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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
I completely agree with #2 and my kids are Hispanic.  The mix of the population at BASIS (child #1 started when it was still a Title 1 school, still does not have very many Hispanic kids) combined with [b]book after book in grade after grade about the experience of black oppression from "To Kill a Mockingbird" (which I also read in school) to a book about a black boycott of a store that was owned by member of the KKK to "As I Lay Dying," not only precludes any reading of the classics but also makes every other minority invisible and creates a kind of hierarchy of victimization which in this house has resulted in extremely cynical children[/b].  When they hear kids play the race card (like when the applications for National Junior Honor Society were being handed out which require a certain GPA) they come home and tell us (in this case my child overheard two girls saying it was racist) and they now view it as a pitiful excuse whatever the circumstances - [b]even when it might be valid[/b] - even when it does not come from the kids with $500 dollar Jordans or the girls who say "I'm so ghetto" who are usually gone after 6th grade. My son does not yet understand that the police may put him in the same category, that when he gets to college the shopkeepers may follow him around thinking he will shoplift (happened to my friends).  My kids have yet to feel the sting of discrimination.

I was raised in a white family in Washington DC to believe that the only kind of elitism that was acceptable was intellectual and moral - not the color of someone's skin but the content of their character, and while my parents may have been shocked that I ended up coming home from my Ivy League University with a boyfriend who was definitely not white, and definitely could not pass, he was definitely smart, had with help pulled himself out of an inner city to an Ivy, and they never said anything even when we decided to marry.  Compared to me and my parents my kids are racist and all of this has to do with their experience at BASIS, and I don't feel like I have anything to say about it because I went to private school here and by the time I met a poor non-white kid I was in college.  And my kids feel this way even though the majority of their friends are black and two of their favorite teachers are black - cognitive dissonance anyone?  Makes no sense to me except that some AA kids have learned to cry racism at every turn to blame teachers (the excellent new British Latin teacher got fired early in the term because of such unfounded accusations) and my kids are learning from them - and the books they are reading just make it worse because it sounds like yes there was a time..... but no longer.  And they see what I saw in DC - only black and white.  I don't think it has ever even occurred to them that they are a minority, or to think about where they fit in, because they are top of their class and that is the way they choose their friends - in THAT they are colorblind.  But the troublemakers tend to be AA and someone has taught them to cry racism, which makes all claims sound false to them at least at school, and they are learning that the AA kids are the troublemakers.  Every time they hear about the oppression of African Americans in church they squirm, and I squirm for them.  The police are not going to be friendly to my son.  Finally I am in absolute agreement with #3, no social promotion, but BASIS takes care of that starting in 6th.
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I think your kids are representative of how America has progressed.  I think it's time for people to understand that we are always going to see color.  It makes no sense to pretend to be colorblind.  We see color and judge, the same way we see other features about people and judge (fat and skinny people for example).  The fact that your kids recognize that most of the troublemakers in school are AA, yet they still have AA friends is how this society should be.  People need to realize that its ok to say that a certain segment of a population is the problem, yet understand that the segment is not one monolithic group that all think and behave the same.  If I watch the show "Cops" and see them cracking down on Meth heads in West Virginia, I'm not going to think that everybody in West Virginia is a Meth head.  The same thing should be applied when you see ignorance on the streets of DC.[/quote]

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