A Christian Perspective on Education and Minorities

Stephen D. Holtrop 11/9/95

After reading some class responses to the articles on African American immersion schools in Milwaukee, I feel compelled to make some comments about thinking Christianly about race relations and education. Racism is not Christian. Most Christians would admit that, but many Christians are racist. Some people say every human being has racist feelings. Race relations is a constant issue in the Bible. Tensions were high between the Israelites and their neighbors (enemies). Jonah is an example of someone who didn’t want to see another race get any benefits. But there is a constant emphasis in the Bible on helping people who need it: widows, orphans, and also outsiders like Ruth. And Scripture constantly talks about helping the alien or foreigner within your land. In the New Testament there is overt mention of Jesus’ dealings with people considered low on the social scale: fishermen, tax collectors, the prostitute at the well. Additionally, there are passages dealing positively with non-Jewish ethnic groups: Philip and the Ethiopian, the Good Samaritan, Paul’s new churches throughout the Mediterranean and Asia Minor (Gal. 2-4; Eph. 2). In fact, Paul even stood up to Peter for allowing racism in the church (Gal. 2:11-14).

So why does dealing with ethnicity or dealing with certain ethnic groups make white, middle class American Christians so uncomfortable? Why does an African American-centered curriculum, for example, make some of us mad? There are magnet or private schools for just about everything else, from music to science to hockey. There are colleges just for women. Are we feeling somehow threatened by an African studies school? Insecure somehow? Or do we need some new, post-Cold War scapegoat, this time within the country, to serve as the object of our fears and distaste?

Who’s Got It Better?

Whatever the reason, we’re hearing--I think increasingly--that African Americans are not only getting their share of the American Dream, but also getting more than they deserve just because of their skin color. The implication is that jobs, entitlements, grants, tax breaks, and all kinds of other goodies are going to them and therefore not to us.

The problem with this attitude is that minority life in America is not simply a matter of choice. It can’t be merely "bad choices" that cause so many members of ethnic minorities to grow up in poverty, have almost insurmountable obstacles, and end up unemployed, underemployed, sick, murdered, or in jail on a much greater scale than the "rest of us." Living as a minority does involve choices, but the key choices are between being who you are and turning one’s back entirely on background, family, and culture. Is this a choice most people--in any group--would make cheerfully? Can most people choose the latter?

Further, many ethnic minorities--especially the children--simply do not have even this choice. A person can’t choose to have good enough teachers and curriculum materials in K-12 schooling to get into a good college. A person can’t choose to have a supporting family with two parents and enough money to be healthy and somewhat involved in the dominant culture. A person can’t choose to have business contacts through successful parents and other successful adults to land that first job to start the climb up the corporate ladder. A person can’t choose to have relatives give money enough at each birthday to start investing for college, a house, or a business venture. The fact that some minorities have surmounted these odds is simply greater credit to them and their guardians, not proof that anyone can do it. Despite these grim prospects of success, people of all colors hold up successful professional athletes, for example, for all youngsters to aspire to, although only about one percent of high school varsity players even make it into a pro game. Mainstream kids, whether they know it or not, have multiple back-up options when a dream like this falls flat; minority kids don’t. (Read Langston Hughes’ poem "A Dream Deferred.") Would any white person who claims blacks get all the breaks in our society accept a switch?

Growing Up Hated

Worse, no one can choose whether or not others will hate him. Prejudice means pre-judging, before the judged person as an individual has a chance to make any impression at all. The hateful looks, the suspicion, the assumptions that some people have to endure daily in this country are criminal. Some people, merely because of their looks, are literally presumed guilty. There are still stories of racist cops arresting a black person first and finding the crime later. In many ways members of ethnic minority groups are routinely treated this way, without the actual arrest, by hundreds of grocery store clerks, tellers, teachers, government office workers, and K-Mart returns desk employees every day.

This kind of treatment has to affect a person’s sense of self and ability to dream, plan, and act to realize those dreams. A famous experiment in education involved telling blue-eyed kids that they were dumb, inferior, and unworthy of decent treatment for a short portion of the school year; brown-eyed kids were told the opposite. The results regarding students’ self esteem and treatment of each other were predictable. How much more would such conditioning affect someone if it occurred throughout an entire lifetime? Systematic erosion of self-esteem is a terrible thing. Parents who see siblings chipping away at each other’s sense of self worth act quickly to intervene. But all of society chips away at ethnic minorities’ sense of being capable and lovable every day for their entire lives. A book that shows this is Black Like Me, a personal account written by a white reporter who colored his skin and hair and passed for a black person for a few months. His experiences were quite eye-opening--for white people.

Why Does This Happen in America?

We need to ask why. Why do African Americans and some other ethnic minority groups have this problem in our great society, our dream land, our land of unsurpassed freedom and opportunity? Why do African American students have high drop out rates and suspension rates and low GPAs and graduation rates? Lazy? Free loaders? Welfare kings and queens? Getting us back for slavery? There are no easy answers, and quick answers seem to me to be cop outs, blame assigning--quick coats of shiny paint over rotten wood. Regardless of the answer (sociologists, theologians, politicians, police officers, education professors--everyone has a different answer), it’s obvious that there’s not a level playing field out there. Today, the young American black male is an endangered species. And some people are saying "Good!" Because we’re afraid of young black males. So we treat them with fear and suspicion. And we would never say "The only good n___ is a dead n___." But we know people who would. And we’re related to people who have.

I’ve been told that black students at HC, most of whom are from Africa, not the US, are followed around in Target--suspected of shoplifting before any crime is committed. How would this make you feel? Day after day, year after year? I, as a white guy with a tie, can exchange my daughter’s watch that quit working a few months after we bought it for her, without even having the receipt any more. I am trusted by many people in this town and state. People who’ve never seen me before take my word for things that involve their money all the time. Do all colors of people get this treatment? In Miami, I drove around for a while with a crack in my windshield; no police ever hassled me. But one of the black cleaning people at the school where I taught had a crack in his windshield; a white female cop came into Burger King to find and ticket the owner of the car, legally parked outside on a private parking lot, but on the edge of a black section of town. Most of the restaurant patrons were black.

Not too long ago in this nation’s history a white woman accusing a black man of rape or even unwanted sexual advances could cause a lynching. Case after case: presumed guilty without a trial. Yet, still today, when the alleged assailant is white, the accusations are often dismissed as overblown (symptomatic of a sexism problem our culture also has in a bad way). After the Civil War, angry Southern whites devised countless ways to harass blacks. Poll taxes, no loans, and the Klan all contributed to a life of "freedom" but constant harassment for blacks. The North wasn’t heaven on earth for the freed slaves either. Southerners accurately accused the North of hypocrisy: talking equality but acting and speaking with more racism than many in the South.

Racial Inequality in Education

In education, busing--essentially a racial issue--caused riots around the country. Busing and the larger issue of school desegregation brought out intense hatred. Shots were fired, motorcycle police were caught on the neck by wires suspended across roads, the National Guard had to force governors and state police to comply. All to prevent black people from entering white schools.

Black schools get a fraction of the money white schools get. Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities looks at city after city across the country, cataloging the inequalities between white and black schools. The simple but surface reason for this is that property values in the suburbs are high, so the tax base, and therefore revenue for schools, is also high. Another reason is states do not want to dump money into schools they see as "bad investments." In the central city, white residents and businesses have left, leaving sometimes no tax base at all for the local schools. In East St. Louis, IL, a big company still located near the gutted downtown has managed to incorporate company property--and company property alone--into a separate municipality, thus avoiding all taxes to the city of East St. Louis.

We have a bad racial situation in American education. To echo Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath, if a farmer has a horse, he doesn’t refuse to feed him on the days he doesn’t need him to work. So a rich, cultured, educated society shouldn’t let human beings grow up with their needs--and society’s needs for them--to go unmet. If we saw flowers in our gardens failing to thrive, we’d try to figure out why and do what it takes to remedy the situation--more watering, a different location, etc. But if we see people in a bad situation we want to assign blame. I don’t know the reason: fear, anger, resentment, guilt? All mixed together? These are normal human emotions on display all over the world--especially in ethnic struggles. But they’re not Christian, biblical, fair, right, or wise. Just because we paint Jesus in our image doesn’t mean God’s idea of his own image is a white, middle class, consumeristic suburban American. "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:28).

In Ephesians 2:19-22, Paul has a vision for the racial unity of Christians:

You are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple to the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

 

Racism Isn’t Smart

And practically speaking, it’s not smart to give vent to racism. For one thing, white people are becoming another minority in America. We may be treated eventually the way we as a group treated minorities in the past. Secondly, it’s less acceptable to voice racist views than it was a generation ago. It’s not acceptable to say racist things in a teachers’ lounge, job interview, parent-teacher conference, or other professional occasion. Thirdly, it’s in our own best interests to diffuse the bomb of ethnic strife in America, or we will endure more riots, strange trial verdicts, and deaths caused by the growing discord.

Let’s Be Open-Minded

I don’t know if an African-American immersion school is the answer to all this. By itself it can’t be. But our attitude as Christian white people has to be one of tolerance, love, concern, and openness--openness to whatever it takes to love each other as we are commanded to. If something is working and it’s not immoral, why not let it have its day in the sun?

Our attitudes toward social issues like this one are crucial since they will come out in our teaching. In preparing an integrated unit, a teacher cannot help choosing materials and approaches that reflect his or her personal values, convictions, and attitudes. Our attitudes toward race relations cannot be left unexamined and untried by biblical standards. I challenge you to pick up works by black authors (James Baldwin, Alice Walker, James Banks) to further inform yourself on African American culture, accomplishments, trials, and educational needs and opportunities. One of HC’s recent students was affected enough by reading Kozol’s book and participating in the multicultural January term in Fort Wayne to decide to pursue a teaching job in a multicultural setting. We don’t have to feel guilty for what our ancestors may have done, but we can’t get angry, defensive, envious, or start blaming. We need to work for positive solutions to right the wrongs. A black professor at another Christian college recently told me, "Nothing will change until the people with the power, the white people, do something to change things." Let’s acknowledge this power and responsibility.