Segregation in America

 For over 50 years, the national issue of educational bias and segregation in schools have continually pursued, tampering with many of the ethnic kids ability to achieve success through academics or any educational means. School is meant to be a medium in where all kids are able to have the opportunity to grow and learn, shaping their youth to become the adults they choose to be. But, leading off the Brown vs Board of Education ruling that happened over 67 years ago, where segregation in schools was banned, there has been a largely followed campaign of preventing desegregation.

In the podcast The Problem We All Live With, the parents of the children who attended the Francis Howell school district were outraged when kids from Normandy could attend “their” district due to un-accreditation laws. Many of the parents expressed racist statements, and for some reason, feared for the safety of white kids who attended schools in this district. As shocking as it may be, many of the parents were serious, “But I've read. I've read, and I've read, and I've read. So we're not talking about the Normandy School District losing their accreditation because of their buildings, or their structures, or their teachers. We are talking about violent behavior that is coming in with my first-grader, my third-grader, and my middle schooler that I'm very worried about. And I want to know. You have no choice, like me. I want to know where the metal detectors are going to be, and I want to know whether your drug sniffing dogs are going to be.”. Now, parents wanted metal detectors to detect guns, dogs to sniff out drugs, all aspects of institutional racism that has been prevalent before the parents were even born. Assumptions and beliefs based on faulty logic has clearly spread amongst many, as people are too quick to judge others based on their race and social class, further blocking any progression in creating a fair and desegregated society.

Mah’Ria’s story is quite inspirational, as a young middle schoolgirl to have the courage to bus 30 miles every day and wake up at 5:30 am every morning, it is quite remarkable. But many don’t know that this is normal for many ethnic kids that have been forced to live in segregated, low-class areas. When Missouri “accidently launched a school integration plan”, based on the accounts of Mah’Ria, progress was actually being made. When she first arrived at her new school, she was met with a “little cheer-leading squad” and made a white friend for the first time; all on her first day there. This shows the generational aspect to institutional racism, as the more and more we integrate and grow as a society, the better we are doing at acknowledging and disregarding racist beliefs. Although progress has been relatively slow, like Asagai said, “progress… is simply a long line… one that reaches into infinity.”. School integration has shown success, and according to Nikole Hannah Jones, “And I think I'm so obsessed with [School Integration] because we have this thing that we know works, that the data shows works, that we know is best for kids”, showing that desegregation is a massive step towards our eternal goal for equality.

Segregation amongst communities are clearly still evident in today’s “advanced” society, but we still have made improvements. The institutional racism that has been embedded throughout the foundation of our culture and country needs to be morphed into an accepting society, or maybe even entirely changed. Education is a right that every child, no matter who they are, deserves, and school integration has seen success that society has longed for. But as we push forward, desegregation needs to be purposeful and not simply a product of an “accident”. In order to end the “large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with their own little picture in front of us - our own little mirage that we think is the future”, we must begin implementing and acting on plans to forge a society that isn’t built on the oppression of others, and like Mama’s plant, continue to grow under any circumstance.