“The arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., revived the ongoing discussion about tensions between police officers and non-white Americans. John Burris, a lawyer who represented Rodney King, joins Portland, Ore., Police Chief Rosie Sizer and Montgomery County, Md., Police Chief Clarence Edwards to discuss what happens when black and blue collide.”
African-American poet Claudia Rankine’s latest collection, Citizen: An American Lyric is a personal meditation on race in America with a cover that recalls Trayvon Martin — a black hoodie against a white background.
Citizen was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award. The book reads like a series of diary entries about encounters with racism. Here’s one of the book’s anecdotes:
You and your partner go to see the film The House We Live In. You ask a friend to pick up your child from school. On your way home your phone rings. Your neighbor tells you he is standing at his window watching a menacing black guy casing both your homes. The guy is walking back and forth talking to himself and seems disturbed.
You tell your neighbor that your friend, whom he has met, is babysitting. He says, no, it’s not him. He’s met your friend and this isn’t that nice young man. Anyway, he wants you to know, he’s called the police.
Your partner calls your friend and asks him if there’s a guy walking back and forth in front of your home. Your friend says that if anyone were outside he would see him because he is standing outside. You hear the sirens through the speakerphone.
In a 2003 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to uphold affirmative action and said it expected that in 25 years, “the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” Here’s a conversation between Boyce Watkins, assistant professor at Syracuse University, and Linda Chavez, chair of Center for Equal Opportunity, about the 2013 SCOTUS case revisiting University of Texas, that (at the time) could ban affirmative action in higher education once and for all.
Joseph C. Phillip frames the debate in terms of students’ family life and single vs. two parent homes, rather than bigotry in school disciplinarians. He thinks that focusing only on race-talk on this issue will lead to unsatisfactory solutions that institutionalize the idea that there is something inherently different culturally that leads to black children misbehaving.
“A 2006 study claims Seattle school teachers discipline black students more than their white peers. How about a solution that doesn’t involve pulling the ‘race card?’ […] We can either march forward under the illusion that a discipline gap exists because teachers are a bunch of racists, suspending black children more than white for no other reason than the color of their skin. Or, we can finally realize that a breakdown in the traditional family structure, and an embrace of the destructive social behavior and attitudes that have accompanied it, is playing the devil with our children.”
Click here to read/listen to more.
Do you agree of disagree with Phillip’s interpretation of this issue?
Do you think that solutions should be focused on race or family life? Another related factor? A mix of these?
A two part series about how the racial integration of schools is a reform that has been shown to really improve the education for minority children, but that people have apparently given up on. It discusses the case of a school district in Normandy, Missouri (where Michael Brown studied), which accidentally happened upon an integration program.