As we received news of the Supreme Court’s decision in school integration cases, there was something about the term ’color blind’ that tickled my memory. I have always associated the word with people who were trying to convince me they were not racist even though they committed discriminatory acts daily.
And then I knew what the Supreme Court justices reminded me of…..
When someone resists and resists and then is forced to give in, they sometimes overcomply to the point that they subvert the original intent. I remember a boy who hid my gun and I kept after him to give it back. He finally led me to the sand box, dug up the toy pistol, and hit me in the jaw with the butt of it, saying, “Here, take it then!”
That was OK with me even though I cried because I got my gun back, yet my intent had been to play guns with him. But that sense of, “I’ll show you. I’ll be so compliant I’ll screw up everything for you,” echoed in my head. The Supreme Court justices, at least certain ones, tired of being reminded over and over again of the vicious and terrorist acts that rendered Blacks powerless in the society, and threatened by the new roles Blacks are taking in the society, lashed out and said, “Oh, you want us not to notice you’re Black? OK, then, let’s just forget about almost 400 years of discrimination against African-Americans and we’ll act like we’re all the same, if that’s what you want.”
Such is the childishness of those who have been chosen to lead us in justice. Now the schools will have to expend even more effort if we don’t want them to revert to monolithic institutions reflecting not the whole society but only the level of power of the students’ parents. As Condoleezza Rice’s father preached, it’s not the collective effort but the individual effort that counts. So each Black person will have to fight bigotry by himself, on his own.
How do we delineate the outrages against each individual? My wife’s nephew was running a fever as a baby while they were on a trip. My wife and her sister carried the baby into a clinic and the nurses rushed up to them, to take the baby, they thought. No. It was to order them around the back to wait until all the White people had been waited on. About 28 years later that boy was shot to death by the police because he kept trying to start his car instead of complying with their orders. Did he not comply because he was evil, as the religious people would have us believe, because he used drugs, or because that fever did something to his brain that made learning and responding difficult for him? No way to tell. No way.
So let’s see what happens to our schools now. No child left behind, remember?