Critical Race Theory and systemic inequalities

[nett]

And of course most racists say exactly the same thing. They claim their attitudes aren't about race at all. Just innocent things like property values or crime or school quality, traffic, noise, cultural values, etc. etc. etc. It is the oldest trope in the book.

You defend critical theory being taught in schools, but refuse to have a discussion about class based inequality without screaming "RACISM!!!!"

Sometimes I wonder if Ken is actually just a very masterful troll.

[Haystack]

If these areas are open to all then why was it a issue for these students being there? A sticker or shirt whether you agree with it or not shouldn't be reasons to be excluded from a public space. It doesn't matter if the school says it's open for everyone, if the students who organized the area are saying they can't be there then that sounds like the area wasn't created with the intent of inclusion for all. If someone showed up to a CM church with a everyone welcome sign wearing a planned parenthood shirt, would they be kicked out? Talk to them, share your opinion, listen to them, maybe find some common ground, and leave them with something to think about. Maybe they will see things from your prospective and change their ways, maybe not. There's ways to handle certain situations and if you watch the full video of what happened at ASU I think you might agree that it was handled very poorly.

I'm not sure what you expect me to say. The black students were wrong to respond to the provocation the way that they did. They were apparently disciplined. What more do you want? Students do stupid stuff every single day on every campus and in every school in the country. None of it reflects any sort of law or policy. Hopefully this was a learning experience for all involved.

I'm not sure what you think your "video evidence" actually represents. There are tens of thousands of videos of people behaving badly on YouTube and TikTok. The majority of them are of white people being racists or jerks. And most are adults not students. What does it all mean? That we have lots of intolerant people in our society I suspect. Which shouldn't be news to anyone.

I don't want anything, Ken. I merely asked for your opinion and you stated it, case closed. To me it represents that racism has no color and it's not a one sided issue, like many of your posts seem to indicate. I agree with you there are a lot of racist people that behave badly, not news at all, but again it comes from people of all backgrounds. The hate won't stop until we as a society quit pointing fingers and blaming others for things that they didn't do.

[Ken]

This is a thread about race and how we understand our shared history. I'm not sure why you are even here if you don't want to talk about race.

I'm simply pointing out that the arguments used to support every form of racism and racial segregation in this country have always been class-based or about economics and rarely actually about race. Feel free to roll back the clock and examine why people opposed school desegregation in the 1960s. They said all the exact same things you are saying. As a Christian that should make you uncomfortable.

No, I pointed out why some people don't want to go to school with drug dealers and with people whose families don't value education. That seems pretty reasonable to me. You seem to be arguing that it's "racist" to feel that way.

Schools got desegregated a long time ago. People of any race can basically move wherever they want, except for limitations based on wealth / class.

I am questioning why you don't think people should have the basic freedom to decide they don't want to associate with families whose lives consist of crime, drug dealing, and domestic violence. I think that's a pretty reasonable thing for some people to choose.

Because it doesn't actually work like that in real life. And these very same attitudes that you are expressing are what drives systemic racism in this country. I will give you just one very specific visual example. I used to live in Waco TX. The school district boundary lines in Waco were very gerrymandered not only to segregate white and black communities for the same stated reasons that you just listed. But also to hoard economic resources into the white districts and deprive the black districts of the same.

Here is a map of the school district boundary lines in NE Waco that divided the largely white Waco school district from the largely black La Vega school district back in the 1960s. Notice the odd shaped pink trapezoid poking out into the blue in the middle of the page that I labeled in green? No one actually lives there, so why draw the map in that way? Because that trapezoid happens to be the former location of the General Tire Company which at the time was the largest employer (and property tax payer) in the entire county. https://wacohistory.org/items/show/133 and is now a tech center startup and research lab facility run by Baylor https://www.baylor.edu/bric/ By drawing the the lines as such, the white elected officials who were in charge at that time were moving millions of dollars of school property tax revenue from a largely black school district into a largely white school district. That is the very definition of "systemic racism"



After 20 years of additional demographic change, the same exact thing happened on the other side of Waco where the white suburban district that I taught in happens to have captured the SW corner of Waco where no students actually live but happens to contain an industrial park that has Mars Candy, Caterpillar, Sherwin Williams and other large corporate taxpayers that pour money into the "right" school district and extract it from the "wrong" school district.

Race, economics, and class are all inextricably linked in this country. Always have been and always will be.

What is the result? The largely white district where I taught had facilities that looked like this

Indoor football and soccer practice facility



Weight Room



Basketball gym



Football stadium



While the largely black and less affluent school districts on the other side of town have practice fields and facilities that look like this







The science facilities, and other academic resources are similarly disparate, but it is harder to find comparative photos of those. And yes, athletics is not everything. The contrast is simply to show the different levels of resources that different school districts have at their disposal, largely along both class and racial lines. This is the very textbook definition of "systemic racism".

[Grace]

The science facilities, and other academic resources are similarly disparate, but it is harder to find comparative photos of those. And yes, athletics is not everything. The contrast is simply to show the different levels of resources that different school districts have at their disposal, largely along both class and racial lines. This is the very textbook definition of "systemic racism".

I am not denying that systemic racism happens.

But here in Lancaster County, the cost to educate black and minority children is higher than the cost to educate predominately white children. Is that part of the systemic racism as well?

[Josh]

Ken,

People with more money get to buy more stuff.
Sorry but that’s just how the world works.

If you don’t like that, join a plain church that lets community children go to its school and then contribute money so cheaper tuition can be offered to community children. That’s what I do.

[Ken]

The science facilities, and other academic resources are similarly disparate, but it is harder to find comparative photos of those. And yes, athletics is not everything. The contrast is simply to show the different levels of resources that different school districts have at their disposal, largely along both class and racial lines. This is the very textbook definition of "systemic racism".

I am not denying that systemic racism happens.

But here in Lancaster County, the cost to educate black and minority children is higher than the cost to educate predominately white children. Is that part of the systemic racism as well?

I don't know anything about what is going on in Lancaster County. But district comparisons can be deceiving. Old buildings are often much more expensive to maintain than new ones, especially if there is lots of deferred maintenance. And utility costs can be higher as well. Salary schedules may be different. Poorer districts often have a lot more special ed costs which are much higher due to the much lower student-teacher ratios. That happens when charter schools bleed off lots of able bodied students leaving the special ed students behind in the public schools. Which commonly happens.

In Texas the school budgets are split between capital costs and operating costs. Day-to-day operating costs such as salaries, maintenance, etc. are capped by law for all schools but capital construction costs are payed for separately through bonds and uncapped. So two districts might have seemingly identical operational costs which is what is measured when you compare per-student costs. But the richer districts have far better resources which comes from a different pool of money. For example, when the school I was working at was expanded and remodeled through a construction bond measure we suddenly got about $75,000 to spend within the physics department on capital equipment and went on a buying spree to buy all the latest and greatest lab equipment and computers. A school down the road that didn't pass a similar construction bond had none of that same money to spend. None of that extra money went into the per-student calculation of operating costs so on paper we looked the same. But in reality were much different.

[Falco Underhill]

The science facilities, and other academic resources are similarly disparate, but it is harder to find comparative photos of those. And yes, athletics is not everything. The contrast is simply to show the different levels of resources that different school districts have at their disposal, largely along both class and racial lines. This is the very textbook definition of "systemic racism".

It looks like a genuine problem you've got there. So where the heck are the Civil Rights lawyers taking this thing to the U.S. Supreme Court to have the districts drawn more fairly?

[Ken]

The science facilities, and other academic resources are similarly disparate, but it is harder to find comparative photos of those. And yes, athletics is not everything. The contrast is simply to show the different levels of resources that different school districts have at their disposal, largely along both class and racial lines. This is the very textbook definition of "systemic racism".

It looks like a genuine problem you've got there. So where the heck are the Civil Rights lawyers taking this thing to the U.S. Supreme Court to have the districts drawn more fairly?

Oh, they have. In both Texas and here in Washington. Not to the US Supreme Court, but to the state supreme courts. In Texas the supreme court agreed that the funding system was hugely inequitable and horrible but still constitutional. In Washington the courts ruled the opposite.

Here is Texas: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ans ... itutional/

The Texas Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Friday that although the state’s “Byzantine” school funding system is “ossified” and urgently needs to be modernized, it is constitutional — a defeat for more than 600 school districts that had been fighting for years for relief.

It was the sixth significant legal battle fought in the state about how public schools should be funded since 1984, and only the second time that the high court ruled that the complicated finance system was not unconstitutional.

And here in Washington State a similar case reached the opposite result. https://www.nwpb.org/2018/06/15/mcclear ... ing-fight/

[ohio jones]

The largely white district where I taught ...

So you're complicit in perpetuating the systemic racial inequalities?

[Ken]

The largely white district where I taught ...

So you're complicit in perpetuating the systemic racial inequalities?

Yes, to the extent that I worked in and participated in a grossly unequal system. Sure. I did student teach and intern in a poorer district but got hired in a wealthier one that was much closer to home and where my kids attended. I actually have science classroom photos of both schools. I’ll see if I can find them. The difference is pretty dramatic.