Now identity politics substitutes for scholarship in my field. We live in a culture that emphasizes grievance and retribution; it reveres hoodlums called “rappers” and blames teachers for getting beat up by teenagers. It’s not a matter of black or white. It’s a matter of a culture that promotes displays of power and uses the force of law to alleviate white guilt on the backs of working class children.
While black and white families may not have broken bread together routinely in their homes in the 1960s, they did live peacefully side by side in the neighborhoods around Clinton and Joseph Avenues. Were my and other parents prejudiced? Yes, they applied their ideas about gypsies to blacks, with my mother using the old story about gypsies kidnapping small children to keep me at home while she shopped at the second-hand stores. But my mother also spoke bitterly of the Italian foreladies who favored their own kind by passing on the easier, more lucrative bundles of suit parts to sew together in the piecework done at Bond’s Clothing Factory.
I disagree with Spelman College President Beverly Daniel Tatum’s assertion in the Atlanta paper recently that “the likelihood of having either a multiracial social network of acquaintances or at least one close interracial friendship is linked to the experience of attending racially mixed schools,” I had no such “interracial friendship.” But my Ukrainian best friend moved to the suburb of Irondequoit to go to a safer school. The lunchroom at my high school was markedly segregated. School buses and lunchrooms are still self-segregated.
The social engineers profited, however. They made careers with their theories of forced racial integration and new curriculums based on abstract notions of “diversity.” My excuse for a social studies teacher went on to become a prominent union leader for teachers.
And Beverly Daniel Tatum is making the rounds of a publicity tour for her new book, “Can We Talk About Race? And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation.”