Divinest Sense

Tom DeLay indicted.

Wake County, North Carolina, where Raleigh and surrounding suburbs are located, reports huge successes in its program to economically integrate public schools. The main emphasis of the program is avoiding large concentrations of low-income students in one school. Placing poor kids in a middle-class learning environment has been shown to vastly improve their chances of doing well, because of exposure to kids, teachers, and parents with higher expectations. It seems like a no-brainer when you think about it in these simple terms, but lots of (mainly white, upper-middle income) people get really upset about the government forcing kids to attend particular schools, which are sometimes far away from home and in a different kind of neighborhood.

I grew up in Dallas, and was enrolled in private school at a pretty young age because the conventional wisdom around town was that the public schools, especially in the Dallas school district, were just terrible, and you should avoid them if you could afford to. There was a lot of resentment among North Dallasites (white and higher-income) over the forced racial integration in the 60’s and 70’s. People say that “bussing” was the worst thing that ever happened to Dallas schools. Kids from black neighborhoods were shipped up to North Dallas and vice versa. The overall quality of all the schools declined - as if the presence of a few blacks and Mexicans in the classroom could ruin everyone’s experience of pre-calc. But this was Dallas in the 70’s, racial tensions ran high, and people freaked out. The program, consequently, was never fully tended to its fruition.

As the Raleigh article points out, the integration measures succeeded because they were not done in isolation - there were many other factors involved. This exact program would not work in every city. The Research Triangle area is doing very well economically, and corporate and community leaders are supportive of the school district’s efforts. Notably, the media are supportive - this is incredibly important. It’s frustrating to watch news on TV or read the letters to the editor when I’m visiting Dallas, and see conservatives whipping up a froth of panic over some sort of progressive thing that the government might force them to do - and to see the black and hispanic members of city council portrayed as crazy, ignorant wingnuts.

The people who frevently believe in school choice and educational vouchers don’t see that such programs inhibit cultural and economic integration and make the problem worse. If a frightened white family is given a choice of public schools or a private school, won’t they just choose the one that has the most “people like us” in it? Will a kid from a poor family have any clue that these voucher programs are available? And what happens when the poor kid lands in the middle of an affluent school - will there be any sort of programs in place to help him catch up academically and integrate socially with everyone else?

School voucher proponents tend to be of the mindset that giving someone an “opportunity” means doing nothing at all - that just being alive means you have every opportunity in the world, if only you will choose to take it. Sadly, these people are living in a dream world. Children should not just be dropped at the door of their chosen school and left for the wolves to devour. They need to be led to the well of opportunity and shown how to retrieve the bucket.

Education is a serious problem in this country, and it’s not the place for politics and polemics. This is exactly the sort of thing that needs serious, sustained regulatory and financial efforts over a long period of time in order to fix.

Kinky Friedman for governor of Texas - as his campaign slogan says, why the hell not? Check out the “Kinkytoon” on his campaign website for a hilarious sendup of good ol’ Texan campaign trail pandering.

The Guardian waxes commonsensical about the results of a new study by psychologist Janet Shibley Hyde–it demonstrates that there are very few inherent psychological differences between men and women. The different behaviors that we tend to take on are caused mostly by cues we pick up from our environment and inequities in social structure. And boys are not better at math! Some delicious shame-on-you quotes:

A common method was to show that patterns of electro-chemistry in the body or brain were different for men and women, or that various bits of brain had different sizes. That this could be due to differences in upbringing rather than the Y chromosome was rarely considered. Yet it has been clear for some time that nurture affects biology profoundly. Several studies show that women sexually abused as children have 5% less of the brain’s hippocampal region than untraumatised women. Similar evidence regarding the effect of nurture exists for patterns of brainwaves or for crucial hormones such as cortisol.
Little coverage was given to a study of 37 nations that showed that the more a country fosters women’s financial independence, the less they are attracted by rich men. Nor have I noticed coverage of the fact that, although women tend to be twice as likely as men to suffer depression in the Anglo-Saxon (Americanised) world, that difference disappears in much of gender-equal Scandinavia.

The most emailed story in the NY Times today was this one, about Ivy League undergrads who are already planning to become stay-at-home moms. I’m not saying that this is not a valid choice for a parent to make, but the nonchalant and submissive tone of the women interviewed in the article is downright disturbing.

They have totally bought the line that you can’t be a good parent if you have a full-time job. Excuse me, but my father is a lawyer, and I didn’t get to see him that much when I was a small child because of his late hours and business trips. But do I feel alienated from him? How could I? He was an amazing parent. When he was at home, he spent his time with me and my brother, rocking us to sleep, reading to us, taking us with him to the hardware store and the library, and teaching us about the world.

But my mom was a stay-at-home mom, maybe that’s the reason I turned out so charming, intelligent, and well-adjusted. (and, might I add, good-looking.) She was a wonderful mom, this is true. And it was nice to have her around. But I was put in nursery school pretty early, and I mostly remember spending my time there, which was great fun. Even when I got home, I was *busy* - I had imaginary worlds whose stuffed-animal populations needed tending. New books from the library to devour. The family cat to antagonize. I had a schedule. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time with my mom, because she was busy too.

Sometimes my parents would go out for the night, and we’d have a babysitter. At church, there was the nursery lady (who taught me words in Spanish) and at school, there were attentive and friendly teachers. I never confused any of these people with my parents. Mom and dad are always mom and dad, even if you hardly ever see them.

The point is, it takes a village… ok, I won’t go there. But it’s true - a lot of people have a role in raising your child. And children are pretty durn smart about figuring out those roles. They’re not going to turn out all weird in the head because mom works during the day.

The ivy league women in this article seem to me like they’re from some other planet. Maybe they’re all members of the college republicans or something. Because to me, education is not about getting a “well-bred” seal of approval and meeting a future lawyer husband. Education instills a sense of longing–a growing awareness of the vastness of our world and the variety and richness of human experience. Education reminds you of how much you still don’t know, and makes your heart and mind ache to learn more. One way to keep learning is by doing - by working. By participating in society and contributing to it. If I were a mom, I’d want to pass that yearning on to my child, and show her that as many books and furry animals and dandelions as there are at home, there are infinitely more and greater things, out there, out in the world.

CNN is finally covering a story that I heard on Saturday on This American Life (Episode 296) on WAMU. Hundreds of people who were trying their damnedest to evacuate New Orleans on foot were stopped and shot at by crazed gun-toting cops from Gretna, a relatively dry (and electrified) town on the West Bank. The This American Life story featured a long interview with Lorrie Slonsky, a white woman, who was in town for, ironically enough, a paramedic conference. These tourists were evacuated from their hotel and told to wait for buses that never came. After they were told numerous lies about where these buses were, a police commander finally told them to walk 2 miles to the west side of the city and go over the bridge to Gretna, where buses, or at least drinkable water and dry land, would be waiting.

At the end of the long walk, during which the small group was joined by hundreds of other lost people, they were met with the armed-and-dangerous barrier of Gretna’s finest. Slonsky and her husband managed to approach a police officer (by putting hands in the air, waving fireman’s badges, and walking slowly backwards) and asked why they could not cross over into Gretna, whose lights were twinkling invitingly in the darkness. After some blustering about “it’s not safe”, the cop said, “we will not allow Gretna to become another Superdome”, and that was that.

So the crowd of mostly black people, tired, starving, disabled, elderly, children… dispersed and went their separate ways to seek shelter. The interviewee ended up with a mixed group of about 60 people, who found a perfect shelter on an empty overpass. They set up camp there and worked out shelters, pooled their food and water to ration amongst themselves, and set up sanitary makeshift outhouses. After all this was accomplished and they were peacefully waiting, another Gretna police officer, crazed beyond belief and waving a gun, ordered them to leave the overpass. Needless to say, he offered no helpful suggestions about where to go. Then a police helicopter that was hovering nearby suddenly dropped close to the overpass so that its wind would scatter all the shelters and personal effects, then lifted away.

The group ended up breaking into a bus and sleeping there with their heads out of sight so they wouldn’t get shot.

More stories like this will surface, and the inexcusable and utterly abhorrent racial attitudes of white southerners will finally be subjected to some much-needed scrutiny.

I grew up in Texas and I know these racist people, I know their knee-jerk reactions and their refusal to see blacks as anything but base animals. Yes, we can certainly blame these racist individuals for their dangerous and immoral behavior. But I also know that the local, state, and federal governments, under the spell of the religious right, the anti-”PC” whiners, the enemies of the welfare state, and yes, the bigots, are ultimately responsible for tacitly, if not blatantly, encouraging this behavior. You will hear a lot of arguments like this:
“It’s not racism, we were just trying to protect our town from the looters we heard about on the news.

“We’re not racists, we’re realists.

“We’re not racists, we just think that some people are given an advantage in this world that they don’t deserve.

“We’re not racists, we just couldn’t help all those people because we didn’t have enough to go around, and there would have been riots.

“We’re not racists, it was better for those people to stay where they were. They’re used to these kinds of conditions anyway.”

Well, it smells like racism to me, from the gun-waving deputy all the way up to the president of the United States. Perhaps now there will be some more steps forward, some more positive change. But it will be painful. It’s a tragedy that so many people had to die in order for us to see our country clearly for what it is. We are all at fault here. We need to change.

From the NYT editorial today: Georgia has passed new legislation mandating that voters present a government-issed photo ID (for most people, this means a state driver’s license), or they will not be allowed to vote. People who do not have driver’s licenses will have to purchase an ID card from the state for $20. In Georgia, people who don’t have driver’s licenses are disproportionately poor and black. This development should be setting off all our alarms - curtailment of basic rights in the name of “security”, disenfranchisement of blacks and the poor…so why am I just hearing about it today, from the New York Times?

Even though it’s the most disadvantaged people in Georgia who are being summarily cut out of the democratic process, the demographics hardly matter here; why should *anyone*, even that one eccentric white millionaire who doesn’t have a license because he has a driver, have to pay $20 for the “privilege” of voting?

Well, as the Supreme Court reminded us in Bush v. Gore, we don’t have a constitutional right to vote in this country:

Just months after the Alexander decision, a 5-4 Court majority in Bush v. Gore denied Florida citizens a right to ensure their votes were counted, saying “the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote [for presidential electors].”

Now, I’ll grudgingly give some benefit of the doubt to the folks who dreamed up this legislation - it’s possible that they just didn’t think it through. Is it a good idea to make sure that voters are who they say they are? Mmmm…sure, not a bad idea. But the fact of the matter is that there have been only one or two cases of this sort of voter fraud in Georgia, whereas absentee ballots are rife with problems. If this were an honest attempt to make voting work better, the law might address the absentee ballots, which it does not. Like the explicit gerrymandering of the Texas redistricting, this is a bald move to improve republican odds by removing a category of voters.