We are all recidivists. We love our bad habits and continually abandon resolutions to change. We choose to go back to what we declared we would never do again. Forces in our country, really just men and women, whose ancestors once owned slaves, ran factories using child labor for it was cheaper than adults, reveled in having more money than one family could use in a lifetime and exulted in the privilege of having schools that only their children and their close friends could attend – are still operating today. Men and women in this country still want women in the kitchen, on their backs in bed and in childbirth and to shut their mouths and say nothing while the paternalistic society they live in grinds down the poor, the unequal, the elderly and the children of the unwashed, foreign and inept.
I could go on, but you see where this is going. The 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas Supreme Court decision is upon us. Have there been changes? Yes there are some. While neighborhoods still remain mainly White on one side and Black on the other some jobs have been relinquished to Black hands. Some schools are integrated but the declared preference is to have a small number of Black kids “integrated” into the large population of GOOD KIDS. The use of this description is due to the fact that large numbers of Black kids in schools somehow makes the schools bad. The predisposition of people who want the best for their children is to avoid having THEIR kids go to schools where THEIR kids are in large numbers.
The people who were against PUBLIC SCHOOLS in the early years of the nineteenth century could afford to send their children to schools of their choice where selectivity was practiced. The argument FOR public schools was that it was cheaper to have large numbers of children educated in some efficient fashion and to promulgate and protect democracy at the same time. There was a time when the children of the richest family in town went to the same school as the town paupers. Recidivists remember this with shame.
“The Good Old Days” are remembered in different ways. I had a great time being a boy in Newark, NJ attending integrated schools. The doctor’s kid from down the street went to a private school. He dressed a whole lot better than I did and had manners. South Side High School (now Malcolm X Shabazz), had a chorus we all sang in. Funny, how voices sound either Black or White in our today’s society. Back then, Charlie, a member of our group, made a point of exaggerating his speech to avoid a Black sound. We kidded him a lot. His family removed him from school to attend a private school that accepted Black kids.
Recidivism has been around for a long time.