PREFACE

As a journalist covering the Rochester City School District, I often find myself the audience for lengthy treatises regarding the dire, seemingly irredeemable state of urban education here and across the nation. These explanations land most frequently on a few common culprits, none of them mutually exclusive. A self-serving school board, inept and overzealous. Tuned-out teachers, uninterested in the plight of the city and content to coast from paycheck to paycheck until their pensions vest in full. Paunchy administrators holed up in a downtown office building doing God knows what, far removed from the children they’re meant to serve. Parasitic charter school operators, in league with their cabal of corporate school reformers, leeching money from “real” public schools. Lazy, stupid parents and—this part is usually left unsaid—their lazy, stupid kids.

It has become increasingly apparent to me that these pat formulations of the problem, even in combination, are ultimately insufficient. They lack context in two important ways. First, any assignment of blame to entirely local factors—Adam Urbanski’s forty-year reign over the Rochester Teachers Association, for instance, or the unusually high salaries that Rochester school board members draw—fails to explain why every urban school district in the United States suffers from the same ills as Rochester to a greater or lesser extent. Second, and related, these short-sighted explanations ignore the critical historical context of how urban schools in Rochester and elsewhere arrived at their present pitiable state and how it fits into a broader history of discrimination and oppression. Education policy in the United States has been slouching away from the standard of Brown v. Board of Education for long enough that most educators and policymakers, not to mention children and parents, cannot readily conceive of any other approach to the issue. My goal here has been to provide that missing context.

I hope readers will recognize in this book not only a recitation of racist actions but also—peeking out intermittently from behind the clouds of bigotry and violence and fear—the joy of learning that is possible when children from different backgrounds meet in the classroom on equal terms and under the guidance of teachers who respect them. Joy is not a typical metric in reform-based school accountability. Many students and teachers who spent time in such classrooms in Monroe County described their experiences with that word, though, and I have visited enough schools to appreciate its presence. The Children’s School of Rochester and Rochester International Academy in the city school district come to mind. So do schools I have visited in East Irondequoit, Gates Chili, Rush-Henrietta, and other diverse suburban school districts. These schools are not perfect, but they seem to have fostered a richness of relationship-building and respect that more homogenous schools seldom manage to attain.

This effect, it seems to me, is often dismissed as extraneous to the actual business of education or seen as ephemeral and essentially random. I hope readers of this book will keep their minds open to a different premise: that every school could be dynamic and joyful if only adults would commit to building the proper foundation of anti-racism rather than racism; faith rather than fear; integration rather than segregation.

This approach constitutes not simply a rescue mission for Black city children but a rethinking of public education everywhere. Parents of children in well-regarded school districts may find this unnecessary. But though the harm done to Black students through two hundred years of segregation is obvious and easily observed through nearly any metric, white students have by no means gone unscathed. It was this psychic harm that James Baldwin had in mind in the 1964 essay from which this book takes its title. In it he addressed white parents directly about the insidious effect of racial separation on all children, in particular their own:

I know you didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, too, for the very same reason: as long as my children face the future they face, and come to the ruin that they come to, your children are very greatly in danger, too.

They are endangered above all by the moral apathy which pretends it isn’t happening. This does something terrible to us. Anyone who is trying to be conscious must begin to be conscious of that apathy and must begin to dismiss the vocabulary which we’ve used so long to cover it up, to lie about the way things are.1

Rochester, like many places in the United States, has deep familiarity with “the moral apathy which pretends it isn’t happening.” As will be seen in the introduction and conclusion of this book, I believe our community can end its dangerous, racist game of make-believe only by dismantling the physical and political barriers of segregation. My hope is that the history contained in this book will illuminate our community’s way in the quest for new ideas, new strength, and a new resolution to stop lying about the way things are.