Stop everything. The most shocking images yet of racist oppression of African-Americans have been released. No, they do not concern controversy about a police shooting or arrest. And, no, no-one dies, at least in the bodily sense.
Let your mind’s eye be the camera and spend a day with Dana R. Casey, a veteran teacher of 23 years, currently in an urban, 99% black school. For what you see, as you picture to yourself the events of her seven-hour day, during the ten minutes it takes you to read her piece, is easily as shocking and heartbreaking as any two-to-three video of questionable police activity with respect to black suspects.
What her day reveals, after all, must be multiplied by the many soul-crushing hours and days it represents of the experiences that thousands of black students shuffled through her “school” year-after-year undergo. Experiences that will permanently handicap and damage them. Experiences of daily oppression at the hands of bullies and brutishly-mannered peers that no authorities are willing or permitted to discipline. Experiences of wasted ten-minutes here, there, everywhere, all adding up-and-up into a total deprivation of many months of education compared to kids attending other schools. So imagine, if your heart can bear it, how Mrs. Casey’s day looks like through those “black lenses.”
At least Harry Briggs Jr., the kid Clarendon County in South Carolina forced to spend several hours each day walking to and from school, thus provoking one of the lawsuits that became the Brown v. Board of Education case, got some exercise during the time his racist oppressors caused him to waste. And at least as he wasted the precious time of his young years (–as somebody once truly said, “There is no way you can repay lost school years”), he heard the songs of birds and the drones of insects, as opposed to the curses, threats, obscenities, cell-phone chats, and pointless challenges to teachers that his equivalent young-black-prisoners-to-time-wasting hear in the school Mrs. Casey describes.
Any educated American ought to have some familiarity with the debates about why these schools are the way they are. There are a lot of factors, and the impacts of present-day white racism, and those which still flow from the stronger white racism of the past, are among them. But any honest “viewer” of what Mrs. Casey sees in just one day quickly understands that the number one cause of everything amiss in that school is an inability and unwillingness to discipline the students, and to expel the incorrigible ones.
And where might that be coming from? Well, it’s long been a problem—it was when I was public school teacher in the 90s—but much of the blame for it, and for its growing worse in recent years, is directly traceable to the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague” directive to reduce the number of official discipline actions taken against black students. That’s a link to a Big Government analysis, here’s one to the letter itself.
Read these words, from Obama’s longtime Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (he recently quit), and weep:
The Attorney General’s been a great partner on school discipline, and trying to move away from zero-tolerance policies that perpetuate those school-to-prison pipelines and think about restorative justice and peer juries.
Peer juries!?! In schools like Mrs. Casey’s? Perhaps you’re beginning to sense why the title of her story, “One Day in the Life of an Urban Teacher,” seems designed to remind us of something…
Black lives do not matter to this administration. They do not matter to this Democratic Party, which sure isn’t your father’s. And don’t get me started on the typical Black Lives Matters leader. As long as the fantasy-world of rhetoric is applauded, as long as the votes add up, or the protest rally numbers hold, each of these black-allies-so-called toss the actual lives out with the trash.