How We Fight.
As of last year, only 15 percent of Black third through fifth grade students in the Clarke County School District could read at grade-level. But the White kids were doing fine. To address the gap, the District Superintendent is trying to put together some rather aggressive initiatives to get the Black kids’ numbers up, so I went to the school board meeting to support his efforts.
He wants to build an Early Learning Center on land currently used for the Athens Land Trust’s programming. The Athens Land Trust is a local non-profit whose primary program offers people the ability to buy a house with a 3 percent downpayment, with the caveat that while they keep the equity they put into the house, they don’t own the land. The homestayers also have to pay the taxes. It’s a step between renting and buying, a stepping stone for some, but not really the solution for community-wide uplift. It doesn’t have to be, though. There is room in the struggle for the Athens Land Trust, but somehow, probably because the structure of their organization will never truly empower its residents, the Land Trust is wildly popular with liberal Athens. I don’t mind the Land Trust. However, I do mind the space in mind and budget the Land Trust has taken in the market for public funds and attention that goes towards support for racial justice. The deep problem is that Athens Clarke County has outsourced a good amount of racial justice work to the Athens Land Trust.
One of the Land Trust’s racial justice programs is a farmers’ market, where they teach kids how to farm and give advice and an occasional market to Black local farmers. This is billed as entrepreneurship. I have my questions. Mind you, I think poor and working class Black people are better served by shopping at Kroger and helping Kroger employees build a stronger union, and gain knowledge in a way to eventually have Black-owned grocery stores or at least Black led unions in White-owned grocery stores. But while I was at the meeting, I ran into John Morrow, a history professor who studies WWI, and he said that we’ve done this garden stuff before. When Black soldiers were hurt in battle, they’d come back and be transitioned to farm jobs, and White soldiers would be transitioned to office clerks. We know how that works out. He sees this as the same con.
I am tempted to believe him for a few reasons. 1) He is a very good historian. 2) It’s an old con.
At the meeting, I made my pitch about how I was concerned that entirely too many CCSD teachers were comfortable not teaching Black kids how to read. Now, my parents worked a lot of evenings, yet I still learned how to read because my teachers were serious about their jobs. So you have to understand that I am very slow to blame working parents, and I see the problem in professional teachers who would rather be underpaid to not teach Black children how to read, rather than be fairly paid, organized, yet accountable for teaching Black children how to read.
The education culture of CCSD exists functionally for make-work jobs for White people who are very good at teaching White kids with parents with post-graduate degrees, but would you believe, these same teachers can’t be bothered to figure out how to teach working class Black kids how to read.
If you want to know the secret, come in closely, it doesn’t work unless you show the students how reading helps them make sense of their lives, and how reading is an integral solution to their felt confusions about life.
We are trying to keep kids who need justice out of the fight for justice, and that just confuses them.
This is one reason that for all of Athens’ youth sports programs, we need debate programs and organizations geared towards Black people exercising public power. A real debate infrastructure where kids are expected to flesh out non-cliche ideas and arguments against opposition. Which means that CCSD teachers would have to give up cliches, and these White teachers (and some Black ones) love their cliches. And the cliches keep the meager checks flowing.
The problem with this cliche education is that it ultimately ends up confusing Black kids into blaming themselves for inheriting the legacy of White racial terrorism. And on the other side, it creates an entire White population that is useless regarding the struggle for justice.
On a related note, Historic Athens put on an event yesterday on the history of Linnentown, where working class Black folks shared their account of how the University demolished their neighborhood in the 60s, moved a good number of these Black residents into public housing, and how they haven’t really been made whole since.
The folks in Linnentown weren’t ripped away from their homes and their legacies because of lack of entrepreneurship. Their lives and descendants’ livelihoods were stolen for lack of organized public power against White terrorism.
There is simply no substitute for teaching Black people the tools to wield public power against White interests, and this includes their White teachers and peers if need be. We can try to find workarounds all we want — talk about entrepreneurship and soft skills — and I know that talking tough to White people takes a bit of courage for those who are unpracticed, but debate and political education around how to grow and wield public power as a matter of right and self-determination is the only way forward.
Community gardens are nice, but we need to rigorous debate program and a political education infrastructure that’s more than just telling people how to get along with White people, or throwing awards banquets for Black elders.
Either we teach our folks how to fight for their community’s cut of Athens, or we continue to roll out program after program that will ultimately have Black people individually blaming themselves for their lack of hustle and “entrepreneurship,” while having the occasional awards banquet.
The kind of political engagement Black communities need in order to be made whole takes practice and a supportive infrastructure. This is one reason I’m a fan of leadership class at Cedar Shoals High School, and the field trip last year to City Hall where the students sat behind the rail and started to get a sense of what it takes to wield public power.
Honestly, if I were a civics teacher, I’d offer extra credit for any kid who went to a school board meeting and argued for a proposal.
Double extra credit if you go to a Mayor and Commission or Planning Commission meeting. But they’d have to argue for a concrete proposal.