Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Growing Up In the Race Divide (part 1)

I grew up in the South. I don't mean the quasi-South like Missouri or Tennessee; I mean the deep South. Louisiana. Even so, I grew up without any idea that race should ever be an issue. I'm not sure why this was so other than that my parents weren't particularly racist. They weren't particularly un-racist, either. For instance, at some point when I was a kid, I remember my dad using the term "porch monkeys," and I had no idea what he was talking about. When I asked, because I couldn't find the monkeys, no one would explain to me what he meant, so, I suppose, he was ashamed enough for having said it (and my mom ashamed of him) that no one would explain it. Later, when someone did finally explain it to me, I still didn't understand. The term just didn't make sense to me; it was years before I understood that it was a racial slur.

The Oscars this year, "the best and whitest," have me thinking a lot about race and how and where I grew up. I am not much a product of my environment. For instance, I don't have an accent. Someone asked me recently about how long it took me to get rid of it after I moved to California, but, see, I never had an accent. And, no, there is no explanation for that, because my family most definitely does have an accent. In fact, I can barely understand my brother anymore.

I went to a desegregated elementary school. Of course, I didn't know that. I'm not sure any of us knew that when we were kids. I don't know for sure if it made a difference, though. The school was mixed, sure, but the classes, on the whole, were not. I never realized that until now in thinking about all of this. Supposedly, the classes were divided based upon ability and, to some extent, I'm sure that's true, because there were a few black kids in my classes, but, mostly, the black kids were in one class, and the white kids were in the other class. I'm pretty sure there were no white kids in any of the "black" classes. The white kids got a white teacher, and the black kids got a black teacher. Except 1st grade: In first grade, both teachers were black, but that was the only black teacher I had until I got to middle school.

The principal, though, was black: Mr. Hudson. I loved Mr. Hudson. By the time I was in first grade, he called me Dr. Leon. I was Dr. Leon to him all the way through 4th grade, my last year at that school. He said it was because of all my brains. Or something like that. He was always very serious with me and would shake my hand when he saw me in the hall. Evidently, race wasn't an issue for him, and he was the first adult male I admired other than my grandfather.

Middle school... I went to an experimental middle school. It was following in the footsteps of the experimental high school I would soon go to. These were some of the first magnet schools in the country and an aberration in Louisiana. I suppose the logic was that if they could get magnet schools to work in Louisiana, which was (and still is) among the worst educated states in the country, then they could get them to work anywhere. And they did work. CPMHS was in the top ten high schools in the country the entire time I was there. In Louisiana.

So, yeah, I had some black teachers in middle school and in high school... but they weren't academic teachers. They were P.E. teachers and an art teacher. The only exception to that was my biology teacher in high school. However, she barely counts, because they let her go half way through the year, because she was not able to handle the academic load of teaching the AP Bio II class. This class was geared toward academic decathlon training, so they had to find someone able to teach that class above all else. Just to be clear, she was not the only teacher let go from Magnet because the teacher couldn't handle the academic load in the advanced classes, and it was her first year teaching.

Also, to be clear, there were some black teachers of academic classes at my high school, but I was in all honors and advanced classes, and they didn't teach any of those.

My high school didn't have the regular team sports associated with high school. No football, no basketball, no baseball. We had what our principal called "Olympic sports": tennis, fencing, track. I only say that to reinforce that this was an academic school. There was testing to get in and you had to maintain a certain GPA to stay there. Each year, we lost about half of the freshman class. As opposed to my elementary school, at which the more advanced classes were more than 90% white, there were plenty of black students at my high school, and they weren't there to play sports. These were smart kids who had done the work to get into a kind of elite school. As I was reminded frequently by my friends at other high schools, we were the "nerd school."

Mostly, though, I want to focus on my elementary school, since it was a typical school in Shreveport. [I would like to think that my high school was more merit-based in its decisions on teacher hiring, and I think that it probably was because of the emphasis on the academic decathlon.] It makes me sad, now, thinking back, that my school got by by following the letter of the law while discarding the spirit of it, and I'm sure that my school was indicative of the "way things were." Probably not just in Louisiana, either. I have to assume that this was the way all schools got around desegregation all through the South. "Sure, we'll have mixed schools, but no one said anything about the classes."

19 comments:

  1. What an interesting experience you had Dr. Leon. Sadly, I would say our elementary schools where I live in NC are segregated because of lifestyle. Middle and High Schools are racially balanced, but the elementary schools are a hot bed of political discussion here. There is always talk of busing, redistricting etc.to balance out the numbers.

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    1. JKIR,F!: There's no denying that economic status plays a huge role in all of this; however, when you look at the economics of it, you can really see how race plays into that.

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  2. When I went through school, I only had two teachers in all my years that were not white and the vast majority of the students were white. Now it's all nicely mixed, and my kids, who are going through the same school system, really don't know any other way about it.

    I think that the major change between then and now is more because of the massive population growth between then and now more than any restructuring of the school systems.

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    1. Jean: My kids went to the most racially diverse elementary/middle school in our county... and it was/is at least 80% white. That's my own personal estimation based on just seeing the kids on campus. I don't have the numbers.

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  3. I don't think I had any black teachers, except maybe in college, though I did have a couple of Indian and Asian teachers. So that's something.

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    1. Pat: Again, in college, the only non-white teachers were in the PE department.

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  4. My grandfather was from Mississippi. He carried that prejudice throughout his life and didn't think anything of it. I never heard my parents (both were teachers) express any racist attitudes when I was growing up in Colorado, which made it all the stranger to be around my grandfather and hear him say some weird thing about "those" people.

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    1. L.G.: If anything, Mississippi is worse than Louisiana.

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  5. Growing up in England I didn't come across any kind of racial problems in schools. These days there are lots of different nationalities living there but I don't know if there are problems there or not as I haven't lived there for 40 years now.

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    1. Jo: The racial issues in England, today, are of a much different kind and all wrapped up in religion.

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  6. I found the schools in Louisiana were superior to the schools I went to in California (I was about two years ahead of the curriculums when we moved to the West Coast).

    But yeah, there was still social segregation at my Jr. High, at least. I remember it making me really, really uncomfortable.

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    1. Alex H: Well, CA education has plummeted since the 80s. When I was in high school, CA was one of the best states for education. I heard a report the other day that said that CA is now #48. That's what happens when you take away the money and make it difficult for teachers to teach.

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  7. I went to school in a town so white that it was a joke on Family Guy (seriously). There were two black kids in my grade, and one moved away before high school. I didn't have a single black teacher until college, and I graduated ten years ago. Yeah, it makes you think. People don't realize that this kind of stuff is what people are talking about when they say "racism".

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    1. Jeanne: Family Guy's a pretty white show, too, isn't it? I've never actually watched it, so I don't know that that's true, but all the stuff I've seen from it are white cartoon dudes. And a dog.

      And, yes, people think of racism as "I hate those !" but there is a cultural racism that doesn't include individual hatred.

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    2. Interesting, it left out "insert name of whomever peoples." I learned something new about using symbols on blogger.

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  8. You certainly had more exposure to other races than I did. I never went to a school with any blacks until I started high school in Tennessee and then in a school with maybe 2000 students I don't know that there were many more than 20 who were black. Prior to that I attended schools in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, San Diego, and northwest Indiana--and nary a black student in any.

    So you can call most of my experience nil until I started at the University of Tennessee and took some Black Lit classes. Still never was close to any blacks until I started managing a show where we needed cast members who could dance well and there were a number of blacks that I hired because they were good dancers. Then I got to know them since I traveled with them for the entire season and we got to be good friends.
    People are people and something in society seems to like to create divides.

    Arlee Bird
    A to Z Challenge Co-host
    A Faraway View

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    1. Lee: I think, as a group, we like to be able to say to ourselves, "At least I'm better than those -insert name of whomever peoples-." And we like to have some group to blame for the ills of society.
      It's pretty messed up.

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  9. I grew up in the quasi-South and race was always an issue, more than I ever appreciated at the time. I am grateful to have grown up with diversity and believe my life is better for it. But matters of race are never simple in my experience.

    I find it very interesting that you had segregated classrooms within an integrated school.

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    1. TAS: They are never simple.
      People that come from overwhelmingly white areas don't really understand or understand the amount of pervasive racism that even they have because there is no direct target. Therefore, they think they are not racist.

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