I just started reading "Feathers" by Jacqueline Woodson in which a sixth grader named Frannie goes to a public school that only has African Americans attending. "Across the highway" there are other schools where only caucasians go. Until a new boy shows up at the school, a new white boy. This boy is picked on by the other students and told straight up by one of them that "no pale faces go to this school. You need to get your white butt back across the highway." Frannie says "It's the nineteen seventies, not the fifties. There's no more segregation..." That's what I was thinking too... But white people only going to the schools "across the bridge" and black people only going to this school, that sure sounds a lot like segregation to me.
This book is set a good 40 years ago, and some things have changed since then, but i still think about segregation today. Growing up in New York City, one of the most diverse cities in the world I still think about what has changed since segregation (which is of course a lot) and what hasn't changed that much. I've always gone to public schools that are plenty diverse, but just because the school has many different races doesn't mean they're all going to get along. At a certain age we all begin seeing the differences between everyone, and because maybe we think that how we were brought up and what we look like is the one good way to be, or maybe because we don't feel that comfortable with people that don't look and act exactly like us, we end up mostly friending people of similar backgrounds to us and who look like us.
Something that stood out to me is how the author keeps saying "across the highway". I know that in the story there is a real place "across the highway", but is it really to the people talking about it? I feel like these kids imagine this place where the white people are as a rich, snobby, happy place where nothing goes wrong, but it probably isn't anything like they imagine it, and they had just imagined a stereotypical white neighborhood. But don't stereotypes affect how we imagine things a lot?
I'm going through the New York City high school process, and one thing that has had a big part on which school I want to go to, is who goes there. Some schools people had said were "ghetto" or in a bad neighborhood. And so I got these stereotypical images in my mind about how those schools were. But one or two of the "ghetto" schools turned out to be so different than I had imagined and a pretty good school. We let stereotypes control how we think about certain places or people, and I think that may be the one big thing keeping us from really seeing who these people are, and that they are actually not so different from us.
I really like your blog post and really agree that people use stereotypes to base all their judgements. I think that people take stereotypes to idealize who they want to be like, all the way to what they look for in others. Stereotyping seems harmless, but I think that it really forms society and societys expectations. As you said, people will judge a school assuming that its in a 'bad' neighborhood. Great post!!!
ReplyDeleteReally nice post Carmcarm! (heh)
ReplyDeleteI totally agree. It's weird to think about issues like segregation, because you think, "Oh, segregation was terrible! It's completely done with now! That's history" or something along those lines, and yet, there are still many forms of segregation today. Another issue like that is women's rights. It may seem crazy that men once got better rights than women way back when, but it was only a year or two ago that the Lilly Ledbetter act was passed, preventing men to get payed more than women who do the exact same job. We may think these issues have come and gone, and are in the past, but are they? Really?
Really great post!
Hey Carmen! So I agree with what Venice just said. I admit that when I think of segregation, I think "Oh, that was such an awful era, but it's all over now! Now we accept everyone no matter what!" But the thing is, when I read things like your post, I realize that segregation is popping up all over the place, without us registering it. I loved your high school process example. That same experience happened to me, too, when I was going through the high school process. People said mean things about who goes to some of the schools I was looking at. I think that these days, we're trained to think of segregation and racism as history, so we don't notice that mean things that are going on around us in society.
ReplyDeleteThis is so accurate. I've been noticing recently how current racial differences are, even though we live in New York, a city known for its diversity. I think one reason that racial separation is still a problem simply because of how recently the Civil Rights movement really was. I mean, it was only 47 years ago. It takes a while for some things to change, and for them to change people really need to take action.
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