Combatting Racism

The election of a black President, far from demonstrating our progress as a society in eradicating racism, ripped away a polite veneer of covert racism to reveal the racist core of American culture. At no other time since the Civil Rights era of the 1960s have we been called on as a people to confront not only our racist past but also our racist present.

Racism to a large degree is founded on and fostered by ignorance, and ingrained by segregation. The public schools have never been a complete answer to the problem of racism, but they have, at times, been one mechanism for addressing issues of inequality, of which racism is an inherent element. In fact, schools in the distant past contributed to our national racism, for example, during the “separate but equal” period under doctrine set down by Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). It wasn’t until 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, that “separate but equal”—a mantra as disingenuous as Fox News’ “fair and balanced”—was discarded and a national effort was begun to dismantle school segregation.

However, racial minority status and low socioeconomic status are strongly linked.  Any number of scholarly reports have affirmed a correlation between poverty and poor school achievement, and minority children are mostly likely to feel the consequences. Indeed, the spurious emphasis on evaluating students and schools on the basis of standardized test scores is a tacit expression of racism. Instead of spending thousands of dollars to line the coffers of testing corporations, a glance at existing economic census data would yield substantially the same results in identifying “successful” and “unsuccessful” schools. Superficial interpretations and misuses of test data are, at their center, racist—by result, if not (and I am being generous here) by intent.

“Success” is misdefined if it is characterized solely by test scores. Set aside the question of testing altogether, and the deck is still stacked against poor and minority students by the structure of our society. Public education has the potential to address racism but that potential is diminished during the current era because the persistent attacks on public education are imperiling its very existence. Overuse and misuse of standardized tests, union-busting, cuts in funding, and other destructive maneuvers by policy makers at every level have undermined public education and are contributing to the destruction of American democracy.

Public education could be a powerful instrument in the battle to eradicate racism. But public education in its currently weakened state is on life support. Until we, as a society, stop attacking and start rebuilding our nation’s public education system, we cannot realistically hope that our schools will be able to contribute meaningfully to the elimination of the racism that mars us as a society.