Race, education and the wrong answers

IS THERE ANY discussion in America more explosive and less honest than the one about race and education? Last year’s 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision, which ordered the desegregation of public schools, ended up more sober than celebratory, as a disturbing number of experts concluded that integration has still not happened.

But there is a more local story that (albeit inadvertently) lays bare the tragic modern nuances of the relationship between race and education that are almost never acknowledged, let alone discussed. And I’m not referring to Andrew Jones, the crusading young conservative and UCLA alumnus who, beneath his anti-liberal rhetoric, is a disaffected white man with race issues.

For the last year, a group of concerned citizens in Ladera Heights has been trying to break away from the Inglewood Unified School District and join the Culver City Unified School District. Ladera Heights is a relatively affluent, significantly black enclave just northwest of Inglewood and just southwest of Windsor Square and Baldwin Hills. An unincorporated community, it joined the Inglewood school district in the 1960s, when Inglewood was undergoing a demographic shift from chiefly white to chiefly black, although its leadership was still overwhelmingly white and its schools were well regarded.

Inglewood is now mostly black and Latino, and its schools are generally low performing. The longtime “solution” for many Ladera and Inglewood parents has been to send their children to private schools, or to get a special permit that allows them to send their children to a school in another district. But members of the Ladera Heights Civic Assn. understandably got tired of this end run around their own school district, for which they pay taxes, so the group filed a petition to join a better one -- namely, Culver City’s. (A county education committee recently rejected the switch, but the association plans to appeal.)

On the surface this looks to be purely an issue of class expectations, of families exercising their basic American right to demand good schools to go along with good neighborhoods and solid property values. But it is also about race. Inglewood schools are undesirable not only because they’re low performing but because they’re black; Culver City schools are desirable not only because they’re higher performing but because they’re mostly white.

A letter circulated among Culver City residents this month by the Ladera Heights Civic Assn. explaining its mission is so eager to identify with Culver City and its many social benefits, it borders on being obsequious. “Like you, we’re proud of our safe, tranquil, congenial and beautiful community,” the letter reads. “Inside our homes are families with the same goals, standards and hopes as you’ll find throughout Culver City.” It also hastens to assure the good people of Culver City that “contrary to the rumors, there will be no school busing” (emphasis in original).

In other words: We are respectable black people, not uncouth, uneducated Negroes who screw things up for everybody else and tend to invade white schools like a virus. (Note the emphatic denial of busing; is there any word more racially charged for whites?)

The letter also says that declining enrollment in Culver City schools will “allow the absorption of Ladera children with neither displacement nor disruption and no net gain in Culver City classroom sizes.” Translation: You’ll hardly know we’re there! Here is a promise not of integration but of invisibility, not of racial reconciliation but of a forced-smile re-identification on the part of black people weary of trying to make things work in their own backyard.

I do not excuse the failings of the Inglewood school district and of Inglewood leadership. The Ladera group says it has lobbied Inglewood officials to make improvements in its schools, with unsatisfactory results. I believe it. At the same time, I know that if the black middle class continues to recoil from the problems and failures it associates with the lower class, we will never find a way out of our unequal-education mess.

One Inglewood school board member called the Ladera proposal racist, which, strictly speaking, is inaccurate; self-loathing or self-interested is more to the point. Either way, what matters is that black people of all classes are suffering the effects of too little achievement, affirmative action notwithstanding. If we don’t get honest on this point and unify instead of separate, if we don’t connect the dots ourselves, we can hardly expect America to do it for us.