Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

I think it's really interesting that so many posters on this thread are unable to relate to anything other than their own experience. As if because you had an experience in the Soviet Union, the actual, stated experiences of other people are not valid, and the explanations (well documented and supported by research) cannot possibly be valid because they do not mesh with your beliefs about how you and yours escaped your own cycle of poverty.

Racism in housing policies is real. While one might argue that there is no longer such an active policy to prevent Black people from living in certain parts of town, the legacies of previous policies is very much in attendance. Discrimination in employment is also real. There are laws enacted to actively prevent discrimination, but those laws have not eliminated the more subtle forms of discrimination. Discrimination within the education system is also real. You can talk about test scores and crime rates all you want. You can say that you'd say those things about any student who tests poorly and behaves badly, regardless of their skin color, but you're not going to receive much opportunity to do that, because in this city, the White kids go to private school or they go to school in upper NW - both of which are predicated on a certain level of income. I know that person such as yourself understands the every day difficulties associated with poverty, so I'm not going to insult you by listing them, provided that you do me the courtesy of not denying their existence.

My child goes to a Title 1 school in DC. I am intimately familiar with the complicated and toxic cocktail of factors that result in poor test scores and a lot of behavior issues. Saying "It's just racism" is missing the point, because it's not just racism. It's generations of racism. It's generations of poverty. It's living in a city with a huge wealth divide, that is incredibly segregated. It's coming from homes where one or both parents work more than full time at low-skilled jobs just to pay the bills. It's coming from homes where one or both parents may not be fluent in English, which remains an obstacle, particularly for things like literacy.

When people say, "Where are the parents? Why are they not teaching their children?" they are both correct and completely missing the point. Your parents and mine had educational role models. Someone, at some point, instilled in them the belief that education is what will help break the cycle of poverty, that it might actually be the only thing. Not everyone has had that message, for a lot of different reasons. In this country, the reality is that people of color were not ALLOWED to go to school for a long time. When they were allowed, their schools were terrible and the assumption was that they would ultimately end up as domestic employees or manual laborers. Their education was treated as irrelevant. When you give a person THAT message regularly, they will start to believe it. Then they will live out that prophesy. Then they will have children and the cycle will perpetuate itself.

There is someone on this thread who keeps mentioning that the honor student in Normandy is an outlier, with the undertone that because of this, we should discount her story as being something that is not germane to the broader conversation. That is incorrect, and it assumes that children who grow up poor and Black are unteachable, that their education is irrelevant because no matter what you do, the ones who succeed will be "outliers." Please consider the strong messages about the importance of education and then consider that the "outlier" stories are part of that message.

Apropos of the housing discrimination discussion in this thread, a new NYT article. Here are a few quotes:

"Americans commonly — and mistakenly — believe that well-to-do black people no longer face the kind of discrimination that prevents them from living anywhere they can afford. But a federal housing discrimination complaint filed last week by the National Fair Housing Alliance shows that this toxic problem is very much with us, nearly 50 years after Congress outlawed housing discrimination in the Fair Housing Act."

"Over the course of nearly a year, the alliance reports, black and white testers posing as home buyers had drastically different experiences when they contacted a real estate company near Jackson, Miss. Agents often declined to show properties to black customers who were better qualified than whites, with higher incomes, better credit scores and more savings for down payments. Meanwhile, white testers who had expressed interest in properties in the majority-black city of Jackson were steered into majority-white communities elsewhere.

These problems are not limited to the South. Indeed, another alliance investigation covering a dozen metropolitan areas, including Atlanta, Austin, Birmingham, Chicago, Dayton, Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Antonio and the District of Columbia, suggests that housing market discrimination is universal."

"By 2010, affluent African-Americans had passed poor whites in potential home wealth but had fallen further behind affluent whites. There is more than money at stake, Mr. Massey and Mr. Tannen write, because home values “translate directly into access to higher quality education given that public schools in the United States are financed by real estate taxes.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/opinion/how-segregation-destroys-black-wealth.html