international blog against racism week

[vaznetti]

So somebody decided that this was "blog about racism week," or maybe "blog against racism week." See here for further details and a list of posts. I had a kind of cranky "this is a bad week for me to blog about racism, actually," moment, but then I decided to post something anyway.

coffeeandink has a post about ways to suppress discussion of racism. I

Comments

[embroiderama]

Wow, you made me think with your point about the gifted class thing. I went to elementary and middle school in a small blue-collar city with a fairly high Black and Hispanic population (though very few of other ethnicities such as Asian, at least at that time). I was in a gifted class (it just met a couple times/week) from 3rd to 8th grade, and I think that those classes were almost entirely composed of white kids. There was one girl who was Korean but, based on her last name and on what was common in the area, she was probably adopted by a white family. The regular classes I was in the rest of the time had plenty of non-white kids. Holy shit. I had realy never considered that. How screwed up.

[vaznetti]

The way I see it is, a lot of the time, parents have to do something to get their kids into gifted programs (or really, any kind of special help). And whether or not they're willing to try that may depend on the kind of treatment they're going to expect from big public institutions. And there has to be a kind of self-perpetuating element -- because if people see that the gifted classes are full of white kids, they're going to think "that's not for me" unless they're white.

It is really screwed up. I don't know if things are still that bad. I mean, the joke was that in fifth grade I switched to a fancy private school which was actually more diverse than my public school class had been.

[jonquil]

Many of the participants in this discussion (notably oyceter) are nonwhite and nonblack. Oyceter has had some intelligent things to say about Asianness being "honorary white" in some cases, not in others, and that there are stereotypical burdens associated with being Asian.

[vaznetti]

My first school was on the edges of the Mission, and there the split was Anglo-Hispanic, so that I was off in the library learning the names of the colors in Spanish when the rest of the class was doing ESL or something. But our street was very white, I think.

Of course, this was just about 20 years ago, so maybe things are different now. That would be nice.

It would be nice. I don't really believe that anything has changed, sadly.

[se_parsons]

I went to an all-white school in an all-white neighborhood. We had one Jewish family. We had two Indian families and one of my two best friends was 1/4 Native American. That was IT for diversity

[vaznetti]

This may be overly pessimistic, but I'm not sure that we have any business making people not hate each other. Or not be prejudiced, or whatever. You can't insist that people change their opinions, but you can keep them from acting on them. Obviously, this is over-simplistic, because ideally the world would be shaped in a way that would make it difficult for people to form opinions like that. But I guess I'm more concerned with dealing with how people act, or what makes a situation like the school I went to. because I don't think that's just down to some people wanting to feel superior; I think it's a structural thing that somehow got built into the institution and needs to be taken out of it.

[se_parsons]

I agree that it has become institutionalized. That certainly MUST be dealt with and is actually the easiest part to deal with.

But, I guess I'm from a tradition that believes in changing how people think and I think it's vital to do that, too. I guess it's my own little form of evangelicalism. Probably dangerous, that.

[coffeeandink]

Thanks for posting this. Your early school experience was, I think you will not be surprised to learn, fairly similar to mine.

(P.S. I still think of you as Vanzetti and have to flip the consonants every time I type your LJ name.)

[vaznetti]

I live to cause name-related confusion!

Sorry to be hot-and-cold about your post. It's a good post, it just cut a little too close.

The thing about the gifted classes still shocks me, and it's been even more shocking to realize that my experience was hardly exceptional.

[coffeeandink]

It is perfectly okay not to agree with and/or like everything I do. And on that particular post, I am surprised I haven't gotten more of a kickback.