A Little Musing about Race & Class

This post on pink science equipment for girls at Love Isn't Enough (formerly the Anti-Racist Parents blog) touches on the intersection of race and class, and the way that racial segregation is at least partly class-based segregation as well. It reminds me that I was thinking the other day about a book I read a few months ago, Paula Penn-Nasbrit's book Morning by Morning: How we Homeschooled Our African-American Sons to the Ivy League.

Penn-Nasbrit's book was fascinating to me because her family suffers from racism but has a great deal of class privilege. She and her husband both attended Ivy League schools after secondary education at elite prep schools; she comes from at least three generations of professors, lawyers, and doctors--one of her uncles was one of the lawyers who argued Brown v. The Board of Education before the Supreme Court. So when she talks about homeschooling her kids into Ivy League schools, she's not talking about someone like me doing that, someone who went to a highly-ranked state college but was only the second in the family to earn a bachelor's degree (dad was the first) and who would be in many ways culturally out of place at an Ivy League school. She and her husband grew up and lived in that environment; she was wanting to find places for her children in an educational culture she was already very familiar with.

On the other hand, it was primarily issues of racism at the private prep school her kids were attending that led her and her husband to decide to homeschool. The local public schools were not a good place for black children, and when they decided they could no longer stay with the private school, they didn't see other options.

Examples of the kinds of things they experienced included her being called on the rug for organizing a Back-to-School picnic for African-American families at the school; problems with her sons being blamed for problems they didn't create, or being held to higher standards of behavior than white students; and an administrator asking her what she was doing to provide "male role models" for her sons. She was taken aback; what did he mean? Turns out he assumed, because she was black, that she was a single mother.

She was concerned about how these assumptions and expectations would damage her boys and hold them back. So she decided to homeschool.

I wished Penn-Nasbrit had talked more about the complex intersection of class and race in her family's life; she didn't really tackle it in depth at all, and seemed in some ways as oblivious to her class privilege as she was sensitive to the careless racism of white people at the school. On the other hand, though, she describes her family's commitment, over several generations, to not just good education but the best education as a direct response to American racism, a deliberate decision made somewhere along the line not to settle for less than the very best.

Penn-Nasbrit's book was hard for me to read because as a parent and a homeschooler my values, my goals for my kids, and my expectations, are so different from hers--I would never push my kids academically, against their will, as hard as she did, and it was hard to read sometimes about the steps she took to get them to comply with her educational plan. At the same time, I think my willingness to be on the very relaxed end of the homeschooling continuum is partly an expression of how confident I feel of my place in middle-class culture--as was my own approach to college, which was very intellectual and liberal-education focused.

My dad, on the other hand, tends to see college as a really good vocational school where you can educate yourself into a good job that won't break your back and ruin your health, and my mom saw his college education as a means to being able to buy her kids shoes that fit and get their teeth fixed. Their very pragmatic approach to college reflects their own upbringings, and my dad's early adult years working as an auto mechanic and seeing the toll that work took on men's bodies as they aged.

So, even as I found Penn-Nasbrit's values and approach somewhat distasteful, I thought I understood something about why she was making the choices she did. If I were raising black boys, I think the insecurity of their position in American culture would be on my mind too--especially if I'd already seen them treated as if they were likely to explode into misbehavior if not carefully watched and tightly regulated.

Penn-Nasbrit also gave me a gift in one of those small, unexpected passages that opens things up. She was called to the school to talk about a problem with two of her sons, who were (I think) two years apart in age. It seems that the two of them were seeking each other out during recess, and when one was sent to the principal's office, the other went with him. She was told that her boys needed to seek friends outside their own family.

"Nonsense," she replied. "In a Black family, there is no such thing as siblings who are too close."

This was a fascinating tidbit for me. I have at times fretted over how close Eric and Carl are, even as I celebrate it, because I have this nagging notion that it is more "healthy" to socialize outside the family. I don't mean to suggest that I think the kids need no outside friends, but her matter-of-fact statement in favor of siblings being friends to each other reminded me of how culturally-bound my assumptions still are.