蜜桃影视

This essay is part of a聽special series commemorating the 65th anniversary of the landmark聽Brown v. Board of Education聽school desegregation case. Read more essays, view testimonials from the families who changed America鈥檚 schools and聽download the new book聽鈥淩ecovering Untold Stories: An Enduring Legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education Decision鈥澛�at our new site:聽.

Philadelphia

We, as a nation, are chasing the wrong things. From Boston to Birmingham, we have seen the ferocious and virulent reaction of white people to the thought of integration. From throwing bricks at school buses full of black kids being bused into lily-white schools to entire school districts either being shut down or wholly seceding to maintain the racial imbalance, we have seen how integration is met.

Let鈥檚 stop playing the game. All black schools aren鈥檛 damaging to kids; it鈥檚 anti-blackness that is proven to be perniciously harmful to kids. As Malcolm X said, 鈥淵ou can’t hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree.鈥�

Let鈥檚 stop ignoring the fact that all-white schools have far more resources than all-black schools, which leads to a deficit in resources for millions of black children. Integration won鈥檛 fix a mindset that says it is better for the public dollars to be skewed toward white children at the expense of black children.

Let鈥檚 recognize that the false cry that integration is the only way for black kids to achieve is belied by the fact that the perspectives of white parents in the North or the South are often not all that different. Even today in 2019, many white parents鈥� views closely mirror those of when he said racist white folks 鈥溾��are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big black bucks.鈥� He made the remark to Chief Justice Earl Warren in February 1954, not long after Warren had presided over that second round of oral arguments in Brown v. Board and before the case had been decided.

Let鈥檚 remember that it wasn鈥檛 enough to segregate schools, the government and so-called public servants and parents together made decisions that ostensibly segregated entire cities to go along with the segregated school systems.

Even when black children are admitted to all-white schools, it doesn鈥檛 mean they will be allowed to enjoy the fruits of vast resources and opportunity. These students often find themselves relegated to less rigorous courses, higher chances of being identified as special needs, more likely to be labeled miscreants, suspended, expelled, and often subjected to culturally irresponsive and irresponsible white teachers who won鈥檛 teach or treat these black students like the extremely talented human beings they are. When students don鈥檛 feel a sense of belongingness, it doesn鈥檛 lead to positive outcomes.

Today, white Americans continue to pursue segregated settings with the same settler and colonial mentality of their forefathers 鈥� , and thus schools, and moving to suburbs to get away from people of color.

Black folks, stop chasing them. I didn鈥檛 go to an 鈥渋ntegrated school鈥� until I was a 16-year-old freshman at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. And once I got there, I didn鈥檛 feel like I had missed a damn thing by attending Nidhamu Sasa (a pan-African elementary school) or Overbrook High School, where there was one white student among thousands of black ones.

The black people who spout the false notion that all-black schools can鈥檛 produce positive outcomes have been duped by white supremacy and are trying to dupe people to believe there has ever been such a thing as 鈥渟eparate but equal.鈥� If anything, we should be fighting to actually see what our communities can achieve when we have equitable and weighted funding systems 鈥� funding that is sustained, robust and engineered to reverse the generational oppression that black education has been subjected to in America.

The Supreme Court decision falsely declared that black kids would be permanently broken if they remained in all-black spaces. They used an to make that ruling. But this conclusion doesn鈥檛 hold up under deeper scrutiny. If majority-black schools were the impetus of anti-blackness, black students who attended all-black schools in pre-K-12 and doubled down on this environment by attending historically black colleges and universities should, by all measures, have the most damaged psyche and strongest negative racial identity. Somehow, I doubt that is the case.

Sharif El-Mekki is the principal of Mastery Charter School鈥揝hoemaker Campus, a neighborhood public charter school in Philadelphia that serves 750 students in grades 7-12. El-Mekki founded the Fellowship 鈥� Black Male Educators for Social Justice and will launch and lead the Center for Black Educator Development in spring 2019. He blogs at聽聽and is a featured voice at聽

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