In San Francisco we have a number of very good public high schools, in which the majority of the students are Asian. Whites still won't send their kids to these high performing schools and instead send them to private schools or move to majority white suburbs.
In San Francisco we have a number of very good public high schools, in which the majority of the students are Asian. Whites still won't send their kids to these high performing schools and instead send them to private schools or move to majority white suburbs.
I understand but it is another example of how white people don't seem to be driven by a desire to improve their children's education but more by a desire to self-segregate.
I live in the edge of where the suburbs meet rural area in the South. In a mixed race and mixed wealth set of neighborhoods. I have neighbors on food assistance and two streets over are houses I can't afford. Our school, which kids from both portions of the neighborhood (older, less expensive and new expensive) attend is still Title 1 with free breakfast and lunch for all students.
I have no doubt white flight is real. I take exception to broad generalizations about white people and self segregation being the *main* motivator for all white people's educational choices for their kids. White rich people, maybe, and ignorant white poor people. But those are relatively small segments of the white population.
When I say "white people" I do not intend to mean *all* white people, sorry if I gave that impression.
It does not matter what ones motivation for behaving in a matter that discriminates against other races and advantages your own. The fact that you do so is enough to make the action "racist" at least by my definition of the term. I know this definition is contentious. I don't think most white people are motivated by racial animus, not at all. But by their actions they are discriminatory and that's what matters.
This is interesting. I would have agreed in years past. In fact, part of the reason I left church was the (white) pastor's family worked the system so their kids wouldn't go to "that school"--our school, as it turns out.
More and more I've come to believe class is the motivator, which of course has significant overlap with race. People who desire upward mobility will by definition enter a class of people that because of historic reasons and demographic realities will be mostly white.
What I have come to loathe is that desire for more. I see big beautiful homes that remind me of some of my friends homes when I was a teen. But I also hate them because what they represent is a deep covetousness. In fact one of those high school friends and his family moved from a nice spacious middle class house to an even bigger and nicer house. When I asked why his parents decided to move, he replied, "greed."
If Black people wish to attain that same upward mobility agent wouldn't they? *we are all goddamned social primates with the exact same base impulses--then they should go for it. I certainly don't want to see Black and brown people confined to a wretched life of squalor.
I can't help but think that a major driving force behind slow upward mobility is something that is a personal problem for me: lack of ambition. For people mired in generations of poverty and truly, overtly systemic racism, I can understand why ambition wouldn't be on the list of top five life necessities.
How do we get people to believe it's possible to succeed? How do we impart the emotional energy required to overcome that first, most debilitating speed bump: that nobody who has come before you has succeeded?
There are more and more people of color for whom success seems like a possibility now. I'm not sure how much more castigating of the great white evil will move the needle .
Even if it was inadvertant, I love the phrasing of an "upward mobility agent" -- like a quiet crusader who steps in to materially help families clamber up to a level where they're living their lives rather than struggling to get by. Obviously these agents already exist in many forms and are in the trenches striving for real cooperative assistance on the ground, not just spouting jargon about centering their clients' lived experiences. Hopefully some in the jargon-spouting group can be recruited into doing more useful tasks going forward (rather than just disappearing when the novelty wears off and the new fad cause arrives).
This comment is hilarious on an article that presupposes the entire country is just like NYC when the reality is the vast majority of America is suburban or exurban sprawl where the only private schools are your run-of-the-mill parochial schools. The amount of coverage IтАЩve seen - between FlanniganтАЩs piece in the Atlantic, Bari WeissтАЩs coverage, and the new NYT piece - on the cynical woke theater of a tiny number of extremely elite schools is completely disproportionate to how much it reflects the reality of most children/familiesтАЩ experiences. I have the same wave of irritation I had 5-6 years ago when the coverage of тАЬwomenтАЩs challenges in the workplaceтАЭ was exclusively limited to women with degrees from Ivy leagues who worked as executives in Manhattan.
I completely agree, and I definitely think race is part of that story. My comment was regarding not everywhere being like the Bay Area. True, but not everywhere is like NYC either. We are having a conversation about a very niche class demographic so a comment about elite San Franciscans, a different but comparable demographic, is not out of place or irrelevant.
A lot of times these white people don't want to send their kids to the mostly asian schools because the pressure there is so intensely high. It's just a different value set. The value set of striving Chinese immigrants is very different from upper middle class white Americans most of these people don't want to subject their kids to that brutal competition. It doesn't have to be racism.
My oldest begged me to not send her to Lowell (an elite public school that requires high test scores to get into) and went to the public arts school instead. She was afraid of the academic pressure she would be under at Lowell and the pressure from her Tiger Mom to do well there.
In San Francisco we have a number of very good public high schools, in which the majority of the students are Asian. Whites still won't send their kids to these high performing schools and instead send them to private schools or move to majority white suburbs.
OK. And I realize this can be sometimes be hard for people in the Bay Area, but imagine for a moment that not everywhere in America is the Bay Area.
I understand but it is another example of how white people don't seem to be driven by a desire to improve their children's education but more by a desire to self-segregate.
I live in the edge of where the suburbs meet rural area in the South. In a mixed race and mixed wealth set of neighborhoods. I have neighbors on food assistance and two streets over are houses I can't afford. Our school, which kids from both portions of the neighborhood (older, less expensive and new expensive) attend is still Title 1 with free breakfast and lunch for all students.
I have no doubt white flight is real. I take exception to broad generalizations about white people and self segregation being the *main* motivator for all white people's educational choices for their kids. White rich people, maybe, and ignorant white poor people. But those are relatively small segments of the white population.
When I say "white people" I do not intend to mean *all* white people, sorry if I gave that impression.
It does not matter what ones motivation for behaving in a matter that discriminates against other races and advantages your own. The fact that you do so is enough to make the action "racist" at least by my definition of the term. I know this definition is contentious. I don't think most white people are motivated by racial animus, not at all. But by their actions they are discriminatory and that's what matters.
This is interesting. I would have agreed in years past. In fact, part of the reason I left church was the (white) pastor's family worked the system so their kids wouldn't go to "that school"--our school, as it turns out.
More and more I've come to believe class is the motivator, which of course has significant overlap with race. People who desire upward mobility will by definition enter a class of people that because of historic reasons and demographic realities will be mostly white.
What I have come to loathe is that desire for more. I see big beautiful homes that remind me of some of my friends homes when I was a teen. But I also hate them because what they represent is a deep covetousness. In fact one of those high school friends and his family moved from a nice spacious middle class house to an even bigger and nicer house. When I asked why his parents decided to move, he replied, "greed."
If Black people wish to attain that same upward mobility agent wouldn't they? *we are all goddamned social primates with the exact same base impulses--then they should go for it. I certainly don't want to see Black and brown people confined to a wretched life of squalor.
I can't help but think that a major driving force behind slow upward mobility is something that is a personal problem for me: lack of ambition. For people mired in generations of poverty and truly, overtly systemic racism, I can understand why ambition wouldn't be on the list of top five life necessities.
How do we get people to believe it's possible to succeed? How do we impart the emotional energy required to overcome that first, most debilitating speed bump: that nobody who has come before you has succeeded?
There are more and more people of color for whom success seems like a possibility now. I'm not sure how much more castigating of the great white evil will move the needle .
That should say --and why wouldn't they? Damn keyboard.
Even if it was inadvertant, I love the phrasing of an "upward mobility agent" -- like a quiet crusader who steps in to materially help families clamber up to a level where they're living their lives rather than struggling to get by. Obviously these agents already exist in many forms and are in the trenches striving for real cooperative assistance on the ground, not just spouting jargon about centering their clients' lived experiences. Hopefully some in the jargon-spouting group can be recruited into doing more useful tasks going forward (rather than just disappearing when the novelty wears off and the new fad cause arrives).
Right?! Upward mobility agent might be a better industry than diversity and inclusion.
How to do it:
1) value ambition
2) have parents / community that believes in you
3) start with small goals and achieve them. Build.
Like other people don't self-segregate, too. This is a human characteristic. Why is it bad, in your opinion?
This comment is hilarious on an article that presupposes the entire country is just like NYC when the reality is the vast majority of America is suburban or exurban sprawl where the only private schools are your run-of-the-mill parochial schools. The amount of coverage IтАЩve seen - between FlanniganтАЩs piece in the Atlantic, Bari WeissтАЩs coverage, and the new NYT piece - on the cynical woke theater of a tiny number of extremely elite schools is completely disproportionate to how much it reflects the reality of most children/familiesтАЩ experiences. I have the same wave of irritation I had 5-6 years ago when the coverage of тАЬwomenтАЩs challenges in the workplaceтАЭ was exclusively limited to women with degrees from Ivy leagues who worked as executives in Manhattan.
Most suburbanites are there precisely because it is full of people who are very much like them, including class, race and prejudice.
I completely agree, and I definitely think race is part of that story. My comment was regarding not everywhere being like the Bay Area. True, but not everywhere is like NYC either. We are having a conversation about a very niche class demographic so a comment about elite San Franciscans, a different but comparable demographic, is not out of place or irrelevant.
A lot of times these white people don't want to send their kids to the mostly asian schools because the pressure there is so intensely high. It's just a different value set. The value set of striving Chinese immigrants is very different from upper middle class white Americans most of these people don't want to subject their kids to that brutal competition. It doesn't have to be racism.
My oldest begged me to not send her to Lowell (an elite public school that requires high test scores to get into) and went to the public arts school instead. She was afraid of the academic pressure she would be under at Lowell and the pressure from her Tiger Mom to do well there.