Reply to My daughter is the only white girl in her grade: ask me anything

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Reply to "My daughter is the only white girl in her grade: ask me anything"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]However, there are a lot of anxious new parents who DO think race makes a difference, as early as PK, and the whole reason for this thread was to allow them to ask questions and answer those questions based on our positive experience doing the very thing that they fear.[/quote]

I think that is in part because people make assumptions about a connection between race and class that are not necessarily warranted.  I would venture to say that if you posted that your child was the only white child in a grade filled with high SES children, people would not have too many questions for you.[/quote]

I understand that, but in DC, race and class often stand as proxies for each other. Particularly when the person talking about race and/or class is uncomfortable doing so. I think a lot of people are a lot more comfortable talking about low achievement among low income children than they are about low achievement among children of color. In DC, low income children are overwhelmingly children of color.

I (OP) grew up in a lower middle class household in the Midwest with a college educated father and a SAHM with a GED who later went to college and then grad school. My elementary and middle schools were overwhelmingly white. By the time I got to high school, we'd moved to a larger city with only 1 high school, so it was much more diverse. However, it was the Midwest, so there were a lot of poor kids of all races. That's not how it works in DC. If you're in DCPS and you're poor, odds are overwhelmingly that you are black or Latino.

I'm not saying that there are not high SES children of color in the city - there obviously are - but that's not where the concern lies.[/quote]

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