That beginning part of The White Boy Shuffle really stuck out to me. The Santa Monica multicultural elementary school Gunnar went to was wack and I noticed really weird parallels to my own elementary school experience that I know were not 'ok.
From 3rd to 5th grade I went to Booker T. Washington Elementary School here in Campaign. It's in the middle of a lower-class, mostly African American neighborhood, so when a few years prior to my transferring, when they decided to totally renovate the school and add in a 'Gifted Program', it was a somewhat big deal. My grade and the grades above me each had only 2 classes (so we just had an extra classroom) for whatever reason, and all the grades below mine had 3 classes of students. My class had 15 students, which was relatively small.
My 'Gifted' class of 15 consisted of mostly Asian and white kids. I was the token latino, and there was one African American girl. The other class consisted of 23 African American kids and one white girl. Its suffice to say, we had problems.
There was a weird mix of "you shouldn't see color", "embrace all cultures", "the other class is weird", and "speak properly goddamn it" between us, and the mostly white teachers. In the book the teacher asks "what shouldn't we judge people by? what should we judge them by instead?" and blah blah. We had somewhat of the same thing, between each other we practiced this no-difference shit because in our eyes we were all 'gifted'- our supposed 'smartness' made us all great friends with each other. On multicultural night we would all dress in our 'traditional' garb and eat each other's specially cooked foods. Yeah, multiculturalism worked so well within my class. We shamed the other class for not being as 'smart' as us. We all had long commute times because most of us lived west of Prospect.
How did this make the 'normal' class feel? not good. It must've felt horrible watching a bunch of kids that aren't anywhere near the color of your skin calling themselves 'gifted' and 'smart', living in comparatively much more wealth. Something that kind of makes me uneasy was a saying among the teachers- "ain't ain't a world and you ain't gonna use it". They paid special attention to the students in these 'normal' classes to speak 'proper' English, almost as if they were destroying the black vernacular.
All of this gifted/normal multicultural stuff really screwed with both classes minds to the point where we actively hated each other in 5th grade. My class was bonded through its 'giftedness' and the other class bonded through the fact it was 'normal', it was almost like they were being forced to believe that they were never going to get as far as those kids in my class, because they weren't gifted.
We can definitely see this when Gunnar moves to the 'hood' and his new school. I saw the Shakespeare thing and I instantly knew- I would have been one of those kids in the Shakespearean Garb, pitying the others. Its not something I'm proud of- I and my dumbass friends said many things that may have really instilled a sense of inferiority into the other class.
Gifted is a strong word. I don't use it anymore. I don't claim to be 'gifted', and I hope others stop using it as well. All children have gifts- you just have to let them explore these gifts. Sorting them out into 2 different classrooms and telling one class that they're 'better' than the other solves nothing.
In my elementary school, I was also put into the "talented and gifted" program where I was the only kid who wasn't white. While you got a "multicultural" education, my school literally just ignored the fact that there were kids that were different. It really sucks what happened at your school and you're right, these "gifted" programs solve nothing.
ReplyDeleteWhile I didn't go to of elementary and most of middle school in Illinois, I have similar experiences. My New Jersey elementary school was fairly diverse, but this did not change the racial makeup of the classes. This became even more evident in middle school when we were broken up into multiple levels of math. In 7th grade you could be in math 7, pre-algebra, algebra, or the revered algebra 2. The racial makeup of each of these sections was absolutely biased, and I'm sure the fact that the difficulty in advancing to a higher level once you were in a math class made this worse. The problem with an honors program is that it reinforces stereotypes, preventing certain students form exploring their interests because nobody else of their race in algebra 2.
ReplyDeleteI can't entirely relate to your experiences, but I definitely experienced the multiculturalism aspect on my school in Saint Joseph. Despite my school being 98% white (a real statistic), we had "multiculturalism" where we would "appreciate" other cultures by watching videos and stuff. Also, the people who weren't white were treated in the counter-intuitive "color-blind" way where the teachers would never acknowledge their skin color.
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