I joined the NAACP last week. And I let my membership in AARP lapse. I feel more need to show solidarity right now with people of color and those divided by socio economics than I do with retired persons. I am outraged by the actions of the majority on the Wake County school board. I will leave to others who know more than I about what a return to neighborhood schools would mean for diversity in our community and beyond, but the behavior and rhetoric of the school board majority and the hatred and inhumanity of their followers that write letters to the editor and online responses to news stories, simply put horrifies me.
Division has a place in the garden. Recently, on one of those "cool" days in the 80s we had a couple of weeks ago (it seems a distant memory), I edged my sidewalk, dividing my lawn (or the weeds that I call a lawn) from the pavement. I re-edged my garden to keep the lawn from encroaching. One of my beds has the less-than-attractive black edging around it, while a brick border separates other beds from invasion. All to keep lawn and flowers separate, but equal; all in their place. Bulbs need to be divided so that they can grow better. Trees and shrubs need to be pruned in order to thrive. Weeds have to be pulled because they will take over if given a chance. I have boxed flowers into containers rather than let them roam free. But this week I have been thinking about the way we divide people from people.
Five of the books I have read this summer, by pure coincidence, have similar themes: The Help, Katherine Stockett and Blood Done Sign My Name, Tim Tyson (the southeast in the 1960s); Stones into Schools, Greg Mortenson (the middle east in the present day); The Postmistress, Sarah Blake (Europe and the USA, WWII); and The Things that Keep Us Here, Carla Buckley (current day pandemic). Each of them are stories of divisiveness; of one side against another; of the consequences of holding one group of people down and using their backs for one's own climb to the top. Us and them. This is the strong root giving life to family squabbles, neighborhood rumbles, city riots, and international wars. I see that happening in the neighborhood school takeover: people in power using their status to do harm in the name of doing good--for their own kind.
We self-divide all the time. We choose what church we will attend and what neighborhood we will live in. We rule out friendship with certain populations of people, sometimes by choice and sometimes by lack of opportunity; sometimes by inability to communicate due to different languages, interests, or experiences. We make decisions, consciously or not, that separate us from those who choose differently. Although these are our choices, I daresay we are always the lesser for it. But why do we choose these containers? I believe it's often because we are afraid of what we don't know, it makes us uncomfortable. And we don't know it because we didn't learn it. And we didn't learn it when we were children. We hang on tight to what we learned in kindergarten, for better or worse.
I grew up in a small town that was divided only by railroad tracks: socio-economic division. There were no people of color in the entire population of the town, much less children of color in the classrooms. There were four elementary schools and we went to the one nearest our home, but we all joined together at the solitary junior and senior high schools. One of the neighborhood schools was in the center of town and the other three on the edges, beyond the tracks. The town school was exclusively the relatively upper class students, one of the others was the lowest income level, and the other two were mixed low and middle income. When we all arrived at secondary school, I longed to be in the Edison School clique, a clique that remained securely intact for the next six years. The Logan School kids remained, for the most part, the untouchables. PE teachers sometimes chose those kids to be team leaders because they were the toughest; and even they, in the unconscionable custom of letting the captains chose teams child by child, picked the Edison girls first. I am grateful beyond measure now, that I was not fenced into a clique, that I was not among the chosen few. I can see now that adult cliques are what happens when we don't learn early in life that the world is not made up of people just like us, and that none of us are better than anyone else. If we don't learn to play together in the sandbox or share stories in creative writing class, we will rarely be able to do so as adults. And those who are oppressed will have nothing to lose by fighting with violence and hatred for that of which they have been deprived. And in one way or another, most of us have some level of oppression, even if only because we have been kept in containers in elementary school.
One of the arguments for neighborhood schools being touted by the school board majority is that kids shouldn't have to ride the bus when there is a closer school. I am pretty sure they never asked the kids if that is a hardship! My first two years of school the bus passed my house twice. Every chance I got I caught it on the first passing so I could ride to the end of the route where my best friend, Maggie Jo Cummings lived. The next four years, in another town, I could walk or be driven half a mile and catch the bus on its last stop or I could get on at the end of my driveway, the first stop, and ride for an hour. (Of course, it was reversed on the return trip.) I usually chose the long trip (if I could get down my Cocoa Krispies--the only cold cereal I would eat--fast enough). I liked the view around the hill and through the dale, I loved watching the day break, I needed the transition time between home and school and back again; I did my homework; and I saw how others lived and spoke to those I would otherwise not have known.
I tried to enlarge a strip of garden in the midst of this drought. Now if I had actual grass, it might have come up easily; but weeds hang on with impressive tenacity, especially when they don't have enough water. I finally had to give up the fight. It is only through the water of education, a spirit of open-mindedness, an acceptance that we are all children of the one who is More, a willingness to sit side-by-side with people with different experiences than our own, even when it makes us uncomfortable, that we will let go of the dry soil and learn to live and work together in the world rather than dividing and destroying ourselves and each other.
Division and containment have their place in the flower and vegetable garden, but not in God's garden. Children who go to school with their own kind, are more likely to feel a sense of entitlement to preserve that lifestyle as adults. Sometimes we have to box teenagers and adults in because they are believed to be in danger of harming themselves or others. They were boxed out as children, and consequently later they have to be boxed in. No one, no one at all, is well-served by a world of people trying to preserve the garden for themselves.
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