Universities Record Drop In Black Admissions

mini
Fri, 03 Dec 2004 17:02:20 +0000

What most elite college admissions represent today as far as I am concerned is Affirmative Action for white five-percenters.

Sybbie - I grew up in NYC in the first days after Brown v. Board - this is what I remember:

There was a magical day. It probably was in my third month in the first grade, at P.S. 131 3/4 in New York City. It was the day we were, for the first time, given our “readers”. The teacher was very excited, and it rubbed off on us.

But first things first: before the books were given out, we were divided into Bluebirds and Robins. I, praised be, was a BLUEBIRD! The selection was, apparently, not in the least bit random; we weren’t asked where we’d like to go, and no one seemed to think it was important to inform us how the selection was being made. It was impossible not to observe that the few Black kids, who were bussed in from another neighborhood (this being the early days of school integration), were transformed into Robins; most of the Jewish kids Bluebirds. It was the beginning of the “great sort”. In the years that followed, it would be impossible for me not to perceive, even though the perception would quickly become dulled, that in my “integrated” schools, for the next eight years I would never encounter a single Robin, some of whom had been my friends, in any of my classes ever again. Some hidden hand was at work. It could have been malignant, or it could have been benign, but it was definitely thought to be beyond my comprehension, or at least not worth explaining to me. We picked up on it instantly: the Bluebird books had real words in them; the Robins’ only pictures. For the next decade or so the social message conveyed to me, when I bothered to think of it, was crystal clear: all African-Americans are Robins; so are the dumb kids. It didn’t take much to form the expected syllogism, and no one would have considered disabusing us of the idea. (Dumb is a good word: Robins themselves were silent as to their predetermined fate. So was I.) Actually, however, forever surrounded entirely by Bluebirds, I was now safeguarded from having to think about it at all. Once a Bluebird, always a Bluebird; once a Robin, well, you get the picture.

My Bluebird book was Fun with Dick and Jane. Easy enough for me – I already knew how to read, which afforded me the luxury of actually thinking about the book itself, though I am sure that at the time my questions were only half-formed. (That they really didn’t need to be teaching me to read, and that they would all take extensive credit for having done so, was one of the great deceptions that only later I realized surrounded much of my so-called education.) Where was Dick and Jane’s house? It didn’t look anything like the dwellings in my neighborhood, and certainly unlike my row of attached houses, mine in the middle, which meant long walks around the block with the push mower before I could cut the grass on our little 12’ by 15’ patch. (Who mowed the lawn in the Dick and Jane family?) Did Sally go to preschool? What did Dick do for a living? Why didn’t anyone have a last name? What kind of dog was Spot? Did they have any difficulty with Jane being allergic? My mom was very allergic to dogs and cats, which disappointed my father, who yearned without ceasing for a canine. And why did everyone speak in only two- or three-word sentences? Was this how it was in their town?

Actually, if given the opportunity and had I learned how to ask, I would have wanted to know how Dick and Jane and Sally and Spot got to be in my Bluebird book in the first place, and why someone thought it was important that they be there. Where did all those blonde people come from? (We only had one in my class, Susie Feldman, with corn-silk pigtails, and I had a crush on her. Thank Heavens she was a Bluebird!) Who put these books together, and how did they get made? (Many of these questions lingered in my head for the next two decades until I became a book publisher.)

There was an entire culture of silence that settled in around my reading experience. My ability to read, to demonstrate repeatedly that I had mastered the skill, was raised almost to the status of religion, or at least to magic. There was silence as to method (for me, the method was irrelevant in any case, as I had already acquired the tool independent of it.) There was silence as to intent – why did they care whether I could read? There was silence surrounding the social organization of learning to read (the Bluebirds and Robins) and the larger dimensions suggested by this form of social organization.

My ‘learning to read’, and the social construction of the experience fit inside a larger social construction: school itself. I attended them for a very long time, but oddly enough, I learned very little about them, other than what happened at my little desk and those few others I could see. This was true for me at 6, and it was true for me at 16, and I was an honor student! I didn’t know who the teachers were, really, how they were chosen, who paid them, or how much they earned. I didn’t know where they learned what it was they were teaching (and certainly there was no opportunity for me to evaluate whether it was correct.) I didn’t know who chose the textbooks or the curricula, why they chose it, or how they were obtained. I didn’t know why subjects followed in what sometimes seemed like illogical order (is it is really ‘biology, chemistry, and physics’ because that’s how they fall alphabetically?) I didn’t know who built the school, who owned the school, or why it was shaped the way it was? I didn’t even really know exactly why I was there (I figured out very early I could learn all the stuff in much less time if and when I wanted to, so why did I have to be here?) I hadn’t a clue as to where the little tables and chairs came from (I never saw them in my friends’ homes or the local furniture store). I didn’t know where the few Black kids who attended my school lived, and they were gone from my consciousness so quickly I would never have thought to ask. It was not that I was incapable of understanding; it was rather more like I was forbidden to know.

In other words, I learned nothing about power, agency, or history. The cult of content (not that there really was very much of it) ensured that we would have no opportunity to discover our own identity, or to validate our experience. I received my doses absolutely, dutifully, and on schedule, and moved on.

In the third, fourth, and fifth grades, and it didn’t matter if we were Bluebirds or Robins, we ‘learned’, about the Holy Trinity – Eskimos, Dead (white) Egyptians, and South and Central American Indians – thus ensuring that we would never have anything of first- or secondhand experience to contribute to the conversation, or to make use of in helping us make sense of who we were ourselves. I have come to think of it as the educational equivalent of clearcutting. I learned quickly not to ask questions that went beyond proving what a good little Bluebird I had become. The line between education and concealment was very thin indeed. In this way we learned not to acknowledge each other’s presence, and to be passive consumers of whatever was dished out, and to act accordingly, isolated, independent, unattached, domesticated, waiting for our next knowledge fix. I was an A student.

Bluebirds were just as much objects of education as Robins, rather than subjects. We too learned that there was a single norm of thought and experience, and in some ways, it was equally not ours. The culture of silence enveloped us all, really a form of fatalism if we were able to think about it, though not thinking was well enforced, as the curtain of questions rained down upon us like arrows from the front of the room, deflecting any that might move in the opposite direction. I now, after 54 years of living upon this earth, recognize that so much of what was deposited in me was counterfeit currency. It is not surprising that when banks are filled with counterfeit currency, more often than not they go bankrupt.

If dialogue about race in our nation seems attenuated, we certainly don’t have far to look to find out why.