Your School Shapes How You Think About Inequality
Ask yourself this question: Were you aware of inequality growing up?
Your answer may depend in part on where you went to high school. Students at racially diverse schools, particularly black and Hispanic students, are more tuned in to injustice than students going to school mostly with kids that look like them.
That's one of the main threads of a new book by Carla Shedd, an assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies at Columbia University. In Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice Shedd goes straight to the source: the students at four Chicago public high schools. She even let the kids pick their own pseudonyms.
Two of the schools were largely segregated: one had no white or Asian students. The other two were fairly diverse — by Chicago standards — one with about a third white or Asian students and the other, a magnet school, with more than half.
Shedd followed the schools from 2001 to 2011, a turbulent decade when the city demolished its infamous high-rise public housing units and began closing public schools in large numbers.
I spoke with Shedd about how school segregation can damage a student's sense of self.
Let's jump right in. What did the students have to say?
Black and brown kids going to their neighborhood school, many of them didn't have the concrete experiences to know that maybe their experiences are unequal. Those kids are very different from the kids who leave their neighborhood and go to a school downtown and sit with classmates very different from them. They see what's similar and they see what is different. This is mind blowing for 14, 15 and 16-year-olds who are making sense of who they are. It will form their perceptions of opportunity.
So what does that look like from the student perspective?
Both Alex and TB live on the South Side of Chicago in all black neighborhoods. Alex travels all the way from the South Side to just north of Chicago's downtown for his school. He has a racially mixed group of friends and his experiences confirm both his privilege and his disadvantage.
Alex went on a shopping trip with his friends to the mall downtown. So, he's in a mixed group of friends, they're doing something social, and a store security guard believed that one of their group members was shoplifting. The guard approached them and pulled out the three black kids in the group and told them they had to leave. Alex was really stressed by it.
And the contrast is TB. He has been searched but not arrested multiple times. He still thinks the police are fair. I asked him, "How do you feel when this happens?," And he says, "Doesn't this happen to everyone?" It's almost normal for him. TB's school can't confirm that what he experiences is not the norm for everyone else.
So, students of color in segregated schools might be less aware of inequality, but in diverse schools, they might be overwhelmed by it. Where's the balance?
With kids in segregated schools I talk a little about dosage. If they have a lot of these Your School Shapes How You Think About Inequality : NPR Ed : NPR:
