Can I admit that I was disappointed—even angered—with Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson’s graduation address to my former students at Gary Lighthouse College Prep Academy. True, it was nice to have the mayor visit. Many thanks. It was also nice to see a graduating class where 100% of students were admitted to some type of continuing education. Their parents’ inestimable pride should not be diminished by this letter; it is merely a criticism of a certain kind of rhetoric that has been smuggled into the discourse of public education in African-American communities.
Mayor Freeman’s speech was extraordinarily underwhelming because its theme was a tired self-help narrative that I’ve heard a lot in my years as a public school teacher. It could have been given by Ronald Reagan, though the old fraud usually doused his rhetoric with a racist flourish like his ‘welfare queens’ bit.
Today, one walks through the halls of public schools today and there is always the obligatory picture of Martin Luther King, Jr. in every school. Yet, the administrators today talk the language of Booker T. Washington. “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps…” “Your success or failure is on you…” etc. Frankly, I’m tired of hearing it, especially from educated middle class black politicians whose job is not to tell my students to work harder as individuals but to reveal avenues for collective public action.
Instead, I wish the mayor could have reminded Gary’s students of their collective disenfranchisement from middle-class white Indiana, or specify the political and economic policies that have destroyed their community and marginalized their families from the middle classes that long ago abandoned the city. It is always the same in black schools these days: persistence, hard work, moral living, and self-improvement. These are the middle class values fired at these kids Do white affluent schools get this kind of piffle? Certainly not. Black kids need to work hard, white kids need to ‘network’ and ‘give back’ voluntarily.
In Mayor Freeman-Wilson’s example she argued that the students should not point a finger at anyone because when one does so there are “three more pointing back at you.” Well, let me ask you some questions that (I believe) answer themselves: Are there no individuals to whom one could point a finger and blame for Gary’s plight? Are there no policies that could use some illumination, ones that have caused systemic unemployment, collapsing infrastructure, wage depression, white flight, and the proliferation of violence? Frankly, I think many more fingers should be pointed and the judge’s gavel should drop after decades of scandal, corruption, abuse, and neglect in Gary. I want my students to point fingers. Point them at the educators who fail you! Point them at the politicians who neglect you! Point them at the tax neglectful rich and economists who are consistently wrong! Point them at the employers who reduce your wages, reduce your benefits, fight the bills that would guarantee your families getting health care!
We live in a time where not one person was fired for the economic catastrophe of 2008 but my students--90% of whom receive free and reduced lunch--get ‘the accountability’ lecture. Not one banker, loan shark, or lobbyist went to prison for (effectively) taking the African-American working class back years in economic development.
I’m pointing at you, Ms. Mayor: Just because you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps does not mean we need a lecture, we need policies that cultivate talent and bring us closer to justice. And while we wait, it doesn't hurt to point out the people and policies who obstruct, delay, and are dead wrong.
