Diversity

Have y'all been following the flurry of posts sparked by Elizabeth's musings on sending her son to public schools? The one that's sticking with me right now is Jody's last contribution, "Reading Ruth Conniff." She concludes:

Another quotation from Conniff:

One of the school bus routes passes through a trailer park, then climbs a steep bluff to one of the wealthiest areas of town.

That sentence describes our bus route: the bus stops to pick up the kids in our neighborhood, then makes a giant circle along the rural edges of the school district, with stops along a whole series of dirt roads, several of which lead into trailer parks. One trailer park, next door to the school, is large enough to merit two stops on the route.

It hadn't really occurred to me to factor that into the discussion about diversity.

We live in a white community. Let's not mince words about it. The greater Boston metropolitan area is probably one of the most segregated areas of the country -- many towns here have identifiable ethnic identities, let alone racial ones. There are a few locations in greater Boston where we could encounter significant populations of racial minorities in the school system (fewer still where we could do it without putting ourselves through the same angst that Elizabeth describes). We could have chosen to make that a priority when we settled down and bought a house seven years. We didn't.

When I say this is a white town, I'm not exaggerating. There is not even one African-American child in LG's kindergarten, not in his class, not in the other kindergarten class. I would guess that there are fewer than three African-American kids in the entire kindergarten cohort in this town, and I wouldn't be surprised if at least two of them are choosing Montessori or homeschooling over the public schools. Chances are that if LG has African-American kids in his classes during his tenure in this school system, they will be Metco students bused in from Boston. Here, we are the white people. There is no diversity.

I grew up in a white town. There was one African-American girl in my grade in primary school. When we were seated next to each other, as we often were, we represented the broad spectrum of diversity in our grade, since I was the only Jewish kid in our cohort in town (the only non-Christian kid of any kind until 6th grade, when an Albanian Muslim boy my age moved to town) and there were no Asians.

In fact, when I started attending private school in 9th grade, one of the things that was most striking a change was the greater apparent diversity in that private school. There were African-American students, Asian-American students, Asian students. There were plenty of other Jews. I believe that, in the years since I attended that high school, it has only gotten more diverse, with a greater international population.

What that school was missing, of course, was socioeconomic diversity. We had lots of people of color, because our student population was drawn from the elites of many nations. But the handful of disadvantaged African-Americans who joined the student body through the A Better Chance program generally struggled, as did some of the white kids from truly working-class backgrounds who were there on scholarships . (Vex, you know who I'm thinking of here.) It was a place where working-class people were made to feel their disadvantages to the fullest extent, and the privileged were never asked to think critically about their privileges.

So we're in a white town here, in a relatively white state, and LG is going to a painfully white school. But, between Jody's post and my own experiences, I'm trying to think a little bit more about diversity. Though our town has a higher median income than the state as a whole, our neighborhood is economically mixed. There are a few McMansions crowding into corners, but generally this neighborhood is made up of smallish single-family homes and multi-family homes that, by and large, have not yet been converted to condos. Our own street is almost equally balanced between owner-occupied single-family homes and rental units.

What does this mean for diversity in LG's kindergarten experience? Well, it's true that most of his classmates are like him in certain key demographic characteristics: family structure, income level, parents' educational attainment. But the child who has taken to him the quickest is a kid whose young single parent just moved in with her fiance into the rental housing across the street. His first playdate is with another child whose parents are firmly working class. And his first real lesson in school -- beside learning how to write the first letter of his name forwards instead of backwards -- is to think about the reasons why another child might be mean and resentful towards others.

A. is six already. She may have started school late, or perhaps she's been held back from last year. She's taller than the other kids in kindergarten, and taller still when she wears her shoes with one-inch heels. She never made it to the orientation activities before kindergarten started. She arrives at school either on foot or in a beat-up old car that's clearly serving as transportation for an entire extended family. She comes with her dad, who is slight and careworn, in the dirty clothes of a day laborer; or she comes with various young teenagers -- siblings or cousins, I don't know which. On the second day of school, while most of us parents cooed over our precious new kindergarteners, I overheard A. getting a nasty dressing-down from the teenager come to pick her up. I've never seen A's mother.

LG has come home from school a couple of times now with stories about A. "I don't think A. likes me," he told me on the way home from school last week. "She pushed me down in line." Today he said, "A. told me that she's not my friend."

We're talking about it. We're talking about why A. might say things like that, about how maybe people aren't always nice to A. at home. We talk about how sometimes, when people are being mean to you, sometimes you feel like getting them back, but you can't, because they're bigger than you are and have more power than you do. We talk about how, sometimes, when people are being mean to you and you can't do anything about it, sometimes you might want to take it out on other people, people who are smaller than you. ("A is a lot bigger than me," LG observes gravely.) I remind LG about how, sometimes, when he was frustrated with the way the bigger kids treated him at preschool, he would take it out by being mean to Baby Blue or Neighbor Boy.

He nods. He understands.

He's not upset when he comes home, telling me these stories. He's loving kindergarten in a thousand different ways, and the teacher says he's enthusiastic and a good friend to all. A. isn't ruining his life or his kindergarten experience. He's not scared of A., or trying to think of ways to make her like him. He figures that he has better things to do than waste his time worrying about his popularity with someone who's going to be mean to the other kids. He just wants to understand what might make someone act that way. He wants me to help him think it through.

He's learning to try to be compassionate in the face of hostility, to try appreciate someone else's very different circumstances before reaching any conclusions about their actions.

I hope that in doing so, he is, in fact, learning something of value about diversity.