Re: Don't tell me I'm dreaming
 

My problem wasn't the conversation but the way it was being done. My best lessons in race haven't come from being part of a "white group" talking about it but from communications with people of diverse races. Often contentious, challenging conversation. Maybe there will be some folks in that group who will trigger something more than the usual, or maybe they'll tape the white-people session to get deconstructed by the non-whites, but, boy, I suspect that particular group will be fairly clueless. Maybe that's the ultimate lesson for that group.

The idea that there is a conversation on race, that the school is focused on it, is good, but the way this particular conversation is being structured wouldn't be my own choice.

But then, I might have a good old-fashioned radical separatist type in just to spark conversation.

Re: Don't tell me I'm dreaming
 

Didn't the article make it clear that they split up into racial groups and then join up again as a full class to discuss what the groups addressed?

I don't think you should look at the group of white kids as only discussing the experiences of other races. Their experiences and feelings need attention as well. Hell, if you can figure out how to remove the anger and fear white people generate about other races before it starts, that would be great. And it seems to me people are typically more honest about discussing this stuff when they can be open without the fear of offending or being judged.

TM

Re: Don't tell me I'm dreaming
 

you complicate responding by equating the class to sex ed- as I type "wouldn't the type of parents that would get kids into this school make sure their kids (at least the black kids) know these lessons?" I realize you hear the same thought about sex ed, where it is bullshit, but somehow that seems different.

The country isn't post racist, but can't friendships be? And isn't that an important result of integrated schools (although rarer that one would hope)? So then we take two kids who might otherwise be completely unburdened friends and put them into rooms where they each hear about how hard it will be to truly be friends? I think growing up they could learn those same things from family and from living their lives.

I'm not saying anything different than I said before, and I don't feel educated enough about education to stand up against what educators feel is important. Just seems like it could complicate some kids growing forward.

Re: Don't tell me I'm dreaming
 

God no. I think most of the discussion would be to minimize the experiences of other races. "Can you believe X got into Y instead of Z? It was just because X was black."

Sure. But my experience dealing with their experience is that there is an extraordinary amount of really annoying whining that goes on. White people talking among themselves about race can be really uncomfortable and disturbing.

OK, I won't be snide here. This is really the key, and the reason to pay attention to the process described in the article. If these single-race discussions do anything to remove this anger and fear, sign me up, skeptical as I am. My real fear is, though, that racial biases ooze into kids at a very young age, and that when you put whites in a room together talking about race they'll more often than not reinforce the biases than work toward removing them. Will putting them in a room together afterwards with kids with different racial experiences fix some of the issue? Give them more self-awareness? I don't know. My temptation is to put them in a room together from the beginning.

Maybe, but if those honest feelings are a bunch of entitled whining, somebody, even a white somebody, should call them out on it.

Re: Dear Lord, I sincerely hope you're coming....
 

Re: Don't tell me I'm dreaming
 

I think this is very different than sex ed, which really should consist primarily of facts.

A good friendship between people of different races does not ignore the differences. Like I said, the lessons will be learned one way or another. And I'm not quite sure why you think the result of this school's approach will be burdened friendships. In fact, I'm kind of confused by your point. My best friend growing up was white. He was best man at both my weddings and we are still extremely close. He is (and we are) an anomaly in that we grew up in a very mixed race neighborhood and went to very mixed race schools. But you know who wasn't burdened in our relationship? Him. He learned many lessons and I taught him lots as well. But that was my burden. White people generally get to walk around enjoying total fucking freedom from the realities of racism. And I wasn't trying to constantly make him understand those issues. I bet he would have liked having a deeper understanding of some of that stuff earlier on.

Hard to respond to this. Like I said, the lessons will be learned at some point. Are you saying it would complicate things for kids because it's too early for them to learn those lessons? Are you saying that it would be nice if they never had to? Because that ain't very realistic unless you're white and you end up like most white people in this country, with zero black friends, living in a gated community, and driving past the "bad" neighborhoods.

TM

Re: Don't tell me I'm dreaming
 

I wasn't really thinking of it as just an outlet for the kids to bitch and moan. I thought the idea was to guide people through their feelings after listening to what they had to say. If the goal is growth, I would hope that the teachers were in a position to achieve it. If the program was just to separate the kids so that they learned to identify with each other based on their race's shared experience, I would absolutely disagree with instituting it.

I suppose we need to know more about the approach, but you seem to be removing the teaching aspect from it entirely. I picture an adult sitting with the kids and talking to them about this stuff when they're broken into groups and when they're all together.

TM

Re: Don't tell me I'm dreaming
 

It wasn't really clear what the group meetings were intended to do, but I didn't read them as being focused just on educated the white kids. It seemed like there was an aspect of reminding black kids that they will have issues that white kids won't. Certainly a lesson that needs to be learned, and the white kids hearing it in the combined meetings is likely positive. But it sounded to me like it might also have an aspect of cautioning (perhaps unintentionally) black kids the white kids perhaps can't really be there for them (again, I have no idea what actually goes on in the groups). Maybe for kids from mixed race neighborhoods this is less likely, but there are also students from heavily segregated neighborhoods who might be meeting their first white friends. It just is sad that there is this wedge put between the kids.

You seem to be reading the lessons as mostly educating white kids what their black friends will confront and how they can perhaps change their own behavior to reduce the challenges? I see that as less a concern if you are right.

Re: Don't tell me I'm dreaming
 

Now the article seems like it's just an advanced Rorschach test.

No. I'm not reading it that way. I was responding directly to what you had written.

I am fairly confident I would have benefited from a discussion of race in a classroom at any time before college.

TM

Re: Don't tell me I'm dreaming
 

probably so.

not the classrooms I grew up in, but in general perhaps true.

Re: Don't tell me I'm dreaming
 

I'm trying to remember if there we had any. I mean, there must have been some superficial mention of the civil rights movement in our pitiful history classes, but I don't remember much.

I remember out-of-class arguments with Matt Anderson* who had some "interesting" theories about coming racial conflict, but not really any classroom discussions about race and the differences people experience before college.

Although that's not exactly true. I think we had to write a persuasive paper for 9th grade English and I wrote in favor of affirmative action quotas. No idea where I got that from at the time. I guess we read and must have discussed Too Kill A Mockingbird too.

*If this weren't Minnesota, maybe I'd feel the need to change his real name.

Re: Don't tell me I'm dreaming
 

I had an interesting conversation with one of my kids on race over the weekend. His school was teaching him that one of the great things Lincoln did was push the "with malice toward none and charity toward all" stuff as the war wound down, and that the subsequent reconstruction period was mean-hearted.

I asked if the real tragedy might be the end of reconstruction, the failure to stand by blacks in the south, and the emergence of the Jim Crow south, and said that we should be careful about assuming what Lincoln did was best or that reconstruction was a mistake given how badly the next hundred years turned out in the post-reconstruction south. He was thinking about that.

I asked him to imagine a smart, hardworking kid like himself, who was just freed from slavery in Georgia in 1865, and what his life would be like over the next fifty years, and what would he, in that position, think about reconstruction.

We still have to pick up this conversation, it was just five minutes between other things going on, and I have to get more of his thoughts on it. His first take was to ask a bunch of questions about Jim Crow, which I thought was a great first take.

I know it's bad in America to suggest that Honest Abe may not have been right all the time, but, hey, slavery and slavers still kinda piss me off.

It just keeps comin'
 

http://jezebel.com/hooboy-rachel-dol...cr-1711460097#

TM

Re: Don't tell me I'm dreaming
 

This is not really what I meant. I meant along the lines of a dedicated effort to address racial issues in a way that attempts to give kids the tools to try to make sense of it going forward.

TM

Together they learn to read and write.
 

Yeah. Not for me.

Back to the NYMag article re the Fieldston program, I have a sibling very involved in education, and so I was urged to read it at the time. I forget the specifics, but I remember coming away after reading it thinking that it was a great idea.

And, apropos of nothing, I just love the name "School of Ethical Culture" - I plan to use it as the name of my next team in the punk rock* bowling league.

*And by "punk rock," I mean by Podunkville standards - you know, Nick Lowe & Elvis Costello circa 1977, etc. CBGB? Mudd Club? Bitch, please. I ain't got time for that now.