America broke its promise to #JamylaBolden

[romanic]

It’s not good enough to go home and hug our own 9-year-old daughters a little tighter, to let that kiss goodnight on the top of the forehead linger. It’s not good enough to march and light another candle, to go to church and temple and mosque, holding hands and calling for calm and peace and healing.

Those actions get us through the day. But what about tomorrow?

Tomorrow, Jamyla’s classmates, those innocent children left behind in the Riverview Gardens School District, will go to school and before the bell rings be eons behind 9-year-olds in other parts of the city. Their chance at success, and a long life, is limited by their ZIP code.

The For the Sake of All report published by Washington University last year under the direction of assistant professor Jason Purnell tells us they will die a full 15 years earlier than people who live just one or two ZIP codes to the south, just because of where they live. The same report tells us that Jamyla’s friends, those who graduate high school, at least, will earn about half what their white counterparts in St. Louis will earn. They’ll be more than twice as likely to be unemployed. They will be more likely to have heart disease or cancer. Their ability to move out of the social strata into which they were born is severely limited, Harvard University’s recent study on social mobility tells us.

They are stuck in a community in which dying of a gunshot wound is not an unusual event.

This is the reality that too many St. Louisans of color, particularly on the north side of the city and county, have been living for too long. It’s costing us more than lost lives; it’s costing the entire region billions of dollars in economic opportunity. We continue to allow an entire region, one generation of people after another, to suffer because in a divided St. Louis, some people have theirs and that’s just the way it’s going to be.

Enough.

Let Jamyla’s death touch a region’s heart. Let her be memorialized in the conversations about inequality in the greater St. Louis region that have been taking place in the past year. Let it not end with conversation. Let conversation become conversion.

Change is happening, but not nearly quickly enough.

We may never know who killed Jamyla, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find justice for a 9-year-old child who wanted to do better than her best.

A year after #Ferguson, the schools that serve its children are still underfunded and failing. The housing is still unequal and unsafe. Guns are rampant. Jobs are few. In a community where blindly fired bullets can kill a little girl in the safety of her home, hope is scarce. Justice is only a word.

Until St. Louis invests in its children — and it’s going to take a whole lot more than $26 million — the promise of a positive future will be trapped in the casket of a child.

http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/the-platform/editorial-america-broke-its-promise-to-jamylabolden/article_db8fa5e1-677f-5bad-a354-b9c5f81a21ba.html

Was going to post this in Good Reads, but figured I post it here to instead. This editorial really got to me; especially the last few sentences detailing just how much in the city of Ferguson hasn't changed. I feel like the rampant gun culture and failure from this nation to ensure a livable and leveled field of opportunity and success for many young black kids needs to be discussed, it needs to be national news and conversation too.

RIP to this little girl and to the others lost to senseless gun violence and lack of care for black children.

[brer cat]

1. "America broke its promise to Jamyla Bolden. No life, no liberty, no pursuit of happiness."

Jamyla’s death defines tragic. So, too, did the death of 6-year-old Marcus Johnson Jr., shot and killed in the crossfire of a rolling gun battle while leaving St. Louis city’s O’Fallon Park in March as he sat in his family’s van.

Equally tragic was the death a year earlier of Antonio Johnson, an 11-year-old fourth-grader at Froebel Elementary on the south side of St. Louis. Like Jamyla, Antonio was sitting at home doing homework when bullets likely intended for somebody else struck and killed him.

Say their names, America, their blood is on your hands: Jamyla Bolden, Marcus Johnson Jr., Antonio Johnson.

A very powerful read, and a look at what happens when we allow/force the isolation of Black families into pockets of inescapable poverty, ignore their plight, and refuse to deal with the gun culture that makes every moment of their lives perilous. You are correct, romanic, that this needs to be national news and there is no better time than during this election season. #BLM activists need to be supported and listened to when they force this conversation, and DU needs to stop trying to silence the voices of those who live this life on the edge.

[romanic]

3. Definitely.

Though I haven't heard anything from BLM about Jamyla's death, unless I missed something.

[Igel]

2. It's easy to say "they need to seize the day and take responsibility."

It's easier and in many ways feels better for a lot of people to say, "We've broken our promise to them and they're suffering because we've failed our responsibility."

And it's even easier and more feel-good to say, "Mainstream America, not us, broke their promise to the poor ..."

All of these utterances mix apples and oranges for emotional, psychological, and political reasons. Some things the population, the group that contains both victims and offenders, are responsible for. Some things outsiders are responsible for. Both (D) and (R) only point to the part of the problems that they want to see, then do a whole/part fallacy and assert that all of the problems fall into the same category. They don't.

1. If the streets are unsafe it's not because there aren't state keepers behind each person making sure they don't hurt each other. The difference between my neighborhood and an unsafe neighborhood isn't the police, the schools, or Congress, but the people who live here versus there. If a community is unsafe and it's not because outsiders are coming in to do the violence it's because the parents haven't taken care of their kids and members of the community doesn't report those who commit violence. A community first polices itself, then it works with the authorities to get help when it can't manage.

A kid whose family recently moved into my neighborhood was watching his new friends play basketball while he ate some fast food. When he got up, he threw the trash into the street. A while later he was complaining saying that his old neighborhood looked like shit because of all the trash--this was supposed to be a nicer neighborhood. He's part of the problem he criticized others for. You don't crap in your own well.

2. Failing schools are seldom failing on their own. Take school X and Y near where I live. School Y is less than a decade old. It was built with wifi and nice equipment and is well-lit. Wrought-iron and copper accents. It's a well funded district, and when it opened it had a decent set of teachers. It was a failing school as soon as they tested the students. The teachers get the same pay as at another school that is not failing. But right now there are a half-dozen openings for core subjects at that school because nobody wants to work there. It's accumulated bad teachers. Because nobody wants to work there. The kids don't care, they act out, there are fights weekly, every month or so ambulances are needed.

School X was a good school. Its demographics changed as fairly inexpensive housing was built in its zone. Over the course of 4-5 years the demographics flipped from rural + high-SES suburban to mostly low SES. Test scores declined, behavior worsened, and some teachers left. In order to stop the slide, a bunch of measures were put into place. Within a couple of years most good, experienced teachers left. All the nice advanced-placement equipment was thrown into a heap as the students stopped signing up for the classes. It's now a failing school. Same building, same equipment, same funding. It's not the teachers: It's the teachers failing to deal with a bunch of students who disrupt classes and lack motivation or self-discipline necessary for school.

Too often when I call home about disruptions in class I get one of two responses: "I can't do anything with him either," or the parent turns to the student and disrespects him openly and viciously.

While teachers can just move away to find other work, the people that really suffer in the short term are the well-behaved and motivated students. If I have 30 students in a class and I'm always trying to get 5 or 6 of them into the classroom, to be quiet(er), to do their work, to stop disrupting things, then I don't get through most of my lesson for the day. The disruption spreads to marginally well-behaved students, who grow bored. But since I'm mostly managing the class at that point and not teaching, at the end of the year pretty much the entire class is behind.

The response to this has been to track students. This was common in the '50s and '60s and into the '70s. It's frowned upon or illegal these days. But we accomplish the same thing with AP, pre-AP, level or regulars classes, where the kids self-sort under parental and school pressure, and by the students' choice of electives and how electives interact with the master schedule for the school.

3. Housing is always unequal. However, some changes have happened and they're sort of nobody's and everybody's fault--and while we can point to redlining in the '50s and '60s it remains the case that the far more numerous neighborhoods built or which shifted populations in the '90s and '00s show the exact same properties and fault lines, and we can't blame events 60 years ago for that. We focus on the rhetorically convenient not the dominant or more widespread examples.

In the '50s and early '60s schools were more mixed by SES. You'd have smaller towns where it wasn't possible to have schools routinely segregated by SES. If segregated by race, even that provided some SES mixing. If not racially segregated, you still got SES mixing. Now it's rare and, to be honest, a lot of people find it a bit repugnant when it happens. There's more shame in low-income housing, and more of a shame associated with not being an arch-consumerist. Low-income areas are larger than before as cities and suburbs have grown to produce large middle or upper-middle class areas. So the first failing school I talked about above is in a sea of (new) inexpensive housing. There is no high-income neighborhood nearby. The school that flipped transitioned fairly quickly with higher-SES flight. It was mostly, but far from exclusively, white flight.

The point is that we've always had unequal housing. But school + economic success and unequal housing weren't so closely linked as now. Humble didn't necessitate feeling humiliated and inferior. And there's no good reason apart from culture for them being linked now. (And, in a democracy, popular culture will always be reflected in how society is run. Otherwise you need technocrats and oligarchs running things the way they should be, telling the masses what "proper culture" is.)

4. School funding is the same deal. A lot of top-notch schools didn't have the funding that a lot of failing schools have today. Failing schools require more money to deal with behavior, with lack of motivation, with student mobility and counseling. Even then, you don't need $10k in labware to be able to do a chemistry lab sufficient to demonstrate the point. Often $100 will do. But it's a pride "thing": They get all that money and equipment, and I'll be damned if I don't feel humiliated, inferior, and cheated if I don't get the same. Wham: A school's teachers, kids, and parents feel that the failing status is somehow imposed on their kids and it's not their responsibility.

In the case of school X above, the low-achieving school got all that money and equipment, and it didn't matter. Five years later the parents were chanting the same mantra--why don't we have a nice school and nice equipment? The excuse for their failing school had to be $$, not that their kids had driven off good teachers and trashed the equipment (or simply chose not to use it). The school I teach at is decades older, has much worse equipment, and its rating and college attendance rate is much higher. Increased funding to my school would boost achievement a little bit. More funding to School X above would do no more, at best. Not everything is centered around $$.

This is true only above a certain minimum level. Below a certain level you really can't run a school well enough. Above that level, you get nicer things and perhaps slightly higher achievement, but we're talking a few points on school rating, maybe 68 to 70. Not going from 68% pass rate to 90%. The details matter. But undermine the rhetorical goals.

That minimum funding and maintenance of schools with sound infrastructure is an outsider problem. Dealing with popular culture and concentrating poverty or producing large areas of low-SES housing is also a larger problem but one that requires politicians in a democracy reshaping mass culture and attitudes. Child behavior in schools and on the streets is not an outsider problem.

Somebody knows who was shooting a gun when Jamyla was killed and isn't talking. Parents usually know when their kids are out of control, and often the first response when an authority figure shows up is to protect their kid. When I was a child in the neighbors' front yard there were a group of young men; shots were fired, and one was killed. The mother's immediate response to the police was that her son was a good boy and did nothing wrong. Yeah, he had odd friends. He kept strange hours. He had money but no obvious job. He was often in his room with "friends." But she swore until he was sentenced for many, many years at a federal penitentiary that he (a) wasn't a burglar, (b) wasn't a fence and the stolen stuff in his room was either planted there or had been hers, (e) didn't deal drugs, (f) the gun in the yard matching the ammo in his dresser drawer wasn't his and the fingerprints on the gun weren't his. Her son was an angel. She added to the list after a month: (g) it was coincidence that the burglaries stopped and the rate of drug arrests declined as soon as he was arrested.

Group solidarity requires supporting those inside and blaming all bad things on the outside. Jamyla is a far more common occurrence than Mike Brown. Mike Brown got attention because he was killed by outsiders that were already considered enemies. Jamyla will only get attention if at least most of the blame can be thrown on outsiders. Group solidarity in these situations =/= social trust, and that's what we need. And do everything in our power to undermine.
There are always wanna-be messiahs happy to take up the mantle of blame or cynics who take it up just to throw it at their political or ideological foes.


"Jobs" in a neighborhood are an accursed issue. If they're manufacturing, immediately environmental justice comes up. Better to move the polluting jobs away--"pollution" being chemicals, or traffic, or noise, or things that are unsightly. Low-income folk often lack adequate transportation to get to better jobs. If they're white-collar jobs, then the level of education in the community comes up, and we're back to having crappy schools that can't provide the kinds of workers needed. What's left are really low-paying low-skill jobs, and those are service jobs that we think of as inferior.