I watched a segment on Last Week Tonight that covered school segregation. John Oliver opened by pointing out the fact that while pretty much everybody in the world has come to expect racism out of the states with populations that still commonly use the Confederate flag as a masturbation aid it’s actually worst in ostensibly more progressive states because laws were created to skirt around racist housing policies. The “not my problem” zone tends to take effect and people assume that’s not an issue where they are if they even think about it at all. Realizing that I have to wonder just how bad the problem might actually be in Canada.
Bus a handful of black kids to a decent school because if there’s one within a reasonable distance of where they live it’s guaranteed to be understaffed, underfunded, lacking materials, and having gone to the school at all will basically be considered a negative on a job application and everybody at the conspicuously mostly white school loses their goddamned minds. Some parents begin hysterically raving that every one of those students is a convicted murderer or something and that it takes seats away from more “deserving” children who have a future - casually admitting that keeping those black kids stuck where they are means they will not have one and this by design keeps their neighbourhoods poor and hopeless - who incidentally are never thought to have lost a seat to the hundreds of white students but only the dozen or so non-white. Sometimes those parents move away entirely because for about six hours a day black people are in the same city as their children before getting right back on their buses for an hours-long commute home.
There are the less frequent occasions where a handful of white kids take a bus into a black majority school but when they do happen suddenly so much money gets thrown at it that most of their problems just vanish overnight getting textbooks, teachers, and improvements to the facilities rushed in before those white kids even set foot on the property. This ever so coincidentally gives the kids who just arrived the impression that the people living in black neighbourhoods desperate for a shot at a real education in another school were complaining so much about basically alright schools generating antipathy and suspicion towards all previous claims of deprivation. A pretty stark flip on the talk of the monetary costs of the practice. It’s a “waste” to spend money on an extended bus trip for so few black students but if a few white students go into a black neighbourhood little thought is spared to practically building a new school just for them.
Some people complain about the commute, some even compare it to apartheid practices meant to psychologically isolate and put emotional strain on black families by keeping working parents virtual strangers from their spouses and children since the additional travel time means they only see each other for the briefest amount of time and are generally physically exhausted as well as mentally drained by that time numbing their bonds and bringing their stresses into sharp focus breaking down their will and making unity difficult even at a familial level to discourage anyone from having any investment in anything beyond themselves and making them more likely to just keep their heads down and take what comes. And with all that in mind it’s arguably even worse for kids in their formative years. I get that. But until we fix the underlying issue that people are looking at their neighbours and countrymen and somehow seeing the “other” whose successes in life are perceived not as an addition to their community and a payoff of the investment into their future via education and employment opportunities but as something separate or even a theft there has to be something to give kids half a hope of anything in life that isn’t just thinly disguised predation turning a profit off them and leaving them with nothing to show for their efforts like many athletic scholarships turn out to be and still keeping them walled off from the rest of the community either physically or by reinforcing the perception that they are the “other” to be kept at arm’s length. Physical and social exposure with their peers and after-school interactions around the neighbourhood so that they may gradually be seen as a part of the community the residents expect to see every day whose names there is a point to learning and not something that came in from the outside, has infested it, or that subtly sinister phrase “doesn’t belong there” are as essential as the improved facilities and increased perception of respectability that comes with the names of some schools. They need to see those students as part of their own future just as much as every other child on the block.