Kontextmaschine

9th June 2016

Link with 11 notes

Portland’s Albina district gentrified. Its public school, Boise-Eliot/Humboldt, didn’t. →

Interesting article, but I say that coming in knowing the context. If you didn’t, I suspect the fact that a famously liberal American city is in 2016 proudly trying to maintain designated schools for black students seems a little underexplained.

Okay. So in the 1960s Portland moved to desegregate its schools. Like other cities, it attempted to create rough parity among schools’ racial makeup despite huge residential segregation by busing students to schools far from their home neighborhoods. Like other cities, there was serious resistance from parents and the program proved politically unsustainable, collapsing by the late ‘70s.

So far so America, but the novel thing here is it was the black parents taking the lead in resisting bussing and returning to neighborhood schools.

For one, with the black population representing a sliver of the district’s total (a resource extraction economy isolated from Dixie, with a white nationalist “free soil/free labor” heritage, Portland missed out on the manufacturing-driven Great Migration and remains the whitest major city in the US) and concentrated in the redlined Albina neighborhood, their children were disproportionately the ones being dragged on hourlong commutes across town.

For another, well, integration proved unsatisfying. After years of seeing their children spread so thinly they represented a critical mass nowhere, under a district making a point of giving them the same education it gave white students, the black community began to appreciate the virtues of black schools embedded in black neighborhoods under the influence of black parents where black teachers-cum-role-models taught students amid an atmosphere of proud and enthusiastic blackness.

(Similar desires on behalf of black Brooklynites turned into a huge shitshow a decade earlier in New York - after attempts to set up schools under autonomous black neighborhood control, the United Federation of Teachers went on a devastating and successful months-long strike in defense of the prerogatives of its (heavily Jewish) membership, shattering the city’s black-Jewish-labor social democratic coalition just in time for the ‘70s debt crisis and ultimately spurring the development of neoconservatism.)

So, a bit over a decade after black Portland’s leadership pushed for school integration under the NAACP, it ended up pushing black schools for black kids, this time under the Black United Front. A great example of the contemporary turn in black activism from equal rights and civic inclusion to black pride and nationalism, tbh.

And as far as I can tell people seemed more or less satisfied with the outcome and no one particularly wanted to tear the system down and it’s continued like that since, and now you know.

Tagged: amhistafamhisthistoryportlandportlandportland