caste in the classroom

A few Fridays ago, the junior girls were on a field trip to the levee so rather than continue reading “A Raisin in the Sun” with no more than five students remaining in either of my eleventh grade classes, I let them work on make-up assignments, extra credit and we had those kind of conversations that crop up at the end of the school year.

At one point, I asked a question that I had been curious about for a while but never had explicitly addressed to any of my students before. I had a feeling I knew the answer, but wanted to know what they felt. I asked whether or not they ever hang out or interact with any white teens, or white individuals at any rate, aside from their teachers at school and as their paths cross in common spaces such as Wal-Mart. A couple had co-workers at places like Sunflower or Sonic, but in both cases this was their store manager. Aside from that, their answer was a resounding no. I asked again in my next period, and got the same response. How is this possible? Granted, white is the minority at approximately 30% of the town’s 12,000 residents, and the dual school system, private ‘segregation academies’ and public schools, as is the case in most Delta towns, remains almost entirely segregated by race … in 2007. Over, and yet apparently only, fifty years since the White Citizens Council, a ‘white-collar Klan’, was ominously founded in Indianola at the same time Brown v. Board of Education was passed. Still so separate. There are both nice and run-down white neighborhoods and nice and run-down black neighborhoods, each with their own gas station/general stores, their own playgrounds, their own community centers … there are white bars and black bars, black churches and white churches and, as already stated, white schools and black schools. None would be so crass as to publicly limit the crossing of such visible racial lines/barriers, lines visible only in the color of the skin on those that hide behind them, but their open declaration is in the quite obvious sweeping lack of exceptions.

For some reason, I imagined kids being a little bit beyond this historical sense of opposition, and maybe they are. Yet my students and those at Indianola Academy, 15-18 year-olds, live in the same town yet never interact with one another - follow suit from the wonderful example set forth by the adults in the town. Their sports teams don’t play one another, ever. Very few community events are publicized in both communities. I've recently been cast in a production of Agatha Christie's 'The Mousetrap' which is generally referred to as "the white theater" in town. That very visible, unacknowledged line. Is this the fear I talked about last week with one class? I asked the guys I was sitting with in the classroom what they think would happen if I attempted to organize an after-school group or program open to both schools, the natural first reaction;

“Where would it be? They wouldn’t let us over at their school and they’d be afraid to come to our school.”

The guys all expressed interest in ‘talking to a white girl’ their own age, many never have, and eagerly echoed one another’s enthusiasm for such an endeavor. I wondered silently if guys from IA would feel the same way towards black girls, or if black girls would feel the same way towards white guys and vice versa … and why. They joked, but eventually they began to say things like “For real though, I think one school for everyone would be better. Them white kids studyin’ all the time and stuff would make us all work harder or we’d look bad.” This was obvious, their sense that all, or at least the majority, of the white kids were smarter than all, or at least the majority of the black kids. If you ask them why, the answer always comes back to money and opportunity. I mentioned how much more money one school system would have at its disposal, for better facilities, better books, etc. but then asked them how the kids in honors classes here would feel if suddenly they were displaced by mostly white kids, or how the white kids on IA’s basketball team might feel if most of them didn’t make the team here when put altogether. I was careful to note my gross generalizations.

“That’s life," DR replied, "I guess they’d have to work harder if they wanted to prove theyselves.”