The Problem We All Live With quotes

"Everybody’s in favor of helping poor black kids do better in school, but the consensus is that those efforts are best confined to the kids’ own poor black neighborhoods. Separate but equal. The Supreme Court understood in 1954 that it would never work. But our perpetual bad faith on matters of race keeps us trying" (Bob Herbert).

I chose this quote to open up with because I feel like it really speaks to the two broadcasts and the article. It calls attention to the first broadcast in the sense that both are about the idea of integration. In the first broadcast they talked about the forced desegregation and integration of students from uncredited schools with those of students from credited schools. The broadcast is about the resistance of integration and desegregation.

In 2015, we still have schools that are segregated. Not by law but by accident; through economic diversities, traditions, and housing discriminations.

When schools, like Normandy in Missouri, are uncredited, their students are given the opportunity to go to a predominately white school where they have the most qualified teachers and some of the best schools around. However, when stereotypes fill the minds of the parents whose kids will now be integrated with these students from poverty areas, these opportunities seem to slip away before they could even reach out and grab them.

"If you're surrounded by a bunch of kids who are all behind, you stay behind. But if you're in a classroom that has some kids behind and some kids advance, the kids who are behind tend to catch up. These kids in these classes in schools with concentrated poverty don't have that.So it's not even like they're getting the same quality teachers as kids who are advanced. They're getting worse teachers. When you combine those two things, it is almost impossible to undo that harm. You have to break that up"(Nikole Hannah).

Yet, once this integration happens, all the stereotypes that had previous filled people's minds and preconceptions of these ghetto students are gone. No incidents happen and these children thrive in their new schools.

The second broadcast talks about the acceptance or rather, the rushing toward the opportunity to integrate. They talk aout a young girl, Kiana, who embraces the idea of integration. She saw some white kids at her predominately black and nation school, and went over and sat with them and made friends. She is a one women integration program.

She was curious about white people. Even though she lived in New York where they said there was about 4 million white people, she never had a white person as a friend and now she did. She decided to go t college upstate so that she could experience full heartedly. She loved every second of being in college with predominantly white people and she is doing really well.

So I've thought about this moment many times since then because it's weird, right? Kiana is a New Yorker. She grew up in New York City, where there are something like four million white people. And she had never had one as a friend. And she was so curious about white kids.

I am not still not clear on what exactly "White Wasted" is but maybe that's because  I am a white girl form the middle class who has only experienced an "inner-city" school- based off the free or reduced lunch rates- through my service learning. I grew up in a 90% or more white community. There were maybe 10 kids in my whole school who had free or reduced lunch.

It was very hard to hear some of the parents speaking about why they didn't want the Normandy students to go to school with their students. But Mah'ria said it perfectly, it was just the parents talking but the kids actually are going to school.

I really liked these quotes and I didn't really go along with analyzing the quotes but they helped to support what I was saying.