Why I support black-focused schools
Published by Sabotabby January 31st, 2008 in Racism, Edumakashun, Shame on you for not being rich white and privileged, book larnin'A few people have asked for my thoughts on the TDSB’s decision in favour of black-focused schools. Sonjaa and Troubleinchina both wrote good posts on the subject, and I recommend reading those too.
I’ll preface this by saying that this is a divisive issue in Toronto, particularly within the black community and the activist community. It’s also a rare example of my opinion reversing on a controversial issue within a very short period of time. In August 2007, I thought that black-focused schools were a terrible idea. Five months later, I support the plan, albeit critically. This about-face happened because of a) my experiences at OISE, b) my experiences in an actual Toronto high school, and c) heated debates with people that I respect.
What is the proposal?
First, to my American friends: Please get the image of desegregation busing out of your heads. This is Toronto, not Boston, and our skanky race issues are a bit different than your skanky race issues. It’s important to keep this in mind when addressing the segregation argument.
The proposal as it stands is as follows:
• Go ahead with an Africentric school, to open in September 2009.
• Create and use a curriculum that includes the history and culture of blacks, as well as other minority groups, in three existing schools.
• Establish a centre for research and innovation, initially with York University, to look at helping at-risk students.
• Develop an action plan to “address underachievement for all marginalized and vulnerable students” in Toronto public schools.
That’s it. It will be a publicly funded alternative school, not a separate system for black students. There are already 36 alternative schools in Toronto, including the Triangle Program, which is queer-focused.
Black kids are currently dropping out of Toronto schools at a rate of 40%.
Why I support the plan
In order to agree that the plan is a good one, one has to accept two things about the Ontario public school system:
1) The Ontario public school system is racist.
2) This racism is a feature, not a bug.
To break it down even further, I will divide the teeming variety of nuanced opinions on the matter into three overgeneralized outlooks: conservative, liberal, and radical. Viewpoints for and against black-focused schools exist in each one of these categories, but for different reasons.
We’ll start with the conservatives. They’re usually the people who think that the system is fine the way it is, or perhaps it’s too leftist and too focused on equity. They’d like history classes to stay Eurocentric, English classes to focus on dead white men, and social studies to extol the virtues of the free market. If black kids are dropping out, it’s because black kids are inherently inferior; they come from cultures that do not hold education as a high priority. They are failing on an individual level. They do not agree with point #1 (or if they do, they think it’s a good thing.)
If a conservative supports black-focused schools, it’s because he doesn’t want black kids going to school with his kids.
Next come the liberals. By and large, they agree with point #1 but they can’t wrap their minds around point #2. The liberals are the reasons why Africville gets mentioned in Canadian history textbooks and why my own high school textbook had one page per chapter on “The Role of Women.” The education system as it stands, though originally set up by racist white men, can be made non-racist by making small adjustments to content (but not to structure). Maybe we can add one page to every textbook on “The Role of Black People,” and put up a display for Black History Month in the library. And then we’ll all be one happy family.
If a liberal supports black-focused schools, it’s because she doesn’t want to offend her black friends.
Finally, a proper radical ought to accept points #1 and #2. If you read some of my posts on education, you should start to see a pattern. If you don’t, just keep in mind that white people kept black slaves in Canada and nowhere in Canadian history class is this discussed. Ever. The public school system is racist in structural ways. Radical supporters of black-focused schools realize this, and understand that the only solution is an entirely new curriculum and an entirely different structure.
I hope you’re starting to see why I think radicals should support black-focused schools. But if you’re not convinced yet, let’s look at some well-intentioned objections.
OBJECTION!
This is segregation!
This is voluntary. Non-black children can attend the proposed school; non-black teachers can teach there. Likewise, black children and teachers can still be at mainstream schools, and most will be.
Toronto schools are already segregated. Most schools in the city fall into one of two categories: vocational and collegiate. University-bound kids go to the latter; kids who will go to community college if they’re lucky, but will more likely go straight to work or even drop out before graduating, go to the former. The kids streamed into collegiates are mostly white and East Asian; the kids streamed into vocational schools are mostly black and Latino. (Desis and Middle Easterners go to one or the other along class lines.)
Pop quiz: In which category of school is a history teacher more likely to cover objections to the Great (White) Man Theory of history? In which category of school are discussions likely to be more critical and open?
Rather than segregating black students, black-focused schools will put more of them on an academic track than our present system allows for by teaching courses that speak to their experiences instead of giving up on them and shunting them into non-academic schools.
Well, now won’t everyone want their own publicly-funded school?
Yeah, probably. But right now, there are arts-focused schools (I attended one), a queer-focused school (as previously mentioned), French-language schools, and exclusionary Catholic schools. There are girls-only schools and boys-only schools. There is even a girls-only feminist-focused school, though it’s private, so beyond the scope of this discussion. So it’s not a matter of “why are black people special?” so much as “why do other so-called special interest groups get alternative schools but black people can’t have one?”
Oh, and there are white-focused schools, too. All Toronto public schools currently have a white-focused curriculum that celebrates the history, achievement, and aspirations of white people.
Isn’t this just a Band-Aid solution? Should any school have a Eurocentric curriculum?
Yes it is a Band-Aid solution, and yes, the whole damned system’s got to go.
But see my earlier point regarding whether racism in the public school system is a feature and not a bug. I can argue until the cows come home that the curriculum has to change, that a school system based on a factory model trains children to be mindless servants to the capitalist ruling class, that we need to radically rethink how we do public schools, period. I would like all schools to have good academic programs, and good art programs, and good tech programs, and curriculum that speaks to everyone’s experience. (Also Latin; it’d be awesome if schools taught Latin again.) But I’m one hopefully-soon-to-be-teacher and my opinion is in the tiniest of minorities. The curriculum is written by ruling class white men and taught largely by exhausted and heavily constrained middle-class white people. If change to the school system comes, it will come entwined with broader social upheaval.
In the meantime, 40% of black kids are dropping out of school, and it isn’t because they’re failing. It’s because the school system is failing them. This 40% will not grow up to make the social changes we all need because their options are being curtailed. We owe them more. Black-focused schools are an imperfect solution to a complicated problem, but at least it’s a start.
So, Sabotabby, are you going to try to get a job in one?
A girl can dream.
Crossposted to The Antisocial Socialist.
Some big American cities have schools set aside for gay kids, so there’s a model there. It’s a pro-gay thing and voluntary.
Affirmative action of any sort is a no-brainer when one considers difference versus dominance. (I owe much to what I gleaned from reading a piece by that name by Catharine McKinnon).
If most people are like you, then most experiences, culture, history, opportunity, basically everything presented to you in life, will be made to suit you and your group. Any kind of group: gender, ethnicity, religion, food preferences, hair color.
If you’re in a minority of any sort, things are just, simply, plainly, obviously not going to be as easy for you.
I get so tired of people (Hannity, recently, on the radio) saying that we have to treat everyone the same regardless of their skin color or whatever, because it ignores the built-in advantages of having the same skin color or whatever as the dominant group in your society. People treat you better if you seem to be like them. Therefore, if most of the people who write books, make movies, write laws, and hire or fire people look like you, you have an edge. I have had all kinds of breaks in life because I’m a white middle class protestant american male.
Affirmative action, taken by itself, is discrimination, but taken in context with the discrimination that goes on everywhere, all the time, it’s there to balance things out. It’s the opposite of discrimination.
A little off of the topic of black-focused schools but…
There are queer-focused schools in America? Really? I have never seen/heard of any, it’s really a shame, I absolutely would have loved to attend one!
This is an excellent post. I’ve been arguing similar points myself. It’s frustrating how many letters to the editors waste space arguing about what to do with mixed-race kids because they completely miss the point and focus of the Africentric school!
North of Toronto, there is what I call “The Hair Line.” This seems stupid, but in Markham, Richmond Hill, and Vaughan, the young male students generally have short to medium length hair. The students come from diverse cultural backgrounds including Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Chinese, Korean, black, and white Christian. From King Township, Aurora, Whitchurch-Stouffville and north, the young male students tend to have medium to longer hair lengths. These students are mostly white (75% to 99%). Note that there are exceptions to “The Hair Line.”
Your assessment of how Black History Month is implemented is pretty good. South of the Hair Line, teachers do try to incorporate black history and culture into the curriculum during the month of February. North of the Hair Line, there might be a Black History Month display in the library and a “black fact” at morning announcements. The rest of the time, it’s teaching and learning the usual curriculum. You can forget about the other months when discussing black history or culture.
There is no guarantee that if the Ontario provincial government implemeneted black history and culture into the curriculum that studernts would warm up to it–especially north of the Hair Line. Heck, it’s just hard enough trying to get them to warm up to any kind of history.
Black African and Caribbean culture and history in a black focused school is just one tool in getting students to want to learn. School principals, teachers, and parents who demand excellence in student content and learning skills are probably more important than the cultural and history content. I can speak from experience of trying to teach a lesson on the Holocaust to students in grades 7 and 8 in two different schools. One school was predominantly Jewish; the other was not. Where do you think I had focused students with meaningful class discussions? In the class that was not predominantly Jewish. The Jewish students were more focused on “David’s” Bar Mitzvah the previous week.
I might differ from some of your readers in that while I do believe that we should be including content from different cultures, I also do think that it should be relevant to the students in a particular school community. Samuel de Champlain explored parts of Canada is relevant. That he may have had a black navigator on his ship is irrelevant in most school communities.
There are wonderful books about black people in the world. Primary students can read about the late Celia Cruz who was born in Cuba and moved to the United States to pursue a singing career. Students can listen to her music at the same time. Another book is called “Underground to Canada.” I don’t know the author’s name but it is a great book for students in grades 6 to 8.
“The Hair Line” seems like a stupid comment to make. However, it is the dividing line between the multicultural and monocultural Ontario. It is the dividing line between attitudes on culture.
To my American friends, if you can tell me the dominant religion of Arab-Americans, you win a happy sticker. I do remember what it was in the 1990 census. I’m not so sure about 2000. I do remember that in the 1990 census, around 75% of Arab-Americans were Christians–not Muslims.
I believe that I can make a few easy to understand and cogent points here.
1. Human beings should not be identified by the amount or degree of pigmentation in their skin color.
2. One does not fight an evil (i.e., racism), by adopting and practicing it.
3. The problem here seems to be an issue of somewhat American-sponsored Urban-culture being made attractive to children and youth of an African background. The only way to combat this is through INDIVIDUALISM. Our schools along with parents, need to drop MULTICULTURALISM and promote the individual above the collective or tribe.
Young men and women need to be taught again that they are separate entities and should choose their values and identity based on their own personal values and goals.
Moreover, even if all people with dark skin identify themselves as “black” or “african”, etc., our Govn’t has no business other than to treat them as 100% equal, free and SEPARATE individuals within our society. Interest group warfare based on race, ethnicity, heritage and similarly obfuscating terms should be utterly abandoned.
4. Teach young Canadians or any person for that matter, that they are responsible for themselves, their choices and the only thing bigger than themselves is the life they have ahead of them. The days of “Hitlerian” race-wars should be put far behind us, and while some of the advocates of “Black Focused” schools may have, ahem, good intentions, they are completely wrong and immoral in their approach.
I feel very bad for every young man or woman who falls under the spell of believing that they need special attention because they are somehow inferior or “outside” of mainstream culture.
I hope that every man and woman of reason that still exists out there will abhor and fight this new twist on an old evil.
Sean, if you truly believe in all-caps INDIVIDUALISM, why do you care what happens in public schools at all?
Teach young Canadians or any person for that matter, that they are responsible for themselves, their choices and the only thing bigger than themselves is the life they have ahead of them.
This is the message currently promoted by the school system. Unfortunately, it does not factor reality into the equation. Not everyone has equal opportunity, privileges, advantages, and aspirations. To ignore these inequalities is to perpetuate them.
I feel very bad for every young man or woman who falls under the spell of believing that they need special attention because they are somehow inferior or “outside” of mainstream culture.
But in the same way, you believe in INDIVIDUALISM. What is the difference between being an INDIVIDUAL and requiring special attention. Should only white people of Western European descent have their culture honoured, respected, and studied? Should only white people get special attention? The call for an Africentric curriculum is nothing more than a call for black people to have what white people have had since the advent of public schools—a course of study that reflects their heritage, needs, and desires.
The problem here seems to be an issue of somewhat American-sponsored Urban-culture being made attractive to children and youth of an African background.
Just to decode your rhetoric here, are you claiming that rap music is to blame?
homeschools are segregated,obviously. In the US more people of all races are homeschooling their children. It seems to actually make them more tolerant of other cultures, as most home school studies are Christian in nature–love they neighbor, be good citizens, etc.
Joyce:
Huh?
What does that have to do with the price of kumquats in Tel Aviv?
This is a topic that hits home for me, as I have multiracial grandchildren living in Toronto. Their local school population is so multicultural that their Nigerian names are completely unremarkable. As part of a multiracial family, they fade into the background in Toronto. What their school experience will be like once they leave grade school is a concern. Attending a school with a black emphasis may be the answer, but their cultural backgrounds are complex. Both of their parents are first generation children of immigrants. They may be a difficult fit anywhere. Having four grandparents with university degrees, and parents with post-secondary education as well, may have more effect on them than their school environment. There’s blackness, and then there’s blackness.
I’m in my last semester of teacher prep here in the States, and currently doing an independent study which until I read this (in synchronicity with several other related pieces) was focused on homeschooling. I’ve just shifted to an exploration of the idea that in a diverse and pluralistic such as ours, the school system shouldn’t be a monolithic factory-modeled enterprise, but rather a loose confederation of accredited schools with genuinely diverse structures and philosophies.
Basically what I’m saying is you aren’t alone, Sabotabby. ‘Course, I’m in another country. And from what I’ve seen of my classmates and student teaching cohort, there’s a distinct shortage of people interested in questioning assumptions.
I don’t know if there’s an equivalent in Canada, but the National Coalition of Alternative Community Schools makes me feel vaguely optimistic on a good day.
y dont we just add black classes to r schools that we all ready have, were they can learn about there history, and so on and if whites want to learn about it to then they can. maybe add other black classes as well.