Everybody Loves Integration
By Jailynn Flaack-Sanchez
Everybody Hates Chris is a television show that illustrates the early childhood of actor Chris Rock and his upbringing in Bedford-Stuyvesant. To get a better education, his parents sent him to a predominantly white school far away where he was viciously bullied and racially targeted. The show highlights the corrupt school district and the vast struggles he must face as one of the only black students in his school. Although the show is a comedy that pokes at the struggles of growing up in a poor black neighborhood in the 1980s, much of the show’s content is still relevant today. As inner cities such as Bedford-Stuyvesant rapidly becomes more segregated, parents are forced to choose between a better education at a predominantly white school or risk a poorer education at schools with a dense black and Latino population.
In the article, “Worlds Apart,” published in the New York Times, Nikole Hannah-Jones illustrates a remarkable and ever-changing Brooklyn that is plagued with tense racial issues such as segregation and gentrification, that is quickly spreading and threatening the education of her own daughter. The article starts in the spring of 2014, just months before their daughter Najya was expected to start school. Her options were to go to a predominantly white school and be offered a good education or go to an inner-city school with a predominantly black and Latino population and risk a worse education. While weighing the options of which school Hannah-Jones wanted to send her daughter Najya to, she reflected on her own childhood experiences: “We showed up in a yellow bus, visitors in someone else’s neighborhood, and were whisked back across the bridge each day as soon as the bell rang” (26). Hannah-Jones decided she did not want this for her child, instead she wanted her daughter to grow up in a diverse community surrounded by other kids like her. After much debate with her husband Faraji, they decided on sending their daughter to Public School 307, an inner-city school with a diverse culture and a good education (31).
Although finding a school for their daughter seemed like a struggle, the bigger struggle comes from trying to understand how segregation is still happening, especially now. The fight for racial inequality is one that happens every day, but how do you fight an establishment with systematic oppression rooted to its core? While integration efforts have taken place, it’s difficult to implement a system that is fair to all. We still live in a divided society where “we’ve come to accept segregation again.” While there has been an effort to desegregate schools, “intentional integration almost never occurs unless it’s in the interest of white students” (37). While it is imperative to implement a system of integration, it needs to be in the interest of all students, not just the white or the rich children. This kind of system is not only damaging to the communities, but also hugely damaging to the children that attend these segregated schools. A 2015 study showed that children that went to desegregated schools, compared to those that went to segregated schools, were less likely to be poor, suffer health issues, and go to jail and more likely to go to college (36). Although the school system in highly segregated places such as New York claim that schools are providing a quality education for all students, there is still an “intensely segregated school system that is denying a generation of kids of color a fighting chance at a decent life” (38).
Of course, Najya never knew that any of this was happening, she just went to school every day excited to play with her new friends and learn. As public school 307 (PS 307) grew into a new and developing school, public school 8 (PS 8) was having difficulties that would encroach on the education of students. PS 8 was a school with “higher test scores” than PS 307 making it more desirable for parents. Hannah-Jones explains that now, “we can concentrate poverty and kids of color and then fail to provide the resources to support and sustain those schools” negatively affecting test scores (40). While parents applied for their students to get into PS 8, some were waitlisted and instead guaranteed admission to PS 307 instead (39). This sparked outrage as people didn’t want their kids going to PS 307 due to assumptions about its quality based on its location. Now all the students that were waitlisted for PS 8 were attending PS 307 causing an overcrowding issue. This issue sparked plans for rezoning, yet another effort to better integrate the public schools.
Believing that the city would fix these newfound problems was difficult, in the past there have been tried, and failed, attempts at integration. In cities as deeply segregated as Brooklyn, people are still forgotten in the attempt of integration. For example, Mayor Bill de Blasio signed the School Diversity Accountability Act into law to increase diversity in schools, but when nothing was done, de Blasio continued to defend the property rights of the more affluent parents that secure entry into the predominantly white schools (45-46). In the past, PS 8 was the same as PS 307, but now only one in four students that attend are black or Latino (43). As test scores in this area saw improvement, more white families began moving in and enrolling their children into PS 8. As more affluent white families move in to the previously predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods, the families that helped establish these communities “feared they were losing something important, a truly diverse school that nurtured its neediest students” (43).
Although the topic of gentrification is widely debated, institutionalized racism can be pinpointed as a source of this ongoing problem: “The [Federal Housing Association’s] explicitly racist underwriting standards, which rated black and integrated neighborhoods as uninsurable, made federally insured home loans largely unavailable to black home seekers” (47). Since 1968, discrimination through the Federal Housing Association has been made possible. Black and Latino families that want to move out of bad neighborhoods are stuck due to lack of resources provided by the government. To try and combat the schooling issue, concerned parents asked that a certain number of seats be allotted to students of color, but it was turned down meaning that as neighborhoods become gentrified, so do the schools. It’s important to have good leaders who fight for the rights of all, but also an engaged community willing to voice their concerns of their children. Demolishing a system based on the systematic oppression of people of color cannot happen without “a surrendering of advantage.” Only then can we accomplish “true integration, true equality” (53). To combat segregation, we first need to achieve unity and fight for the rights of all children, even if it means setting aside our own privileges for other people.
After reading the article, I realized that the struggles of Hannah-Jones and Chris Rock resonated deep within me. I too was sent to a public school in a different neighborhood in an attempt at integration. In Las Vegas, we have magnet programs for students that want to challenge themselves and choose a subject to “major” in high school. To attend a magnet school, a student must first apply and get accepted to the schools that received their application. I chose Rancho High School to further my knowledge on the medical field, specifically sports medicine. Rancho was notorious for its gang activity and riots around the 1980s and is located in a neighborhood that is predominantly Latino and black. The job of the magnet program was to take students from all over the valley and send them to these schools that were in densely black and Latino neighborhoods and raise the test scores while also offering more diversity. It’s interesting to see how these efforts at integration are still taking place, and even in other up-and-coming areas. The change that I witnessed was mostly positive, there were no more riots or even any gang related activity in the school. Due to these higher test scores, the school received more funding and was even able to alleviate the cost of exams such as the ACT and AP Exams for all students. Integration efforts can be positive such as in my case, but it takes strong leaders to propel change in the positive direction.
What Hannah-Jones didn’t explain further was the Federal Housing Association’s role in creating these densely black and Latino neighborhoods that ultimately led to the segregation of public schools. Looking at a system that is failing its own people goes back to the laws set in place during the Jim Crow era. Perhaps the most intriguing struggle of all is the struggle between the FHA and black tenants. People trying to make a better life for themselves and instead are turned down by a corrupt system for the sole reason because they were black. “From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal” (“The Case for Reparations”). While black people tried to move and become homeowners, they were ultimately denied home loans due to living in neighborhoods that were deemed uninsurable because there was a higher percentage of minorities. Neighborhoods became a battlefield between neighborhoods that “lacked ‘a single foreigner or Negro’” and neighborhoods that “were rated ‘D’ and were usually considered ineligible for FHA backing” (“A Case for Reparations”). These racist policies cultivated segregated neighborhoods and denied generations of people a chance at growing and improving their quality of life. Unable to move, the people living in these neighborhoods attend the same underfunded schools with resources that are not suitable to allow students to succeed. In this vicious cycle, the next generation of students residing in these neighborhoods is doomed to the same struggle that parents are facing now if no proper action is taken.
Reading Hannah-Jones’ article opened my eyes to a struggle that I had never even thought about and changed my perspective on the school system. It is difficult to try and discredit Hannah-Jones’ argument; She gives you a first-hand experience on what it’s like to send her own kid to these schools and allows readers a glimpse into her struggles as a mother. She appeals to the reader’s emotions and effectively persuades the reader to view these issues from her perspective. The purpose of the article was to highlight the segregation in public schools and all the factors that help contribute to such a harsh divide. From racist institutions and poor leaders to issues such as gentrification, the school systems are ultimately affected by all these problems. Segregation in schools isn’t a problem of the past, it’s an ongoing battle for equal opportunity for all students despite their race or socioeconomic background.
Works Cited
Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “Worlds Apart.” Best American Magazine Writing 2017, edited by Sid Holt. Columbia University Press, 2017, pp. 25-53.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic , June 2014, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/.
Rock, Chris and LeRoi, Ali, creators. Everybody Hates Chris. CBS Paramount Television 2009.