Tea Party Dream: The Re-segregation of American Public Education

October 2, 2010

If there is any illusion on the regressive direction that Tea Party elected officials will attempt to move mainstream racial amalgamation, one needs only read the disquieting comments of Rev. William J. Barber II, head of the North Carolina State NAACP chapter on the white racists’ move to re-segregate public schools in the Raleigh area.

Fox News reports, “The NAACP's Barber admits busing supporters were caught napping last fall. But with five seats — including Margiotta's — up for grabs next year, they are determined to keep up the heat to counter what ‘the anti-diversity, right-wing, tea party-sympathizing, resegregationist caucus is doing in Wake County.’”

The Ku Klux Klan understands that quality education is the key to upward mobility in America’s economic mainstream. They honor the teaching of a fellow southern, President Thomas Jefferson, when it comes to valuing the academic talents that nature provides for each person.

Thomas Jefferson: Elementary School Act, 1817 offered, “[We proposed a plan] to avail the commonwealth of those talents and virtues which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as rich, and which are lost to their country by the want of means for their cultivation.” The KKK knows if blacks do not harness their academic potential instead opting to be enchanted with ignorance then these gifts will simply fade away.    

Yesteryear’s racist white teachers knew that students will respond very negatively to learning if they are overtly and covertly ignored and made unwelcomed in classroom learning activities. Furthermore, intra-school segregation, where whites are placed in academic and gifted programs and blacks placed in general and special education programs, guarantee that African Americans would not be competitive in the economic mainstream.

The Ku Klux Klan won a major strategic victory by duping the national press into focusing heavily with covering the Old Confederacy National Guards and the Federal Marshalls escorting black children into racially segregated white schools. The attention was placed on getting black children into the public school buildings that we will define as desegregation. However, the white teachers had to decide whether or not to teach black children on par with white children.  Public school integration occurs in the mind of the teacher, so without black teachers in the educational mix then black children became fodder to be victimized by the pervasive southern white racists’ wrath when the news cameras disappeared.

The white citizen councils were very effective at purging black teachers out of southern education and putting fear into the hearts of black people who managed to find new jobs. The USA Today reports, “In 1954, about 82,000 black teachers were responsible for teaching 2 million black children. In the 11 years immediately following Brown, more than 38,000 black teachers and administrators in 17 Southern and border states lost their jobs.”

The white citizen councils amended the anti-integration strategic objective to focus on showing that public school integration was a failure that underpinned subpar Black American academic performance when compared with White America. They were astute enough to vilify the concept of integration without constantly ballyhooing their abhorrence of the interracial boogeyman, worrying about interracial grandchildren and their children sleeping with their perception of sub-humans, into the public debates. 

The white citizen councils exploited what President George W. Bush called, “The soft bigotry of low expectation” against African American students. President Bush tried to counter this anti-integrationist mindset with his “No Child Left Behind” initiative to hold public school teachers accountable for all students’ progress.  

Teachers College Record allows us to understand the white teachers’ mindset on seeing racism in the classroom. “Research findings indicate that most white teachers operated from an impaired consciousness about racism; that a majority ‘blamed the victim,’ assigning causality for racism to Blacks. Findings further indicate that of those who witnessed racist behavior by their white colleagues, the majority remained silent and did not challenge such behavior. . .”

The white citizen councils’ success at upending racial integration in public education can be seen in the percent of blacks graduating High School College ready.  The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research reports on the distressing high school graduation rates and college readiness of African Americans and Hispanics. “. . . only 51% of all black students and 52% of all Hispanic students graduate, and only 20% of all black students and 16% of all Hispanic students graduate college ready. While the overall graduation rate of 70% for the graduating class of 2001. . .”

This roughly 50 percent African American high school dropout rate suggests that these people have a high potential of becoming wards of the state or federal government because incarceration is in their future. It is very disquieting to recognize that Blacks are 13 percent of the US population yet they are 40 percent of the people in prison or jail. This high incarceration rate suggests that socioeconomic genocide is underway in Black America. It is wreaking havoc on the black family structure allowing for terms like “baby daddy” to gain notoriety as one man may father children with multiple women with no intention of marrying any of them.      

The Achilles Heal in the anti-integration public school strategy is the KKK premised their dream on continued Aryan autocracy without regard that the nation is turning rapidly nonwhite. These white racists will not get their yesteryear’s racist country back because they are now facing a comparable fate to the Native Americans who lost their country to the waves of White Americans that confiscated their lands.

The money changers and big farmers who have morphed illegal immigrant labor into modern day slavery are the real nightmare for KKK (Tea Party Movement) because their greed did not have a plan to return their slaves back to the nations of their birth once the artificial market conditions collapsed. The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution is a white citizen councils’ worst nightmare because nonwhite illegal immigrants proliferate very rapidly with their offspring born in the United States granted automatic citizenship by virtue of being born here.

Thus white rightwing political candidates will pay lip-service to changing the wording of the Fourteenth Amendment away from, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”  

President Barack Obama understands that the difference in public school integration and desegregation is in the minds of the teachers and administrators. He is funding a “Race to the Top” initiative with four billion dollars that shows he has moved beyond just paying lip service to the nation’s education crisis to gaining a buy-in from the local stakeholders to indentify the best practices. The President realizes that America can not afford to have over twenty-five percent of its human resource potential going to waste when we live in a century where quality education underpins the nation’s competitiveness and military might.  

As one who specializes in teaching mathematics to college students coming from inner city and hood backgrounds, I feel the key to harnessing these students’ talent is they must understand that you care and the other things fall in line. I also believe there are fundamental teaching principles that transcend race and class that I have used at both predominately black and white institutions of higher learning. Hence, it would be a real tragedy for a nation of immigrants to allow the Ku Klux Klan (Tea Party Movement) to exploit the dream of a yesteryear racist hope of a few white racists to hamstring today’s diverse America.