Education concepts and applications

African-Americans are second only to Native Americans, historically, in terms of poor treatment at the hands of mainstream American society. Although African-Americans living today enjoy nominal equality, the social context in which blacks interact with the rest of society is still one that tangibly differentiates them from the rest of America. This cultural bias towards blacks is in many notable ways more apparent than the treatment of other people of color, such as Asian immigrants, as is reflected in disparate wages and living conditions experienced by these respective groups. Common stereotypes hold the successful, college educated black man or woman as the exception rather than the rule, whereas Asians are commonly thought of as over-achievers. Although any bias undermines social interaction in that it shifts attention away from individual merit, the bias towards African-Americans can be said to be worse than most, and lies at the root of discrimination and racial tension.

In that discrimination is the result of an escalation of tension between African-Americans and the rest of society, this development is a new one in the history of race relations in American Culture. The first blow that was dealt in this race struggle between African-Americans and predominantly white Caucasian-Americans (hereafter referred to as blacks and whites) was, self-evidently, the enslavement of blacks by predominantly Dutch and English slave traders at the end of the 17th century. As a dispossessed people that were commonly regarded as chattle, colonial blacks had no recourse for reprisal. By contrast, whites had attempted to enslave Native Americans, who always managed to rebel or escape due to their knowledge of the terrain and ability to return to pre-established tribal communities. Likewise, Irish and English indentured servants were able to escape to ports, join colonial communities, or borrow money to buy their freedom. Rather than an escalation of racial tension, colonial America saw a categorical institutionalization of slavery unknown in the west since the fall of Rome. Although many liken slavery to the serfdom found in England and continental Europe, it must be remembered that according to English and Spanish common law, any serf could win his freedom by evading authorities for a year and a day, and that slave auctions were unknown.

Although slave riots were not uncommon in the Antebellum south, the driving force behind abolition was the moral opprobrium of radical Christian reformers in New England, who were inspired by the enlightenment and various religious revivals that condemned slave ownership. A black-lead, categorical response to the deplorable conditions afforded blacks in the antebellum South was nearly impossible due to almost-universal illiteracy. Whereas whites of the time were able to develop increasingly intricate pseudo-scientific rationales whereby blacks could be declared inferior, blacks possessed no means by which to respond and hence were unable to champion their own freedom, let alone equality. One notable exception was Frederick Douglass, a freed slave who had taught himself how to read. However, even such capable black men could not become pamphleteers promoting freedom among blacks, because of the woeful punishments waiting for black slaves that had covertly developed the ability to read. These included not only beatings but having one's eyes put out.

Between the end of the Civil War and the 1960's, race relations between blacks and whites cannot be characterized as one of escalating tensions, but rather one of the woeful continuation of past transgressions.

Although a brief hiatus existed during reconstruction where the federal government sought to institute social reforms that favored blacks and encouraged voting, the end of reconstruction brought an end of this. The infamous Jim Crow laws kept blacks in what was though to be their place on a state government level, and civic participation in the form of lynchings augmented these officiated prejudices with implicitly condoned terror.

The stalwart refusal of the black community to resort to violence against whites at this time can be attributed to a number of factors. Predominant among them is the socialization of most blacks, which happened via the church. Black communities were usually either southern or had strong ties to black communities in the south, and were brought up in small, faith-based communities. The black population in the United States was not without its own small victories; the NAACP and black colleges were both born of this era, and communities such as U. Street in Washington DC and Harlem in New York City became centers of black culture, which became instrumental in changing American entertainment during the Jazz age.

Black sentiments became radicalized in the 1960's, owing to the conclusion by many black leaders that peaceful incrementalism had afforded blacks little in 100 years of emancipation. This is reflected aptly in James Baldwin's 1963 work, "The Fire Next Time." In this book Baldwin recounts his own experience as a young black man growing up in Harlem, where he found preaching in a storefront church to be his only escape from the baseless life of inferiority afforded black teenagers and young people in America. Part of the book consists of a letter to his nephew, in which he writes:

This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that, for the heart of the matter is here, and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity. Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do (and how you could do it) and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying, "You exaggerate' " They do not know Harlem, and I do. So do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine-but trust your experience. Know whence you came.

Baldwin set a precedent among radical black leaders, insisting that black culture was not American culture and that the aims and objectives of the American government and white American society was one that did not reflect black interests. Blacks, according to Baldwin, were thought to deserve a separate fate from whites, forever relegated to the ghettos of the north and the poor farms of the south. In this since, their lifestyles reflected those of new white immigrants to the United States, but unlike these immigrants, whose lives improved as they were Americanized, black standards of living were to remain static.

Black radicalism, African-American critical theory, the Black Panther movement, and urban riots are all examples of how Black Americans were galvanized by Baldwin and his contemporaries. Although the archetype of the "angry black male" remains with us as a reflection of common perspectives towards black radicalism as an aspect of the civil rights movement, it must be realized that protest methodologies employed in the 1960's were far from race-specific. A comparison between race riots in Newark and the Watts section of Los Angeles and the draft riots that took place in Kent State and on other campuses reveals distinct similarities. It must be understood that the socialization of black communities and the perception of blacks as a separate social entity played as great a role in white perceptions as was reflected in the fervor or scope of black violence.

Even as school integration brought white and black children into contact, other federal policies worked to actively encourage segregation. After the Second World War, the Federal Housing Authority had granted low-interest home loans to GI's looking to buy a new home in America's then-new suburbs. Blacks, however, were denied these loans. Although desegregation was a victory, its mismanagement lead to white flight, which resulted in a socio-economic iron curtain between suburban whites and city-bound blacks. In effect, ostensive efforts at desegregation actually promoted segregation, which took on a geographic context. In this there was an escalation of race tensions: as whites saw integration as something that was forced on them by civil rights activists and social reformers, they opted to abandon the cities where they had traditionally lived rather than remain side by side with the blacks. Neighborhoods that were not open to blacks were considered to be "exclusive" and usually featured higher property values. In communities such as Shaker Heights, Ohio, a Suburb of Cleveland, the effect of home loan discrimination was coupled with the effects of real estate agents actively discouraged the arrival of black residents because they were thought to have a negative effect on the price of homes.

To make matters worse, many cities such as Chicago sought to concentrate blacks in high-rise housing projects. These blacks were displaced by highways constructed under the National Highway Act of 1956. Other municipal improvements included the Pittsburgh Civic Arena, which displaced hundreds of poor black families living in the area in an attempt to improve the neighborhood. When the highways were built and families were displaced, white people received home loans to live in the suburbs, while blacks were sent to projects where they had no hope of gentrification improving their neighborhoods.

Although housing projects were ostensibly designed to help black people, the effect of their construction was usually the opposite. An article published in The Economist in 1998, Chicago's problems were born when Mayor Daley and other prominent politicians began to use public housing to segregate the city's rapidly growing black population...The result was hulking high-rises in poor black neighbourhoods, the worst of which is an uninterrupted four-mile stretch of public housing on the city's south side. The Robert Taylor Homes are the hallmark of this corridor -- a clump of more than two dozen 16-storey buildings, identical except for the colour of their brick and the way they face..The result is the biggest concentration of poverty in America.

Other cities faced worse fates, as the white flight to the suburbs left them almost exclusively poor, black, and bankrupt. White flight from Newark, New Jersey to its suburbs, which started in the '40s and accelerated in the '60s, drove city revenues down, leading to another problem associated with the new black inner city: urban blight. According to Thomas Dolan at Rutgers University, between 1960 and 1970, Newark experienced a 6.6% drop in population (26,998 residents) while the surrounding region's population increased by 14%. Between 1960 and 1967, a net total of more than 70,000 white residents moved out of the city. During the same amount of time, the city went from 65% white to 52% black and 10% Puerto Rican.

By the end of the 1960's, blacks not only went to separate schools from whites, they lived in different kinds of communities, they were much poorer, and they were radicalized in opposition to what they saw as an alien culture. In a famous speech, Malcolm X referred to those that assumed that their lot would be improved alongside that of the whites as the house negros, which he contrasted with the radically anti-white majority of blacks, that he likened to the field negros. Malcolm X implores the blacks to use violence against whites, saying;

You bleed for white people, but when it comes to seeing your own churches being bombed and little black girls murdered; you haven't got any blood. You bleed when the white man says bleed; you bite when the white man says bite; and you bark when the white man says bark. I hate to say this about us, but it's true. How are you going to be nonviolent in Mississippi, as violent as you were in Korea? How can you justify being nonviolent in Mississippi and Alabama, when your churches are being bombed, and your little girls are being murdered, and at the same time you are going to get violent with Hitler, and Tojo, and somebody else you don't even know?

Leaders such as Malcolm X and James Baldwin adopted the revolutionary class rhetoric that had been refined by white intellectuals in order to implore the proletariat to self-identify as a group that maintained separate interests from those of other classes.

Whites had never seen blacks in this class context before: it implied that they were of equal ability and shredded the notion of an equitable democratic polity. Since blacks were seen as having inferior minds to those of whites, white racism, even in a "compassionate" incarnation, retained a paternalistic role. Social reformers such as Margaret Sanger and politicians such as Mayor Daley saw blacks as a social responsibility, reducing the governments efforts to help blacks to one of stewardship. Although this is arguably a social policy aimed at alleviating poverty, it is much different in focus from the black empowerment efforts that were to follow, in that it reflects the notion that blacks are inferior. By re-imagining the black population in a class context, Malcolm X and others were to win a pyrrhic victory. They illustrated the politics of race as intolerable to blacks, but at the same time re-invented the black social reformer as a hardened militant who saw himself as cheated by society and by the course of American history.

This negative self-image lead many blacks to play into the trap devised for them by the anti-egalitarian social reformers and politicians: the young urban black male or female, estranged from the social mainstream, was to live within the confines of the blighted and abandoned urban centers, his or her life pre-determined by the effects of an environment populated by adults collecting public assistance (95% of public housing residents in the Chicago projects reviewed by The Economist,) a criminal justice system that punished non-violent drug offenders, and underfunded schools. New drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine, which were often introduced to the United States with the full support of high officials within the United States government, devastated previously respectable black communities in places like Washington, DC. Even blacks that had managed to escape this cycle and join the middle class were negatively effected by these stereotypes, which persist to this day.

Whereas escalation can be seen in the history of the black experience in the United States, it is even more important when seen through the eyes of children growing up in American communities. The New York Times conducted a nationwide series of surveys on the nature of race relations in the United States in 1999 and 2000. They focused on the lives of young people in various communities and showed how race affects people in the 21st century and were eventually compiled into a book called "How Race is Lived in America." One article, "Growing Up, Growing Apart" by Tamar Lewin, investigates a racial behavioral dichotomy in the middle-class town of Maplewood, New Jersey.

The article tells the story of three children who were best friends: Johanna, Kelly, and Aqeelah, and focuses on how racial differences among their peers threatened to drive them apart. According to the book, the racial balance between blacks and whites in the South Orage-Maplewood school district is almost exactly even. What's more, the blacks in this school district are middle class, and even manage to enjoy a higher median income than the whites. According to the Times, however, even here, as if pulled by internal magnets, black and white children begin to separate at sixth grade. These are children who walked to school together, learned to read together, slept over at each other's houses. But despite all the personal history, all the community good will, race divides them as they grow up. As racial consciousness develops -- and the practice of grouping students by perceived ability sends them on diverging academic paths -- race becomes as much a fault line in their world as in the one their parents hoped to move beyond."

Johanna conferred to Times reporters one experience that she had talking to another black student. "People are always asking, 'What are you?' And I don't really like it," she said. "I told him I'm half white and half Puerto Rican, and he said, 'But you act black.' I told him you can't act like a race. I hate that idea. He defended it, though. He said I would have a point if he'd said African-American, because that's a race, but black is a way of acting. I've thought about it, and I think he's right." As they are starting high school, black children have difficulty identifying themselves. Because blacks are thought both by blacks and whites to have their own culture, any attempt to adopt cultural standards based on taste rather than racial posturing is seen as contrarian. We remember Malcolm X's excoriation of blacks that saw themselves as members of society rather than as members of black society, who he demonized as "Uncle Toms."

Again and again, we see these children condition themselves to behave in distinctly separate ways based on perceived racial identity. The example is given of Aqeelah, the little black Muslim girl, getting reprimanded by her friends for picking up something a fellow black girl had dropped on the floor.

Why do you have to be like a white person? her friend retorted. Just leave it there. But Aqeelah picked it up.

There's stuff like that all the time, and it gets on my nerves," she said later. "Like at track, in the locker room, there's people telling a Caucasian girl she has a big butt for a white person, and I'm like, 'Who cares, shut up.'"

The article notes that at the elementary school, the students all play together without regard to race. When interviewed, a third grade student claims that the racial differences aren't important to her or the others.

I've known Carolyn G. since kindergarten," said a black girl named Carolyn Morton. "She lives on my block. She's in my class. We even have the same name. We have so many things the same!"

As for how they might be different, Carolyn Goldstein groped for an answer: "Well, she has a mom at home and my mom works, and she has a sister, and I don't."