Reflection on Ricky Lee Allen's presentation on
Critical Race Theory and Education
I have not read the whole of Rocky Lee Allen's paper; it is very wordy. I
read two pages one day, then started from the beginning again the next day and read 4.
I did not have any problem with what he had to say Friday night. I
have done a lot of reading of late that keeps bringing this topic up. I do know that as a white person there are things
that just go smoothly for me that might be a stuggle for someone who is not white. I read Black Like Me
years ago, as well as The Way It 'Spozed to Be, Throwawy Children, Jonathan Kozol's Death at an Early Age and
Five Smooth Stones. I just now reread Death at at Early Age and Jonathan Kozol's newest book, Letters
to a Young Teacher. I also just finished The Black Notebooks which are a compilation of reflections
by a woman author on being a black woman in America while looking and being taken for white. Life is So Good
is the wonderful story of George Dawson, a black man born before 1900 who lived into 2000 at least and finally learned
to read at age 98. He has naturally seen a great deal in his lifetime and is a window on some of what is was like to
grow up black in this country.
You don't undo the damage of 200 years in 20. The measures we took in the
60s to begin trying to undo some of the damage that decades of being less than and oppressed had done were just that, only
a beginning. Generations of black and native people were held down forcibly. People standing on their necks.
It wasn't that long ago. I have listened for two years to young people reflecting, in their first college paper, over
their lives so far and I see the ways in which white power has shaped their lives, the fact that 18 year olds can't speak
to their own grandparents because white power did their/our best to eradicate their language. Twenty years of trying
to tip the scale in the opposite direction is nothing. I believe in affirmative action. The biggest thing holding
back all the children in school who aren't making it is, . . . what? The fact that their own parents and extended
family can not help them when they come home from school, that they did not hear enough different words in the first three
years of their life, that they don't have the food they need, the medical care, that they move from school to school as they
can't pay their rent and have to move. What do you think is responsible for that? White power structure.
Okay, so that is not you and me. We didn't do that and we are certainly not
encouraging hate and rejection. But yes, I feel guilt because I know that I did not have to deal with that. My
parents were white. My father and mother grew up middle class and got a good education. My dad left school to
be a navy pilot and my mom graduated from Cal Berkeley and stayed home to raise children. During WWII when my dad flew
a Navy fighter plane and amazingly survived, the Navy was segregated. All our military branches were segregated.
My parents were able to buy a home because of the GI bill (which the black military vets did not get) and a loan from my mom's
mother who was a Navy nurse and owned her own home and borrowed on it for them. It was 1951.
Owning a home is the single most important economic leverage. Owning a home is really
the dividing line between achieving the American dream or not. Once you own a home you open up a number of
other financial opportunities. You can borrow on it to make things happen. My dad is still in that home.
He borrowed on it several times including to start his own business when the company for which he had worked for years went
bankrupt, to help some of us go to college, to bring my sister and her family home from Europe to live, and for medical emergencies.
It was his savings. He still has it. He paid $20,000 for it in 1951 and it is going to take care of him in his
old age now. If my dad had been a black soldier instead of white and my mother had been black, then he would not
have been able to buy that house and when the company he worked for went bankrupt and he was 42 with six minor children we
would have been broke. I can't guess what else might have been different.
We need to make it possible for many more people to own their own
homes and get out of the cycle of poverty. Thank heavens for Habitat for Humanity.
I am fairly new to the southwest and am doing my best to learn about the history and
the culture of the children I will teach. I came from the Pacific Northwest with different geography and different native
tribes, traditions, art, architecture, trickster stories, creation stories, etc. But I was not familiar with their deeper
culture. Here, I am trying to learn more so that I do not hold frivolous expectations, so I do not say things that
will offend people.
I grew up white in the 1950s and 1960s. My younger brother was in the first
grade when we began busing for integration in Berkeley. Guess what, they bused the little black kindergarteners, first,
second, and third graders UP to the white school and the white 4th, 5th, 6th graders down to the black school.
They couldn't possibly bus the littlest white children because they could not deal with the white panic, even in Berkeley
where we only had one high school and have always been integrated at ninth grade. Meanwhile, many, many, white
families in my neighborhood headed for the suburbs that year.
During the war in Vietnam, who went to fight? All the young people who could
not claim they were college studetns. Many middle class white kids enrolled in college to get out of
the war. It was poor and minority students who had to go and fight. And after that war it was suggested that had
the white middle class students been at the same risk for going to VietNam, the riots and public pressure to get out would
have come sooner.
I know I have had it easy because I am white. I saw our black friends accosted
at the corner of our street and questioned as to what they were doing there. These eight and ten year olds on bikes were outside
there proper Oakland neighborhood. My cousin lives and teaches in downtown Chicago and her daughter has grown up
watching her African-American school friends be stopped on the street for nothing and questioned and their purses searched
with no cause.
It is true today that an inordinate number of minority students are in those bottom
tracks in high schools across our country, that an inordinate number of young black men are in jails, that the court still
throws bigger penalties for the same behavior at black male teenagers than at white. The case of the Jena Six in Louisianna
finally hit the papers. But the penalties for the black kids in that little racial scuffle was ten times the penalty
for the white kids involved - which is why it finally hit the paper. However, only the fact that it made national news
finally brought some justice oversight into the case.
It is never ending and everywhere. I don't mind being lumped in with whites. I
have been lumped in as any number of other things. Just a girl. A hated Californian. A Catholic. A
teacher. A Berkeleyite. An American. So, okay, I am or have been all those things and more.
Ricky Allen basically said that being white I experience white privilege everyday and may not even notice. And
he is right. I went a lot of my life without noticing but this topic is coming up all over the place and I AM noticing
now. It sure is good to be white in this country.
