#segregation racism

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Guy Venables

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 16, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 16, 2024

One of President-elect Trump’s campaign pledges was to eliminate the Department of Education. He claimed that the department pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” He promised to “return” education to the states. 

In fact, the Department of Education does not set curriculum; states and local governments do. The Department of Education collects statistics about schools to monitor student performance and promote practices based in evidence. It provides about 10% of funding for K–12 schools through federal grants of about $19.1 billion to high-poverty schools and of $15.5 billion to help cover the cost of educating students with disabilities.

It also oversees the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program, including setting the rules under which colleges and universities can participate. But what really upsets the radical right is that the Department of Education is in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding, a policy Congress set in 1975 with an act now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This was before Congress created the department.

The Department of Education became a stand-alone department in May 1980 under Democratic president Jimmy Carter, when Congress split the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into two departments: the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education. 

A Republican-dominated Congress established the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1953 under Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower as part of a broad attempt to improve the nation’s schools and Americans’ well-being in the flourishing post–World War II economy. When the Soviet Union beat the United States into space by sending up the first  Sputnik satellite in 1957, lawmakers concerned that American children were falling behind put more money and effort into educating the country’s youth, especially in math and science. 

But support for federal oversight of education took a devastating hit after the Supreme Court, headed by Eisenhower appointee Chief Justice Earl Warren, declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional in the May 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. 

Immediately, white southern lawmakers launched a campaign of what they called “massive resistance” to integration. Some Virginia counties closed their public schools. Other school districts took funds from integrated public schools and used a grant system to redistribute those funds to segregated private schools. Then, Supreme Court decisions in 1962 and 1963 that declared prayer in schools unconstitutional cemented the decision of white evangelicals to leave the public schools, convinced that public schools were leading their children to perdition. 

In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan ran on a promise to eliminate the new Department of Education.

After Reagan’s election, his secretary of education commissioned a study of the nation’s public schools, starting with the conviction that there was a “widespread public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system.” The resulting report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” announced that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

Although a later study commissioned in 1990 by the Secretary of Energy found the data in the original report did not support the report’s conclusions, Reagan nonetheless used the report in his day to justify school privatization. He vowed after the report’s release that he would “continue to work in the months ahead for passage of tuition tax credits, vouchers, educational savings accounts, voluntary school prayer, and abolishing the Department of Education. Our agenda is to restore quality to education by increasing competition and by strengthening parental choice and local control.”

The rise of white evangelism and its marriage to Republican politics fed the right-wing conviction that public education no longer served “family values” and that parents had been cut out of their children’s education. Christians began to educate their children at home, believing that public schools were indoctrinating their children with secular values. 

When he took office in 2017, Trump rewarded those evangelicals who had supported his candidacy by putting right-wing evangelical activist Betsy DeVos in charge of the Education Department. She called for eliminating the department—until she used its funding power to try to keep schools open during the covid pandemic—and asked for massive cuts in education spending.

Rather than funding public schools, DeVos called instead for tax money to be spent on education vouchers, which distribute tax money to parents to spend for education as they see fit. This system starves the public schools and subsidizes wealthy families whose children are already in private schools. DeVos also rolled back civil rights protections for students of color and LGBTQ+ students but increased protections for students accused of sexual assault. 

In 2019, the 1619 Project, published by the New York Times Magazine on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans at Jamestown in Virginia Colony, argued that the true history of the United States began in 1619, establishing the roots of the country in the enslavement of Black Americans. That, combined with the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, prompted Trump to commission the 1776 Project, which rooted the country in its original patriotic ideals and insisted that any moments in which it had fallen away from those ideals were quickly corrected. He also moved to ban diversity training in federal agencies. 

When Trump lost the 2020 election, his loyalists turned to undermining the public schools to destroy what they considered an illegitimate focus on race and gender that was corrupting children. In January 2021, Republican activists formed Moms for Liberty, which called itself a parental rights organization and began to demand the banning of LGBTQ+ books from school libraries. Right-wing activist Christopher Rufo engineered a national panic over the false idea that public school educators were teaching their students critical race theory, a theory taught as an elective in law school to explain why desegregation laws had not ended racial discrimination. 

After January 2021, 44 legislatures began to consider laws to ban the teaching of critical race theory or to limit how teachers could talk about racism and sexism, saying that existing curricula caused white children to feel guilty.

When the Biden administration expanded the protections enforced by the Department of Education to include LGBTQ+ students, Trump turned to focusing on the idea that transgender students were playing high-school sports despite the restrictions on that practice in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury.” 

During the 2024 political campaign, Trump brought the longstanding theme of public schools as dangerous sites of indoctrination to a ridiculous conclusion, repeatedly insisting that public schools were performing gender-transition surgery on students. But that cartoonish exaggeration spoke to voters who had come to see the equal rights protected by the Department of Education as an assault on their own identity. That position leads directly to the idea of eliminating the Department of Education.

But that might not work out as right-wing Americans imagine. As Morning Joe economic analyst Steven Rattner notes, for all that Republicans embrace the attacks on public education, Republican-dominated states receive significantly more federal money for education than Democratic-dominated states do, although the Democratic states contribute significantly more tax dollars. 

There is a bigger game afoot, though, than the current attack on the Department of Education. As Thomas Jefferson recognized, education is fundamental to democracy, because only educated people can accurately evaluate the governmental policies that will truly benefit them.

In 1786, Jefferson wrote to a colleague about public education: “No other sure foundation can be devised for the preservation of freedom, and happiness…. Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against [the evils of “kings, nobles and priests”], and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[newsfromstolenland]

Please watch this video. It's about racist urban planning in the United States, but many of the things described happened in Canada too. (example, example, example, example)

And I'd like any white person who has ever reminisced about a time when they could've been able to afford a home to watch this. Because you could buy a home, but could Black people? Could the rest of us?

Segregation was not just a policy of apartheid (although it absolutely was that). Segregation is built into the designs of our cities and communities, these same cities and communities we live in today.

Watch the video. And especially if you're white, watch the fucking video.

@allthecanadianpolitics

[ecoamerica]

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[alwaysbewoke]

A new study by the education watchdog Available to All reveals that school attendance zones and selective admission policies in the U.S. often exclude students of color and low-income families from elite public schools, thereby reinstating levels of segregation reminiscent of 1968. The study criticizes the use of residential addresses for school assignments, which supports "educational redlining" that favors affluent families, leading to systemic inequalities in access to advanced educational programs. Available to All calls for legislative reforms to protect enrollment rights and recommends that school districts minimize the importance of geographical boundaries to combat segregation and improve school access for all. The resurgence of school segregation to levels seen in 1968 is a stark reminder of how deeply systemic inequality is entrenched in our education system. Policies that favor affluent families and perpetuate educational redlining deny many Black and low-income students the opportunity to access quality education.

but listen to the racists and coons, black people are just making shit up and "playing the victim/race card."

[hussyknee]

White women have turned into the salafi police trying to transvestigate how in Islam the Algerian gold medallist in athletic shorts could be carried on the shoulders of her male trainer. Lmao.

Apparently the Islamic heteropatriarchy is now in collusion with the Woke LGBT, since the alternative is distrusting a Muslim Factoid that Hazel heard about last Thursday.

[ljblueteak]

"Paul Asks About White Australia: Beatle Paul McCartney yesterday showed an unexpected interest in the White Australia policy." From The Sydney Morning Herald, June 19, 1964.

Text of the article reads:

At a Press conference yesterday Paul was approached by a Nigerian journalist.

Paul said "Are you an aborginal?"

The journalist said he was from Nigeria.

Paul said: "I didn't think that Australia allowed coloured people to come in. I remember reading about this in geography in school which I failed, and I thought it was a bit off. I thought they were the only country in the world to do this. I saw you today and I thought: 'Hullo, we'll get onto the Government right away.'

The journalist said he was allowed to stay in Australia under certain conditions which included having a job.

He said Australia was host to more than 3,000 Asian students and he had found no discrimination whatsoever.

Paul said: "That is good because there is in Britain and in America."

He said that apart from kangaroos and koalas his biggest early impression of Australia had been "this white-only business."

"John and I were talking about it only this afternoon."

[apenitentialprayer]

Fr. Jimmy Coyle, and his younger sister Marcella. (x)

She had lots of pictures of him, but he looked the same in them all: thick curly hair and eerily pale eyes, that stared straight at you until you put the cardboard lid back on. The most important thing about him, for us as kids, was that he was dead: shot on purpose by the Ku Klux Klan which was American for Very Bad Men. In her story, and we only had her story, he died on the porch, where he'd been reading his breviary. We pictured a porch, long and wooden. We pictured the sort of reliable sunlight that might make a porch possible. We slanted the sun's rays for evening, and pictured the good-looking Irish priest with the strange eyes looking up from his Divine Office to find Very Bad Men coming up the porch steps with guns. We pictured him dead: head back with a look of surprised piety, his breviary open and fluttering at his feet, the rocking chair still creaking. It was iconic, a vivid movie scene that never left us.

Sheila Killian, Marcella and Jimmy's grandniece, and author of Something Bigger.

Today (8/11/24) marks the 103rd anniversary of the martyrdom of James Coyle, murdered by a Klansman for performing an interracial marriage involving the assassin's daughter.

[john-lennons-bby-daddy]

You know what would be cool a forbidden love between the beatles and a poc reader set in the 60s at the height of their fame

[nashvillethotchicken]

A subtle way you can tell lestat is very selfish and ignorant about race, especially in ep 6 is that he said that they'd go to Argentina, a country which at the time was explicitly looking for white Europeans (including n*zis) to move there after spending decades pushing their black and Indigenous populations to the fringes of society to whiten up the country

[vanmarkus]

i had a pretty busy day at work. coming back to tumblr to see that people are trying to talk around being racist again is something i don't have the energy for. being white passing doesn't make you white or erase your heritage and racial/ethnic background. europe and especially eastern europe has a very different experience with racism than the states.

it's okay to not be educated about something, it's not okay to stay that way and try to "correct" people who actually know what they're talking about.

[degeneratedworker]

"The First Lesson. This way the society in which vices reign gives the child their first lessons." Soviet Union 1964

[thenixkat]

The Deep Roots of North Carolina Racism by Intelexual Quickies

[odinsblog]

When looking at where the Black sides are, we could start by considering where they are not.

FHA and VA loans are credited with helping form the middle class of America by making homeownership available to a large portion of the population. Large housing complexes were developed, beginning with Levittown in Long Island, NY. Similar complexes sprung up in many major cities with one thing in common. No homes could be sold to Black people, with the federal government fully backing redlining, which made segregated housing the rule and not the exception. Black sides of town evolved where the whites elected not to go. There were housing complexes created for Black and Jewish people as well; these “projects” were definitely not intended for the middle class.

(continue reading)

[trashcanwithsprinkles]

I feel like the wildest thing is like. Again, the creation of Nahida way earlier in the timeline. A proof of concept, as you would. A tiny god child and Ajax is just well. She might stay tiny for centuries or she might grow better outside of being imprisoned- and isn’t that a wild thing to just drop on someone. This tiny god of dreams

it would be absolutely buckwild but also conisder: dream divination becomes a thing

[andthespidersfrommars]

you might not think it’s hard to be a soc fan artist on tumblr, but let me tell you about the time I called someone out for drawing inej with light skin, so they blocked me and then wrote a long post about me that I couldn’t see, along with colour samples taken from my art as examples of how inej is “too dark” in them, and then they end the post with “I’m disappointed in you” 💀

[princess-of-thebes-1995]

Every day.... how exhausting