Josh wrote: ↑Fri Mar 03, 2023 3:14 pm
Ken wrote: ↑Fri Mar 03, 2023 3:09 pm
It is objective fact that the legacy of white supremacy still pervades education in Mississippi to this day in a myriad of ways. To claim otherwise is to be ignorant of history.
No, it is not objective fact that your bogeyman of "white supremacy" has anything to do with education in Mississippi or other places in the present era. And it is certainly not objective fact that Critical Race Theory is the right way to do anything to help uplift education for all children regardless of race.
Let's take a look at some history that you are apparently ignorant of.
Slavery: Mississippi was first settled by white planters in the early 1700s and slave plantations came quickly to the Mississippi Delta so there was roughly 150 years of slavery. As part of the deep south, Mississippi was subject to the the most vicious large-scale industrial slavery compared to more northern states like Kentucky. The entire economy was based on slavery and the settlement patterns towns, and basically everything in the built environment is a legacy of slavery. Everything about antebellum Mississippi was premised on white supremacy.
Jim Crow: As part of the deep south, Mississippi was run by a vicious white supremacist government for roughly 100 years after the end of slavery. It was not a democracy, but an authoritarian white-supremacist government that enforced racial segregation in every aspect of life from education to housing to employment to criminal justice.
Civil Rights Era: Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954 but desegregation came slowly to Mississippi. The whites-only university system did not even start desegregating until 1962. That caused widespread race riots by violent white mobs who rampaged the city and the violence was so out of control that the Federal government had to airlift in troops from both the 101st and 82 airborne divisions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ole_Miss_riot_of_1962 The universities remained largely segregated through the 1960s and the college football teams were not desegrated until into the 1970s.
Education during the Civil Rights era: Mississippi began to dismantle its system of segregated schools in the 1960s. At that time the population was roughly 60% white and 40% black and due to segregation there was large black middle class so maybe 40% of teachers, coaches, school principals, etc. where black. When Mississippi started desegregation of the public schools they did entirely by dismantling black schools and bringing black students into formerly whites-only schools. There were no instances of desegregation happening by sending white students to formerly black schools. Which gives obvious lie to the notion of "separate but equal". Now in theory, black public school teachers, counselors, coaches, administrators, etc. were supposed to be absorbed into the white schools just like the black students. In practice that did not happen due to overt racism (white supremacy if you will). Principals of white schools found lots of convenient reasons to reject black applicants for teaching jobs largely for reasons of qualifications. They didn't attend the right universities or have the right degrees because those were all closed to them. The belief at the time was that it was unacceptable to have black teachers teaching white students in an integrated school. And there were certainly no black administrators hired to be principals of formerly white schools. The result was that during the 1960s and 1970s the black middle class of teachers and administrators was absolutely gutted in Mississippi. Many were forced to leave the state to find work in the north, or were forced to take more menial and less professional jobs.
Now education like many other professions such as farming tends to run in families. If your father or mother is a teacher, you are more likely to follow in their footsteps. So this racist implementation of school desegregation essentially erased an entire generation of middle class black teachers and administrators in Mississippi. Which meant that through the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, teaching was largely a white middle class profession in Mississippi. There were, of course, some black teachers. But this legacy of racism still ripples through the school system to this day in Mississippi and other southern states where black teachers are still nowhere near their percentage of the public school population. You can look at the demographic makeup of the Mississippi teachers over time here:
https://mississippitoday.org/2019/09/06 ... ographics/ Today about 25% of Mississippi teachers are black while about 57% of public school students are black. And the percentage of black administrators running public schools is far lower. That is a direct legacy of white supremacy and the racist implementation of desegregation since many teachers and administrators still working today got their start during that era. And old habits die hard, especially in the south where as Mississippi's own William Falkner famously said: "“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
Segregation Academies: The second thing that happened in Mississippi during the era of school desegregation was the establishment of private segregationist academies. Racist affluent and middle class whites pulled their children out of desegrated schools in droves during the 1960s and enrolled them in segregationist "whites only" academies across the state. This happened throughout the south. This had the effect of making the public schools less white, but also resulted in the reduction of support for funding public schools. Majority white property owners lost interest in funding what were majority black schools through their property taxes when their own children were attending segregated private schools. And so financial support for education declined. Many school boards remained all-white despite the fact that they oversaw public schools that were increasingly black.
There are reasons why Mississippi spends less than half the amount of say Massachusetts on a per-student basis and racism is one of them. Another reason is that Mississippi is highly gerrymandered along racial lines which means that the state government is far more white, male, and conservative than the population at large.
https://mississippitoday.org/2019/02/06 ... -like-you/ and these are the people who make funding decisions about Mississippi public schools. What is the most recent thing they have done? They have decided to further erode public funding for public schools by passing various voucher programs that largely subsidize wealthy white parents who are already sending their students to private schools. People who have studied Mississippi's school voucher program have found that it has basically transferred millions of public dollars to private schools to subsidize largely wealthier and white students who were already attending such schools in the first place.
Present day: So that is essentially where we are today. Virtually everything about the Mississippi public schools is a legacy of white supremacy. The distribution of public schools throughout neighborhoods, the school boundary lines and school district boundary lines, the racial composition of the teaching profession, the racial composition of the administrators, school boards, and legislators who are governing schools and making policy decisions about them, the neighborhoods in which children are raised, the economic disparities between white and black parents, the criminal justice system which interacts with the schools and students, and so forth. All of it has its roots in Mississippi's 250 year history of overt white supremacy.
Feel free to dispute any of this. But since you apparently believe that racism no longer affects Mississippi public schools you really need to dispute ALL of it.