Segregation and its Excuses

 Desegregation is a simple, yet unbreakable tangle in our community and society today. It’s been so incredibly integral to our thought processes– mostly subconscious– that we don’t even realize how much we’ve internalized it. We can think, “That’s just the way things will be”, or “America is a land of free opportunity, so people being forced into bad schooling and less-than-optimal living situations aren’t actually being forced to do so - it’s what they chose to do. They chose to grow up in dangerous areas. They chose to not learn from the teacher who couldn’t teach well for the life of them. In reality, though, it’s so much harder to escape those types of living areas, and it’s all because of this tangle. We can say that we want to get rid of it all we want, and we can say that we don’t see color as a component of our decision not to let a majority-black school start attending ours. It’s just not true, though. Not at the subconscious level, anyway. After all, if people from the Normandy School District are volunteering to wake up at 5 A.M. and travel over 30 miles to get their education, is it really plausible to believe they just want to cause trouble? 

 

This podcast shined a new light on the issue of segregation. I’m glad I could get so much out of listening to it because it’s much more important to look at the scope of those being oppressed rather than those simply looking at the oppression from the outside.