply because conservatives have found a way of spinning things to make it sound like race-based affirmative action is discriminating.
I'll end with this thought: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS REVERSE-DISCRIMINATION!!! Reverse-discrimination is a neo-conservative, white privileged tool of establishing an undeserved victim status to a race of people who have been, and continue to be, collectively, empowered. Conservatives use "reverse-racism" to point the finger away from themselves and blame minorities for their inability to re-establish their global superiority. Reverse-discrimination is white people upset that they don't get their privileges and minority empowerment tactics. They don't want to pull their hand out of the cookie jar. They're standing up screaming, "N*gger get your hand out of my pocket!" But telling us that if we don't we're racists. Okay.
It's not that I don't understand their logic. Meritocracies sound nice on paper, but doesn't equality come first, and a merit-based society second? I think that the conservative movement is destroying the world for black people (in the Malcolm X sense of the term black). True, it is due time for race-based legislation and codes to be abolished, but it is the failures of society that have perpetuated the need for such legislation. Change society, then the laws. Stop reversing a revolution that has yet to be completed!
Posts
