Category Archives: Race

Fear and Ferguson

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Fear is not professional. Teachers and police who fear members of their community should never have been hired. We damage the very people we are supposed to serve; we damage our professions and ourselves.

Officer Darren Wilson was probably raised to fear black men. I do not hold him entirely accountable for his fear because I was raised to look down on black people, to see them as different from me, which is a form of fear. As children, Darren and I didn’t know any better. American society is responsible for our fear.

But someone—the certification board, our supervisors, and ourselves—should have screened us for fear before hiring us as professionals. I thought I’d screened myself. During the civil rights movement, I’d rebelled against my upbringing. Although I knew few black people, I was sure they all were good but had been treated unjustly. I applied to Trenton High to help their cause. I did not anticipate the visceral fear I’d feel when surrounded by black faces. And nothing in the certification process or interview revealed my fear. Here is the story, taken from my book, of how I slipped through.

It was almost Labor Day when the Trenton School District offered me a job based on my application alone. I had the choice of an elementary school position and one at the high school. I chose the high school and went for an interview with the special education supervisor, Mr. Lorenzo Dupont. Mr. Dupont, a robust, fatherly white man who wore a short-sleeved white shirt, gray slacks, and an enormous key ring at his belt, stood waiting. A dark-skinned man in his forties, dressed in a Hawaiian aloha shirt, sat at Mr. Dupont’s desk. He seemed tired and distracted. Mr. Dupont introduced him as Dr. Hopfield, the principal. Dr. Hopfield asked me one question: Had I ever had experience in an inner city school?

My mind raced back over my career. I had taught in one city. Among my 120 English students, I’d had the children of blue-collar workers and one girl who was black. They’d resisted literature. “Why do I need this? I’m going to be a butcher like my father.” I didn’t know if the school qualified as “inner” city, but it had been a challenge.

I looked into Dr. Hopfield’s weary eyes and told him I’d worked in Woburn, Massachusetts. Dr. Hopfield nodded, gave Mr. Dupont his consent to hire me, asked that I do my best for the students, and left the office. I’d had my interview with the principal. Mr. Dupont skipped his chance to interview me and led me to my classroom.

Dr. Hopfield must have suspected my fear, but he had a vacancy to fill. Was there such urgency when Darren Wilson was hired for the Ferguson police force, or is fear the norm in Ferguson? And if fear is the norm, would Officer Wilson have tried to conquer it?

I knew I was afraid. I discovered my fear the first time I encountered a throng of black students innocently returning from lunch. I struggled to hide it and thought I was succeeding until the following incident forced me to become a professional.

Even as I romanticized the problems of the inner city, the thought that I might be physically threatened never occurred to me. But one day that fall, I found myself trapped at the back of my classroom by a new student. Large, firm breasts were inches from my face. Dark eyes looked down mockingly, “Try and get past me,” they implied. I made a move toward the intercom by the door. She pressed in more boldly. She seemed to revel in her power over me. The other students, all young men, sat watching us. Embarrassed and desperate, I yelled for the teacher in the next room. She heard me and came in. The young woman took her seat, and I passed to my desk. Nothing more was said.

My vulnerability scared me. I wasn’t used to students being bigger than I was. Big and black . . . . No. No—just big. What had started it? Why had I lost control? My failure as a teacher scared me more.

Maybe the incident hadn’t really been a threat, just a test. After all, the young woman hadn’t actually touched me. The other students hadn’t banded together to jump me. I’d been tested by students before, though never so openly, and I’d won. Surely, I could do it again.

But the memory of those defiant breasts wouldn’t go away. A woman’s breasts. So much bigger than mine. The confrontation had meant more than just testing the new teacher. A woman’s breasts . . . on a child. A child . . . . What if the child had been trying to find someone to respect and rely on? Someone stronger, so she could put down the responsibilities carried by the woman? If so, I had failed as an adult. My job was to protect that child from finding out that she was more powerful than an adult. She didn’t need to grow up that fast. Maybe she’d tested me because she’d already been made to grow up too fast. I vowed to embrace these children.

Once I embraced my adulthood, the fear was gone. I could then embrace my students. In my 23 years at Trenton High, I was rarely tested by one of my own students and never again lost control. If only Darren Wilson had recognized Michael Brown as the teenager that he was!

Of course, in the halls or auditorium, where students were protected by anonymity, I didn’t have the same control. Kids often spoke with disrespect when I urged them to go to class or sit quietly—“You’re not our teacher, “ “Mind your own business,” or “Who do you think you are? Security?”—but rarely the “F” word. Trenton High kids didn’t curse, and the “F” word was considered cursing.

I learned another lesson in professionalism: don’t expect respect; earn it by showing respect. Although it was easy to earn respect—and compliance—from my own students (many were overwhelmed that I’d bothered to learn their names), it was difficult in the halls. I learned to interpret disrespect as just a few teens showing off to their peers the power that anonymity bestows. My job was to remain respectful and keep on urging their best behavior.

It was all about anonymity. For a time, girls wore gold earrings the size of index cards with the name of the wearer stenciled in. They were a big help with discipline. “Tonya, it’s time to go to class.” Tonya would whip around, indignant, “How’d you know my name!” But Tonya would start moving to class. When Trenton High divided into small learning communities where teachers knew all the students, discipline problems in the halls vanished.

What did Darren Wilson really say when he found Michael Brown walking in the street? Even if Wilson was originally as polite as he testified, I can hardly believe that Michael Brown’s alleged “fuck what you have to say” was, as Wilson testified, “a very unusual and not expected response from (sic) a simple request” and thus one that drew his attention to Brown. Why was the response “unusual” when Wilson said that he himself later told Brown to “get the fuck back.” Professionals don’t use “fuck;” they don’t need to. But they are not surprised when others do, and they don’t respond to the disrespect. Wilson could have waited for the back-up he’d called for. Better yet, community policing, where officers try to get to know the residents, could have reduced the anonymity that allowed the confrontation.

We ask our doctors to be professional. We require years of education and training—cut by cut, stitch by stitch—under the watchful eyes of a series of licensed practitioners until confidence replaces fear. Otherwise, doctors could kill us. Shouldn’t we require more training—and under a variety of supervisors—for our teachers, who can kill our spirit, and for our police, who carry guns?

When Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch announced that the St. Louis grand jury had found that “no probable cause existed to file any charge against Officer Wilson,” he explained that “the law allows all people to use deadly force in certain situations.” The law needs revision. Those situations cannot include fear because someone doesn’t look like us, because someone doesn’t jump at our command. None of us should be excused. But keeping an illegal chokehold on someone already on the ground, pleading for breath, cannot be excused. When handcuffs, mace, a TASER, or even a gunshot to the leg would do the job, killing is not professional.

Society must demand higher standards. Unions must protect themselves by holding all members to those standards. And Officer Pantaleo of the NYPD must face criminal charges for what the medical examiner, a brave professional, called a homicide.

Back to Blogging

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I said I’d be away a few weeks, but it’s been two months. Vacation, family visits, and voter service have intervened. And what can I say after Ferguson? Such fear and force. What worth have my words when Shias, Sunnis, Syria, ISIS, climate change and Ebola dominate the news?
Can I believe that if more than 6% of the eligible African-American voters in Ferguson had voted in the last election – if an appropriate candidate had put his or her name on the ballot – a black man would not have been killed? Sadly, no. Our history of racism, the current economic depression, and a fascination with tanks instead of TASERs complicate the issue. But the vote is a powerful weapon. And since I hate settling conflicts with guns, I will be taking the next few weeks off from blogging to continue working for the League of Women Voters.
And if any readers have the courage to run for office but don’t know how, here’s a link: http://www.njwow2014.com/ Many institutions offer free workshops on running and winning. It’s certainly harder to gain power by winning an election than by buying a gun, but it’s so much more civil.

Ban the Box

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Cornell William Brooks, Esq., recently selected to be President and CEO of the NAACP, and currently President and CEO of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, spoke at a League of Women Voters’ meeting on the topic “The Beloved Community Behind Bars: A Dream Deferred.” Much of his focus was on the “Ban the Box” movement.  Because having a criminal record, for even the smallest offense, severely impacts the chances for employment, Mr. Brooks supports banning the “box,” the question on job applications that asks “Have you ever been arrested or convicted of a crime?”

To help his audience gain perspective about criminal records, Mr. Brooks asked us to picture two old, sepia mugshots—one of an eager, self-possessed young black man, the other of an older, dignified black woman—each with a number stamped under the photo. The mugshots had been found in a dusty file cabinet in Montgomery, Alabama. I think most of us guessed correctly: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mrs. Rosa Parks, American icons with criminal records that few of us knew about. But, Mr. Brooks pointed out, in today’s world, criminal records are digital, are saved on disk, and can be sent anywhere.

One out of three young people in America is arrested, and 65 million Americans have criminal records, often as a result of arrests after being stopped and frisked or for mischief (the kinds of risky things even League members might have done in their sorority days). Joel, a high school senior driving to an interview at Yale, accidentally bumped into a parked car. He was late and didn’t stop to leave his name and insurance information. A day after his Yale interview, he was picked up for hit-and-run. Fortunately, the owner of the dented car was a teacher and, hearing Joel’s story, refused to press charges because she knew a criminal record might jeopardize his acceptance at Yale.

Another example of the absurdity behind some criminal records is the story Mr. Brooks told about a sixty-year-old construction worker who came to the Institute for Social Justice for help. Forty years before, he’d been convicted of possessing five Valium pills that had not been prescribed for him. (Mr. Brooks asked whether League members had ever borrowed medicine from a family member, then quickly added, to laughter, “Don’t raise your hands.”) The resulting criminal record meant either that the construction worker would be fired or that his employer would lose a contract with the state. The only solution was a pardon. The Institute gathered testimony from experts that the worker, after all these years, did not pose a threat, and Governor Chistie pardoned him. To cap his argument, Mr. Brooks pointed out that Barak Obama had admitted in his autobiography to using marijuana, and George W. Bush, in his autobiography, to driving under the influence—yet the American people elected them to the presidency.

A record of incarceration deprives an individual of about $100,000 in income during his prime years. Having 2.4 million people behind bars exerts a $65 billion drag on the economy each year. Besides these economic impacts, are the moral challenges as well: self-esteem, the ability to provide child support, etc. There are also racial implications: for a white male, having a criminal record reduces his chances of being employed by 50%—for a black male, the reduction is 67%. (And even a white male with a record has a better chance at employment than a black male without one.)

For Mr. Brooks, the solution is the Opportunity to Compete Act, which takes the same position regarding hiring as does the U.S. Government and Walmart, the nation’s biggest employer. Under the act, employers would first make an offer and then run a background check for a criminal record. If a record is found and the offer is withdrawn, the prospective employee would have ten days to dispute the record or provide additional information for consideration, such as evidence of rehabilitation. The employer would not have to hire the person but would, if the position has not already been filled, have to explain in writing to the person why the offer is still withdrawn.

I’m with Mr. Brooks, and I hope my readers are too. We need to show the New Jersey Legislature that we support this act. As Mr. Brooks’s examples show, it’s not hard to get a criminal record, especially if you’re black. How many of us hold our jobs because we’re lucky not to have been caught or are privileged enough to afford a lawyer to get us off? Banning the box doesn’t guarantee employment, but it increases the chances that people will be seen for who they are now, not for how their history has marked them.

I Hate My Skin

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Trish made the following comment on my post “Asians Are Smarter,” which I’m publishing with her permission. “I so disliked the title of this post that I almost didn’t read it. But, now I am glad I did. Your blog is certainly touching some nerves with me. My husband and I are Caucasian. We live in Trenton. We are the parents of a six year old African American boy. Before we adopted him, six years ago, I feel like I had considered every aspect of raising a child here. Each day, tiny little things happen to remind me that I cannot ignore race. Our son is reminding us too. His questions and comments sometimes take me by surprise. “I hate my skin!” he has said! That is just one of many things that really make me stop and think hard about raising our child. Just recently, a friend told me she purposely uses the words Caucasian and African American with her children. I have started doing the same. I am so thankful that I have many African American friends I can talk to and a few excellent books I can consult. Their advice has been invaluable.”

If reading “I hate my skin!” is painful for me, hearing it must be devastating for Trish and her husband. No child that young should have learned to hate anything about himself. But how to repair damage that shouldn’t have happened in the first place?

An image from the PBS Newshour sticks in my mind: Gwen Ifill interviewing John Kerry. I was struck by the balance: two intelligent, attractive people—a black woman and a white man—equally knowledgeable. Margaret Warner or Judy Woodruff interviewing President Obama offers the same balance. But could a six-year-old appreciate what I see as ideal relationships, where gender and skin color are lovely variations and intelligence trumps all?

I wonder if Trish’s son can explain why he hates his skin. Wanting to look like an adopting mom and dad is less ominous than experiencing playground taunts or being told that skin color implies certain characteristics. Or is it possible that a six-year-old is making such associations on his own?

At Trenton High, I was surrounded by such a variety of black people that it was impossible to link color to behavior. In fact, the one assumption I brought—that all black staff members would work tirelessly for the success of their black students—was shattered. But recently I’ve been trying to help a black friend in crisis. Her children can spare neither time nor money. Instead of pulling together as a team, they scream accusations at one another while their mother lies helpless. Fearful and frustrated myself, I find myself suddenly seeing black—linking color to this selfish, dysfunctional behavior. I know better. I hate myself. But when the hostile, irresponsible, loud faces around me are all black, I make an association.

I need to restore balance, to schedule lunch with my other black friends. It hasn’t helped that I was raised on stereotypes, that I live in a mostly white community, nor that I’m writing a blog about race. Thankfully, I continue to have long chats by phone with my friend who’s in crisis—who, though physically incapacitated, remains strong, capable, and loving. But I shouldn’t need such reassurance. Skin color, character, and behavior are not correlated. I know that. But if I make false connections, might a six-year-old?

Missing my Black Neighbors

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I’d be more optimistic about achieving a post-racial society if some of my neighbors were black. Recently I visited a town in rural New Jersey. A white couple lives across the street from a black friend of mine, who has just returned from the hospital. The couple promised they’d drop over daily to help her out. Down the street three young black men pulled into their driveway, next door to a white guy mowing his lawn. An integrated community with at least one neighborly neighbor! Do they even bother to notice black and white?

In Princeton, some of us constantly notice black and white because we’re worried. As the value of land increases, along with taxes, black people whose families have resided in Princeton since its early days may be forced to leave. We say that we want to keep Princeton’s diversity, but it’s not certain that, even with white and black citizens working together, we can overcome the pressures of the free market on this ever-more upscale town.

I used to have black neighbors: a mixed couple down the block and the family next door (though for more than a year I didn’t recognize that they were African-American). I might have guessed when we were told upon moving in, “You’ll like the Phelans. They’re good neighbors.” Why else single out a specific neighbor? Eventually, when I knocked on their door bearing Christmas cookies and was welcomed into a house filled with colorful masks and carved wooden statues of African women, I found out. (The Phelans were very light-skinned and very private, so my ignorance is understandable.) What started out as neighborly assistance during snow storms and hurricanes became invitations to dinner and, once, an excursion together to New York for a special art exhibit. We didn’t often talk about race, but we could. Judy Phelan and I hated wastefulness. When her mother died, I gave her my mother’s urn for her mother’s ashes. We laughed about how shocked my mother would have been to share her urn with a black person.

Am I saying I want black neighbors just because they’re black? Actually, I am. Neighborhoods are defined by socio-economic similarities, so on my street, poor blacks would be excluded. But it would be reassuring to know that some black people can afford to live here. Neighbors, unlike the black and white friends we make at work who, like us, are scientists and teachers, offer insight into other fields and sometimes different perspectives. Having been raised to look down on anyone who was not a WASP, I learned a ton from my Italian, Catholic neighbor in Illinois, who was married to a butcher and had five children. Thanks to her tolerance of me, I discovered my own intolerance and overcame it. We are friends to this day.

Any person’s story can be fascinating, but every black person’s story is an education for me—not that I want to discuss race all the time. Besides, after working at Trenton High for so many years, I miss black faces. And maybe then I could stop noticing black and white.

Asians Are Smarter

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For years I’ve heard that Asians are smarter than Americans. Each time, I’ve envisioned hordes of Chinese people peering down disdainfully at stupid me. I’ve cowered, embarrassed and fearful: are they really smarter than me? It wasn’t until I wrote my post “The Most Dangerous Pronoun” that I realized I’d fallen into the collective noun or “they” trap.

Acknowledging that Einstein, Chomsky, Clinton (Bill and Hillary), and thousands of other individuals are smarter than I am has never bothered me. And I acknowledge, unconsciously and happily, the intellectual superiority of Chinese friends. It’s the vision of hordes who are ethnically different from me that’s intimidating. I, a Caucasian, stand no chance. Perhaps that’s what black people feel when reading negative comments and dismal statistics about their race.

But wait, we are individuals. We fit into a spectrum of ability that has nothing to do with ethnicity. We can strive to fit in wherever we choose. I was reassured recently by an article in The Princeton Packet about Amy Chua, the “Tiger Mom,” who spoke at Princeton University about her latest book, The Triple Package, written with her husband. They began by identifying overachieving groups in America today, which include Nigerian-Americans, Jews, Mormons, and Chinese-Americans among others. They found that the groups share three qualities: self-discipline, insecurity, and a superiority complex or sense of one’s exceptionality. According to Chua, feeling simultaneously superior and insecure produces drive. She noted that the three qualities are not exclusive to any one ethnicity or group.

Can any child learn to achieve? As a teacher, I believe so—though how to instill insecurity is a mystery. At Trenton High, students came with insecurity; my job was to elicit and prove their exceptionalism, and that took long enough. But, if I succeeded in convincing them of their worth, self-discipline usually followed. Some of my students achieved.

Certainly I was raised to believe myself superior to others. Mother told me I was an aristocrat and boasted about me to her friends, but she never warned me not to boast. My braggadocio alienated everyone around me. Without friends I became insecure, aware of my effect on others, and eager to please. People now tell me that I’m driven. I believe I have achieved.

Are Asians smarter? I opt for a more useful wording of the question: do American schools instill in students whatever qualities they need in order to succeed? Answering that question is hard enough and will yield more valuable results.

 

 

Voting Rights and Politics

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      Why, in New Jersey, is the right to vote denied to people with felony convictions while they are on parole or probation? It’s politics, right? The ACLU notes, “New Jersey is home to some 80,000 citizens – most of them African American or Latino – who live and work in our state but cannot vote because they are on parole or probation.” So, I reason, since minorities tend to vote Democratic, it must be Republicans who’ve put this law on the books.

      I decided to look at the history, certain that the law was recent—say sometime around the War on Drugs. I found a thorough, overwhelmingly footnoted, 2004 article by George Brooks in the Fordham Urban Law Journal.  To my astonishment, I learned that felon disenfranchisement was written into New Jersey’s constitution in1844 and rested on John Locke’s concept, “that those who break the social contract should not be allowed to participate in the process of making society’s rules.”

     The law had not been designed to suppress the black vote. Blacks didn’t have the vote in1844. This law appears in Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, where the states cannot abridge the right to vote except for participation in rebellion, or other crime. Brooks notes that “despite facing judicial scrutiny under the Fourteenth Amendment and the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s and 70s, felon disenfranchisement laws were almost always found to be constitutional.” (Brooks, 110)

       Even though, during the War on Drugs, disproportionately more blacks than whites have been stopped, arrested, and convicted for drug-related crimes, this has nothing to do with the disenfranchisement law. Any discrimination is the responsibility of the criminal justice system, not the law. Moreover, as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow points out, it is the intent to discriminate that must be proven in court. Statistical evidence means nothing.

       How can I convince my state legislators to pass a bill allowing parolees and probationers to vote, as they can in Pennsylvania? My own legislators, all Republicans, would have more to lose than to gain. Yet I cannot argue that the law is based on politics.

Maybe I should point out that the effect of changing the law will be minimal. After all, only half of Americans who can vote, do.

I could just admit that I’m a bleeding-heart liberal. I am excusing 80,000 citizens—most of them African American or Latino—who shouldn’t have broken the social contract in the first place. Or is there an excuse? Although I find John Locke’s premise compelling in the abstract (good is good and bad is bad; obey the rules), “the social contract” is troubling. The CEO of McDonald’s will find it easier to obey “Thou shalt not steal” than his employee, who must support a family on minimum wage. The social contract allows the already rich and powerful to determine who gets the profits—and, especially after Citizens United, even to determine who writes the contract. Maybe that’s a reason to consider restoring voting rights not only to parolees and probationers but also to those felons still in prison.

The “for a” Stereotype

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While thinking about dangerous pronouns, I was alerted to an article in The New York Times about microaggressions.  “Microaggressions,” I learned, are “common verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile or negative slights to marginalized groups.”  One example in The Times article, however, “You’re really pretty … for a dark-skin girl,” seemed to me not “micro” but outright racist – because of the words “for a.”

We hear and use “for a” even as children on the playground. “Your hair is awfully long for a boy” or “You’re pretty strong for a girl.” Do we even notice the stereotypes about boys and girls in these comparisons? No, probably we accept them. Instead, we focus on the criticism or compliment directed to the individuals in these sentences. Perhaps we should also think about what the “for a” says about our expectations for boys and girls – the box “for a” puts them in.

A feminist talking with a male acquaintance who expresses sympathy for her cause says, “You’re pretty smart for a man.” Does this remark raise eyebrows? I doubt it. She’s putting men down but also satirizing the stereotype of men as insensitive, macho types. Besides, men are so powerful already that no one needs to stick up for them. But again, what does the “for a” reveal about her expectations for men?

Conversely, if a white person says to a black woman “You’re really pretty,” is the “for a” implied? I was told it was politically incorrect to say “Obama is so articulate” because it implied “for a black man.” I was perplexed. In my mind I was comparing Obama to George W. Bush. No race imagined or implied.  I guess I could get in trouble if I said “You said that so well” to an Asian or Latino person, even if I meant the clarity of his or her reasoning, not the ability to speak English.

It’s hard to think of a compliment that isn’t really a judgment, a comparison to a group or norm. “You sing beautifully” implies better than others.  It’s unfortunate if someone hears an unintended and limiting “for a” in that compliment, but such is the burden of our history of discrimination.   Certainly we can and should stop using “for a” aloud. The goal, if we are ever to achieve a post-racial society, is for all of us to stop thinking it.

The Most Dangerous Pronoun

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The most dangerous pronoun is “they”—and its objective case “them.” Unless its antecedent is a string of specific nouns, “they” is most likely to perpetrate misconceptions and downright lies. Pronouns are convenient, but please don’t put me in a box with “them.”

The safest pronouns are, of course, “I” and “me.” This is because I know myself well. “You” is probably the next safest pronoun. I would hesitate to say anything about you to you that wasn’t justified and, I hope, sensitive. “He” and “she” refer to just one person and thus may have more validity than “them,” although I’ve heard slanderous things about “him” and “her” that were nothing more than gossipy fictions. Finally, there’s “we” and “us.” Do I really know enough about people like me to use “we” accurately? How could I complete the sentence “We Wellesley graduates…”? Earned high-power positions? Had children? Took up knitting?

This topic came to mind as I was reading comments on the PBS NewsHours’ segment about disparity by race in education, which I discussed in my blog. One comment read, “The black community needs to grow up and start taking responsibility for themselves, and the democrats need to stop treating them as children.”

It’s obviously racist, but taking responsibility for oneself is an accepted standard of adulthood. What would happen to the comment if, instead of “the black community,” the writer had used a string of nouns describing the people who are not taking responsibility for themselves? If I think about why someone might not take responsibility for himself, I get an almost endless list of possibilities: mental or physical illness, lack of opportunity to work, wages too low to pay for food and housing, alcohol or drug addiction, a felony conviction or lack of training that impacts the ability to get work, depression, bad decisions that prevent getting ahead like gambling or having an extra child—and, yes, a willingness to rely on others, be it the government or one’s parents.

Accurately written the sentence would read, “Able-bodied, healthy people who have the carfare to get to vocational school for training or to the job itself and who do not have to stay home with a baby need to grow up and start taking responsibility for themselves….” Wouldn’t adding “black” to that sentence sound funny? Only “black able-bodied, healthy people…have to take responsibility”?

And who are the “black community”? Is there a corresponding “white community”? Do people who are not responsible for themselves think of themselves as a community or act as a community? Interestingly, a number of black leaders see a growing need for community and look back longingly to the days when churches were strong, when neighbors disciplined each other’s children, and even when schools were segregated That black community was a positive force.

“They” is a dangerous pronoun, and using it reflects arrogance. How much can one person know about others?

 

Disparity by Race in Education

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I was eating dinner and watching the NewsHour on PBS when Judy Woodruff announced that for the first time in almost 15 years, the Department of Education had published data…from all 97,000 public schools across the country. “The findings highlight big patterns of disparity by race,” she said.  My fork dropped and my ears perked up. “No kidding!” I thought, but then I learned that although only 18% of students are African-American, they account for half of all suspensions and that even pre-schoolers get suspended! I didn’t know about the pre-schoolers, but at Trenton High, of course, about 98% of the suspensions were Latino or African-American because 98% were students of color. With regard to punishment at least, it was impossible to see disparity by race.

The report went on to say that African-American, Latino and Native American students attend schools with higher concentrations of first-year teachers and less experienced teachers than white students do. That sounded familiar. Positions at Trenton High were never all filled by September. One year, when I took over a homeroom, the students called me “Mrs. Staff” because “Staff” was the name on the classroom door. No teacher had yet been hired for the math class scheduled for that room. But was it that few teachers were willing to teach in an urban school or that the Trenton School District was too disorganized to contact those who did apply? For two years in a row, even though I’d applied in spring, I, an experienced teacher, wasn’t contacted by Human Services until the week before Labor Day. The first time around, I’d already accepted another job. The second time around, I called Human Services myself to ask about the status of my application. It had been overlooked. I was then offered a choice of two vacancies, one at an elementary school, the other at the high school. After two brief interviews, I chose the latter.

The DOE report also found that while more than 80 percent of Asian-American and more than 70 percent of white students had access to a full range of math and science courses in high schools, only 67 percent of Latinos were at a school that offered a range of advanced classes. The figure was 57 percent for African-American students and less than 50% for American Indian and native Alaskan high school students. I recalled an evening meeting of the Trenton High School Management Team in 2001. A student had come to protest that Advanced Placement courses were being discontinued. Our principal told him that because few, if any, students had passed the AP over the previous 10 years, success was unlikely. She reassured him that she had contracted instead with the College Board for Pacesetter, a course of study that would be more appropriate for our students. She suggested that he could take up to six advanced credits at Mercer County Community College. She’d been told by the provost that those credits would be transferable to 40 institutions of higher learning. The young man wasn’t happy; he didn’t want to lose time commuting.

Was our principal, a black woman, just being sensible, not wanting to waste time and money on AP? What role does “If you build it, they will come” play? In the ’80’s, Trenton High had a gifted and talented program that produced gifted and talented graduates. It vanished. In 2002, a colleague suggested resurrecting it, but her committee was stymied because the title sounded too exclusive. Perhaps we should have called it the “AP Small Learning Community.” Sadly, what the DOE found out after 15 years is what Trenton students have known for the past 30 years.