Discrimination in American Public Schools

As the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in mid-May 2016 (http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-16-345), the percentage of K-12 public schools in the U.S. with students who are poor and are mostly Black or Hispanic is growing and those schools share a number of challenging characteristics. They are the most racially and economically concentrated in the U.S., are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (an indicator of poverty), offer disproportionately fewer math, science, and college preparatory courses, and have disproportionately higher rates of students who are held back in 9th grade, suspended, or expelled.

Few people are likely to pay much attention to that revelation and it hasn’t made front page headlines, even in a Presidential election year. We just don’t seem to care about discrimination and we should. After all, those “challenging characteristics” are the result of well more than a century of intentional effort on the part of the federal government, states, local political jurisdictions, and the dominant White American culture. None of what we have today in American public education has occurred by accident, chance, or serendipity. That educational system is what it is because we want it that way. Which is why discrimination hasn’t decreased in the decades since the 1960s but rather is growing steadily.

It is time White America stood up and proudly took ownership of those supposedly “challenging characteristics.” We worked hard to put them in place through decades of de jure and de facto discrimination based on our hatred, fear, anger, intolerance, and studied indifference toward people of color. As reality demonstrates, witness the GAO report, the Brown v. Board of Education decision, War on Poverty, and Civil Rights movement have been kicked to the curb while Jim Crow in its far more subtle contemporary forms of implicit racism has triumphed. Consequently, White Americans should be proud that we have defeated the efforts of alphabet soup liberals like MLK Jr., JFK, RFK, and LBJ who tried to shove what amounted to a modern-day Reconstruction down our throats. Instead, Whites have overcome and kept the Blacks-Latinos in their place, a matter for rejoicing and celebration.

Thanks to the GAO, White America’s real-world accomplishments are in the spotlight for all to see. So, let’s not shy away from taking credit where credit is due. In spite of all the stumbling blocks, White Power, White Supremacy, White Rights, White Privilege have won and Blacks-Latinos are where they belong as a subordinate, devalued underclass, a position in which they should rightly be confined far into the future.