Exploring School Segregation

Through The Lens of Hope in the Unseen, by Ron Suskind

Where did I come from? Prior to the twelfth century, the first person singular pronoun was actually written in English as ic, and in the mid-1100s it was shortened to ‘i’. It wasn’t until the thirteenth century that the word ’i’ became capitalized using the Roman numeral ‘I’ for practical purposes, simply in order to help people avoid misreading it as a part of neighboring words, as all manuscripts were handwritten at the time. We’ve carried on this tradition of using the upper case ‘I’ when referring to ourselves, which carries obvious metaphorical implications regarding the importance of our singular identities. So, that’s where ‘I’ came from.

Hope in the Unseen, by journalist Ron Suskind, is a nonfiction fairy tale about identity, not terribly dissimilar from The Ugly Duckling. Those familiar with Hans Christian Andersen’s story likely have its most famous sentence firmly planted in their heads: “And the ugly duckling grew into a beautiful swan.” This led all of the ugly duckling’s siblings and friends, who had spent their entire childhoods judging and bullying the protagonist, to finally adore and accept him. But, how exactly did a duck grow into a swan? Why did this animal have the ability to morph into a completely different creature? Additionally, the unfortunate lesson bestowed upon children from this fable seems to be: ‘You never know how physically attractive an ugly person might eventually become, so it’s best to be nice to them now, just in case you want them to like you later.’ How about we teach children to just love everyone from the start, whether that being is an ugly mutating transformer bird or not? Or is there perhaps an even more edifying message we can pry from this primitive parable of appraisal?

Suskind’s novel, his first, attempts to kill two birds with one stone, as a story of both pride and prejudice is presented through the eyes of a gifted Black student. How did Cedric Jenkins, Suskind’s protagonist, launch himself from the barren bog of Southeast Washington D.C. and crash land onto the cushy quads of Brown University? As the story would have us believe, it was a combination of faith and effort that catapulted young Cedric from an environment that was impossibly dark to one that was prohibitively bright. However, this intensely American tale is not about what we do, but instead is about who we are. Or rather, it is about who we think we are. Although the story’s hero is presented as possessing a wide variety of relatable characteristics, the crux of his ascension seems to be rooted in fortune.

Cedric’s challenge is not one of achievement, but instead one of understanding and acceptance. To quote contemporary poet Earl Sweatshirt, Cedric often found himself to be “too Black for the White kids, and too White for the Black kids.” Are any of us who we think we are, or are we simply who society says we are? Do we need to foster an understanding of who we are in order to know others? What permits this growth? What stifles it? These are questions that readers of Hope in the Unseen may be led to wonder, and yet Suskind struggles to guide us towards an answer, other than that perhaps it is not our place to ask such questions. According to him, the answers lie with God, so what’s the point of wondering?

Since we are beings provided with the survival tool of qualitative comparison, the question of “Who am I” is inevitably matched with its external counterpart, “Wait, who are you?” Though the perspective of the story is that of an urban Black teenager, it is Suskind, a White middle-aged journalist from Delaware, who acts as his mouthpiece, conveying impossibly intimate thoughts and experiences as evidence, gospel and fact. This is a complicated trick for Suskind to pull off, similar to Andersen’s attempt at teaching tolerance through the lens of his magically morphing mallard. How did Cedric transform from a kid who struggled to find a home in his own house, to learning to play the ivory keys of the Ivy League? The same way the duckling “grew into” a swan. By simply letting nature take its course, and revealing magic to be what it always is: a clever trick to behold, but not to be believed.

In the same manner which quantum theory has proven that observation affects reality, the life of our protagonist was altered and molded by Suskind’s monitoring and subsequent reporting of the details of Cedric’s final years of high school. The subject of Suskind’s Pulitzer-winning Wall Street Journal articles, Cedric was (unbeknownst to the reader) a minor celebrity before the book entered its second act. Would Cedric have had his meeting with Clarence Thomas, a pivotal and poignant plot point, if it weren’t for the publicity Suskind’s articles garnered our irreproachable hero? According to The Washington Post, Justice Thomas “had read the Journal articles about Jennings before he met with him in his office.”

Were Cedric’s mettle and morale maximized by Suskind’s meddling? Perhaps. Though it is unclear how Cedric’s life would have unfolded if it weren’t for the exposé written about him during his exposition, it is apparent that his tale is not one to be viewed as pragmatically instructional. The circumstances of his ascension were one-of-a-kind due to his national exposure, and this detail was conspicuously absent in Suskind’s depiction of Cedric’s saga. This story is not a book about efficacy, but is actually a book about the efficacy of a story.

Hope in the Unseen acts as an inspiring introduction to understanding multicultural interactions in late 20th century America. The somewhat simplistic tone Suskind employs throughout the story seems to assume that his readers are personally unfamiliar with such an experience, which they very well may be. For, as diverse as America is, its most heterogeneous cities are often its most segregated. The environmental backdrop of his tale, Washington D.C., ranks in the top 15 most segregated cities in our country, and this neglected issue looms at the heart of the educational dilemma of Suskind’s work.

It’s relatively easy to guess what happens when you take an academically talented kid from the streets of our nation’s capitol, turn him into a renowned interest piece via upscale publications and prestigious awards, and then toss him into the assemblage of affirmative action adherent Ivy League admissions directors. The true challenge is trying to figure out why schools as deficient as Cedric’s are as common as they indeed are in the first place.

In 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren(Brown v. Board of Education)pointed out that education was “perhaps the most important function of state and local governments” and that the integration of schools was vital to the overall assimilation of Black citizens into American society. In the wake of the Brown decision, Southern school officials implemented plans for ‘neighborhood schools,’ equipped with zones purposefully drawn around racially distinct areas. Thus, a veneer of integration acted as a substitute for absolute segregation. All-Black schools remained common, though all-White schools slowly began to vanish. By the 1970s, Southern schools, which were once the most segregated in the country, had become the most integrated, usually due to federal court orders.

But since 2000, hundreds of school districts have regressed toward segregation, as judges have decreed that the previously court-enforced integration laws no longer applied. Particularly throughout the South, Black children now attend majority-Black schools as if it were once again the 1960s .In the ‘70s, roughly a quarter of Black students in the South attended schools in which at least 90% of students were minorities. Since 1990, this figure has more than doubled.

When George W. Bush came into office, nearly 600 school districts were under court-ordered desegregation, both in the North and South. By the time Bush Jr. completed his second term, that figure had dropped by nearly 50%, a number that has barely budged to this day. The number of ‘apartheid schools’ has in fact increased over the past three decades, ballooning from 2,762 in 1988, the apex of national school integration, to 6,727 in 2011. Cedric graduated high school in 1994, so his story actually took place during America’s scholastic assimilation heyday.

Does any of this objectively matter? During the 1970s and early ’80s, when over 90% of Black children attended desegregated schools, the achievement gap between Black and White 13-year-olds decreased by nearly 50%.A vast amount of research indicates that when Black children were granted access to adequate instruction, AP courses and other educational features that often are afforded to middle-class White children, the gap immediately began to dissipate. Yes, it matters.

Segregated schools struggle to achieve faculty retention, and the teachers they do have on staff are largely unqualified (inexperienced, not fully licensed, or do not have master’s degrees) when compared to those of integrated institutions. America currently has about 1,400 high schools denoted as ‘dropout factories’, from which fewer than 60% of the students successfully graduate. The majority of these are impoverished, segregated Latino and Black schools. Is it the destitute environments in which most of these students are raised that is to blame for such appalling graduation rates? Most studies have determined that “it’s the concentration of poor students in the same school that hurts them the most. Low-income students placed in middle-income schools show marked academic progress.”

Should it be that children of lesser means are nearly guaranteed to spend their formative years in inferior schools, receiving inadequate educational services due to their parents’ socio-economic statuses? This question nests noiselessly in the nucleus of Suskind’s novel, and it would have been to the author’s benefit if he had explored not only Cedric as a character, but as a product of America’s inability (disinterest?) to minimize the disparity that so starkly exists along its racial and financial lines.

This social stratification permeates from the educational system outwards, wafting towards the rafters of our society’s supposed civilized ceiling. Rucker Johnson, a public-policy professor at UC Berkeley, conducted an elaborate study in 2014 that conveyed the immense ripple effect desegregating American schools could have on racial equality. Johnson discovered that Black Americans who attended integrated schools (including those integrated by court order) were not only more likely to earn a college degree, but also live longer, more financially stable lives than their segregated school-attending counterparts. Similar studies have found that attending integrated schools acts as an impetus for many White students to later live in integrated communities, and send their own children to schools with racially diverse populations. This feature of heterogeneousness in the school system, and the notion that it can lead to widespread integration, acceptance and peace in our communities, could very well be the answer for how to begin to achieve a racial armistice in America.

What I found most engaging about Cedric’s story was that his struggle with race was mostly an internal one, making it more relatable for me. Though we share some observable qualities (we grew up around the same time, both in northeastern metropolises, raised by single mothers), it is Cedric’s struggles with understanding who he is, and where he fits in each of his various environments, that resonated with me. This personal conflict permeated the confines of race, and extended into managing his understanding of masculinity, balancing emotional boundaries, and processing undesirable sentiments, all while attempting to create a life for himself in a system that was rigged to keep him a step behind. The privileges I have been fortunate enough to experience in my life, many of which I did nothing to deserve but was simply born into, have been consistently matched by equally unwarranted experiences of tragedy, trauma and trouble. Cedric’s path felt similarly balanced, despite the occasionally inauthentic tone that leaked through Suskind’s writing.

So, what was the moral of the stories, both Cedric’s and the duckling’s? Go to church and donate often, so that if you’re about to get evicted you can ask the pastor to float you a loan? Maybe we should attempt to understand, in order to be understood? Or is it that we ought to accept others as they are, Black, White, ugly or otherwise? In reality, the ugly duckling was never in fact ugly. Perhaps there’s really no such thing as an ugly subject, only an ugly outlook. For the duckling wasn’t really ever a duck. He was a swan all along.

Resources

1. fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-diverse-cities-are-often-the-most-segregated/

2. genius.com/Earl-sweatshirt-chum-lyrics

3. law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/483

4. propublica.org/article/segregation-now-the-resegregation-of-americas-schools/#intro

5. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/segregation-now/359813/

6. theslot.jezebel.com/the-gop-controlled-kentucky-legislature-takes-on-desegr-1793006993

7. thinkprogress.org/school-segregation-is-bad-and-getting-worse-but-its-supposed-to-be-solved-voluntarily-69409f507d1c

8. washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/25/AR2008072503379_3.html

9. wikipedia.org/wiki/I_(pronoun)

10. wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Suskind