Personal Journal #1: 2.24.09

I grew up in a wealthy suburb outside of Pittsburgh called Fox Chapel. I felt as if I did not fit in with the girls buying designer handbags and having cell phones at the age of fourteen, but I lived amongst them from the time I was nine until leaving for Nyack. The high school that I went to was primarily white, but the deficit of average incomes per family was extremely diverse! There were families making six figure incomes and family on welfare, all primarily white students, but with access to different privileges. The school district spanned a large area which is where the difference of incomes came into effect. One area was particularly “lower class” with the parents earning a lower average income than the parents of the other students from the school. These students all came from the same elementary school and many of these students were in the “merge” program at my school which was for the students who needed extra help. “Merge” was not a special ed group, but the classes were geared more towards keeping the students off the streets and enforcing disciplinary action than learning. The students in the “merge” program were not as expected to succeed as the rest of the students. There was a lot of tension between these students and the rest of the students in my school. Some people engaged in name-calling the students in the “merge” program as “the rats,” making a derogatory name for them because of where they lived. A year after I graduated there was a conflict between the groups when the “preps” decided to dress up as the “rats” for Halloween. This story go coverage from the local newspaper and the conflict continues.
There was a fairly large group of Indian students in my area, almost all of them living in the wealthiest homes in Fox Chapel and almost all of them enrolled in the advanced placement courses. Many of the parents of those students were successful doctors and lawyers. Another minority group was the non-practicing Jews. They were very proud of their “ethnic ties” to Judaism, but not per se of the religion itself. These students tend to be in the accelerated and advanced placement classes and come from wealthy families.

Text Response #1: Hand-outs 2.24.09

The readings for this week highlighting the privilege in our society that goes to the white men and women, who have ultimately been the oppressor is not talked about in our society. Beverly Daniel Tatum likens racism to a “moving walkway” in that “unless [you] are walking actively in the opposite direction at a speed faster than the conveyor belt-unless [you] are actively antiracist-[you] will find [yourself] carried along with the others” (p. 81). During the years of slavery, to be antiracist you had to be a public abolitionist, during the civil rights movement an active social justice advocate; but what sort of action is required today? Racism runs deep and wide in our society, and it is more than what one person can fight at one time. Paula Harris mentioned the inequality in the school system in her “Living in the Truth About White History and Racism,” contrasting the success of white versus nonwhite students in school. Harris remarks, “under all the circumstances, white kids do better in school” (p. 99). Racism in high schools can be as blatant as all white students in the advanced placement courses and the nonwhite students in “special ed” or remedial classes (p. 99). To make a difference in a school setting, the example of Harris’ sister, Holly, assessing the testing situation of her Latino students who all failed the preliminary test of sequencing (p. 104). She believed that her students were smarter than the test “proved” them to be, so she asked for a reevaluation. How many other teachers would be willing to give their students more than a passing glance? One way to combat the “unaware/covert racism” is to push for culturally proficient testing for the younger children of multiethnic origin. How many children are written off as special ed in the crucial developmental years just because of a test misinterpreting their cultural differences for lacking mental ability? This type of racism is a crime that affects children before they even have enough self-esteem to recognize the inequality. It stunts their intellectual growth which leads to a less advantaged life.