Over the past week we've seen the media go from complacently reading the latest lists of war casualties off the teleprompter, to almost literally screaming in the Bush administration's collective face about the serious lapses in the response to Hurricane Katrina. And, as usual, the outcome of the entire situation could have both good and bad results. On the good side, the whole polite, delicately phrased dialogue on the complexities of race and class in the United States is now blown wide open and everyone is finding out what people really think about the issue, not just what they are saying to score votes, points, girls or whatever. On the bad side, we are seeing how poorly prepared we are as a country to deal with a catastrophe, as well as what can happen when citizens are left to fend for themselves in its wake.
Unfortunately, I suspect a lot of Americans have a tendency to change the channel when the news gets too uncomfortable for them. I'm not Nielsen, but on at least two occasions I have heard people I know say things like, "I don't follow the war in Iraq too closely. It's too confusing and it's all bad news anyway." and "I was following that story on CNN, but it just got too depressing." It's one of the prices you have to pay in a democracy. Most people are not willing to deal with information that makes them uneasy about their own version of reality. It's a lot easier to pretend that something does not exist if you don't want to look at it.
When one looks at the various dialogues that are going on in the media right now, it seems that the overall theme is I Told You So, followed by its cousin, Well, What Did You Expect? The ITYS crowd is saying that the issues brought to the surface by the flooding have been around for years and years; the levees weren't adequate and people knew it. There was a large population of poor people who wouldn't be able to evacuate. The WWDYE crowd is saying; these people stayed so they could loot the city. That's what "people like them" do. Perhaps the sanest approach is to look at both sides and take the lessons learned seriously. Murphy's Law dictates that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. If your city undergoes a major catastrophe, don't expect people to just pack up and leave like good boys and girls. Tell them the worst case scenario right off the bat and scare them into leaving. And if they can't leave, roll out the damn school buses. And if they still don't leave, don't expect to find them sitting around the Superdome singing "Kumbaya".
The most disturbing issue brought up by the disaster in the city of New Orleans is to hear how the people one would expect to be in charge, the police and/or National Guard, have, by a lot of accounts, behaved more like thugs than the people they were supposedly there to control. The stories range from cops looting alongside civilians to National Guard troops levelling their guns at people who approached them for assistance. People were encouraged to take refuge in two large enclosed sports arenas and no one was put in charge of the situation. It's this country's problem in a nutshell: We acknowledge that we have a large population that is trapped in a cycle of poverty, poorly funded public education and low expectations, yet no one wants to take responsibility for it. For years anyone who has attempted to present any kind of solution has been shouted down for being a hand-wringing, bleeding heart liberal who doesn't understand that "these people don't want to help themselves."
The people caught in the middle are forced to perceive themselves as helpless and unable to better their situation. By now, generations of lower income people have been told, subtly or otherwise, that they must be dumb because why would anyone spend money to educate them? And if they are so dumb, then what is the point of trying to do anything more than live hand to mouth?
The image that springs to my mind is from a video job that I had once at a school in Lowell, MA. The job was to tape different classrooms around the Boston area and observe how students learned. In this class, the teacher asked if the kids had done the homework assignment. It was the way she asked that struck me as strange. It was a rushed string of words that came out more as a statement than a serious question, "anyonedothehomework", and then she didn't even wait for the answer, which she had obviously assumed to be "no" since she simply started to lead the entire class through the assignment that she had given them to do on their own time.
It spoke volumes to me. I had seen other teachers in different school districts lead students through morning counting drills such as counting off by multiples of 17, I had seen teachers struggle to teach cell structure to 1st graders while trying to control ADHD kids. I had seen a class in Cambridge that was conducted in both English and Creole so kids could learn both languages. All those classes were just as integrated as this one in Lowell but the difference here was the teacher seemed to be saying "Alright, I know you guys didn't do what I asked you to. Who would? Why bother making the effort? You aren't worth the energy it would take me to make sure that you are learning on your own."
To me, that sums up the whole problem of race and class in America. People pretty much behave in the way that they feel is expected of them. Tell people that "statistically" they are highly likely to be uneducated, jobless, and incarcerated and you have substantially lowered the bar on them. I have had the strange (mis?)fortune of moving as a child from a school in South Carolina that had recently been integrated, to a school district that is consistently named as one of the top school districts in Massachusetts. I think the first thing I said when confronted with the sight of 15 six year olds with names like Chad and Kirsten sitting in a circle singing folk songs while someone's mother strummed a guitar was "where are the black kids?"
Even the teacher cracked up. The idea of a black person in their midst seemed to be hilarious to them, like a penguin in the middle of the Sahara. The joke turned out to be on me. Unlike the class I had been in at Crayton Elementary where the teachers spent 60% of their time caning unruly kids with rulers on their bare backsides, and the other 40% herding us into the "reading corner" (One of my classmates was almost 9 and had been held back twice), the kids at Cutler were expected to be able to cruise through "Fun with Dick & Jane" by November. At the time, I wasn't too thrilled to have to spend hours every night with both parents standing over me, stammering out sentences like "Jane and Dick play. Play Dick play!", but three decades later, I'm actually grateful that my Dad's tendencies toward rash and hasty life altering decisions landed me in an educational environment that actually challenged me.
Growing up in a school system where the junior high class trip was a ski weekend at a resort had plenty of challenges. I showed up for the first day of after school tennis in the 7th grade with a wooden racket that I had found in a box of my Dad's old stuff. Everyone else had fiberglass. I tried out for field hockey freshman year of high school (because I had actually enjoyed it when we played it in gym class)only to find that most of the other girls had spent the month of July in field hockey camp. I gave up when it became obvious that I would have a personality clash with the field hockey coach. I only saw it as something fun that would take my mind off of my homework. Her coaching method consisted of charging towards a player like a bull in heat in an effort to scare them off the field.
Even though my parents weren't pressuring me to get into Harvard or, failing that, Yale, I was surrounded by kids who considered it their life's mission. As a senior I would see boys my age get depressed for weeks over being waitlisted for Harvard. It was expected to get into an Ivy League school. The kids who majored in Smoking Area (yes I am that old) could get away with trade school or community college, but you were at least expected to go somewhere. Five hours of homework a night was not considered a big deal. So that's what kids did. Plus sports, plus a job, plus volunteering so it would look good on their college applications. I never had a teacher who acted surprised if people had actually done the assignment. They were always done.
Being thrown from one end of the spectrum to the other, South to North, inner city to suburban, majority of African American students to all white, (well, maybe a couple of Jewish kids but they kept quiet about it) was jarring, but at least it permantly destroyed whatever sense of complacency I had ever had. Rich people are smart because they can afford the property taxes in towns with good school systems. Poor people have to live where they can afford the rent and since they don't have to make the huge investment of a yearly property tax, they have to rely on someone else to make sure that their children are being educated. And chances are they need to hold more than one job to make sure they can pay the bills. This doesn't leave much time for PTA meetings or parent/teacher conferences. So the cycle, if no other factors are added, can spiral very quickly into the situation that we have in the present day: hours of footage of African Americans weeping in frustration at being left to the mercy of the weather, punctuated by footage of European Americans busily tossing the hot potato of blame back and forth. Other factor have been attempted, such as bussing kids from the inner city into all-white school districts, but overall they seem to ignore one fact. People are always going to be more comfortable, more relaxed, and more able to concentrate on what's important, when they are around people like themselves. This is not an excuse to separate people according to the amount of melanin in their skin, it's a wake-up call to this country's government to stop obsessing over where kids are educated and focus on how they are educated. Make every kid going to school in America realize that people have high expectations for them. Keep raising the bar instead of lowering it.
After all the bodies have been counted, and all the evacuees have been placed somewhere where they can recuperate, I believe that overall, the stories about how people were able to rise to the occasion at hand, will far outnumber the stories of people who sank to the depths. If this country has a consistent history of anything, it's the demonstrated ability to overcome challenges that would have driven a Russia or France to its knees. We should never forget that America is still an experiment in progress. And unlike a lot of countries, if pressed, we can talk about ourselves fairly freely. Rather than sweeping the issues of race and class that this disaster has thrust into the limelight, back into the shadows, we should take this opportunity to assess the damage done so far and do what we can to deal with it. We need to realize, as a country, that the issue of class isn't so much tied to race as it is to education, as in rich people feel entitled to getting a good one and poor people are made to feel that they aren't worth saving.
r@*! and c+#$
