In 2010, the Biloxi Public School District in Mississippi voted to shut down Nichols Elementary School, due to "budget concerns." The board, which is overwhelmingly white, cited a 400,000$ loss each year for the district as the reason, despite that fact that it later turned out to have a 10$ million surplus. Even when the Kellogg Foundation stepped in with a 1.5$ million grant, the board said their decision was final. The school was closed.
Nichols was the top performing elementary school in Biloxi that year; it ranked 16th out of 432 public elementary schools in the state; it was the only school in Biloxi to earn the state's GreatSchools designation, and produced the state's 2009 Teacher of the Year. The school has been around since 1886, and the student population was 90% black (surprise!). (Note: you can find this story, and others like it in Chuck Thompson's Better Off Without 'Em)
Racism doesn't ride a horse, with a sheet drapped over its head, and a noose swinging from its hands in the 21st Century. It comes in the form of local school boards citing fictitious budget concerns so they can close the black school that was outperforming the white schools. Abstract things, like Mr. Lee Atwater once counseled the Republican party to focus on. Here's that quote, and make sure to remember it:
" You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
So remember this- when you hear a politician say, "cut, cut, cut", you know what he really means.
No comments:
Post a Comment