Our View - Friday
School segregation
How King deregulated race
Apublic school is an extension of the state. So when administrators at Holmes Middle School sent only black students on a field trip — a decision based solely on race — they established state-sponsored racial segregation. It’s a relapse, reminiscent of a day when government schools enforced racism throughout much of the United States.
As reported in The Gazette on Thursday, Holmes has sent only black students to an annual Martin Luther King Jr. celebration for the past four years. Whites, Latinos, Asians — all others — weren’t allowed to go. The revelation has outraged a prominent civil rights leader who will host the world’s largest Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration Monday in New York.
“To segregate students by color, for this holiday, is immoral. I’m outraged,” said Niger Innis, national spokesman for the Congress of Racial Equality, based in New York. “The fact this school segregated these students by race cuts against the grain of how the civil rights revolution was won. One could argue that it’s more important for white kids to hear the message of Dr. King, because black kids at least have their grandparents and an extended community to tell them what it was like to be black before the revolution. White kids don’t have that advantage. But the fact is, Dr. King wanted equality for all students, regardless of race.”
Innis, who grew up in Harlem as the son of civil rights leader Roy Innis, told The Gazette he couldn’t muster the words to fully express his disbelief that in 2008 — “after all our country has been through” — a public school would send only black kids to a celebration of King.
We concur with his outrage.
Several hundred students from Colorado Springs schools attended the annual event at City Auditorium on Wednesday. Mayor Lionel Rivera and others lectured amid patriotic fanfare, educating students about King’s work. Each school was limited to bringing only a few dozen students because of space constraints. Katie Flamate, a counselor at Holmes, told The Gazette she decided to send only black pupils four years ago after consulting with her colleagues at the school. Principal Rob Utter decided this week the decision was a mistake, and said the policy would change next year. It’s unsettling that a policy of racial selection didn’t seem to trouble Utter until the Gazette’s minorities and demographics reporter called.
What message does this send to our kids? Probably this one: Only blacks should care about civil rights.
It boggles the mind that educators settled on a race-based system in the first place — for a civil rights event, no less. The elimination of state-sponsored, regulatory segregation is what we celebrate on King Day.
Before moving quickly to forgive the school and move on, we should use this sad revelation as an excuse to revisit history. We should remind ourselves that public schools — Little Rock, Topeka, Birmingham, Montgomery, to name a few — have historically been among the worst facilitators of statesponsored racism.
When King fought for equality, his battle was for deregulation. He wanted blacks in the same schools as whites, Latinos, Asians and others. He wanted an end to laws that forced blacks to the back of the bus. He wanted deregulation of race, because it forced blacks and whites to use separate drinking fountains, restrooms, sinks, hotels, restaurants and swimming pools. He wanted an end to government regulations that had blacks and whites using separate theater entrances. He wanted an end to separate government playgrounds for black and white kids. He wanted freedom for individuals, not power for government based on an authority to divide.
We can be certain King would tilt at the policy of a statefunded school that singles out blacks for a field trip, leaving all others behind.
Ideally, organizers of next year’s event will find a way to host all the district’s children. If they don’t, Holmes Middle School should draw names from a hat. Or the school could use an essay contest to choose who goes. It should do anything other than segregate by race — something King would abhor.
Refocusing in Afghanistan
The plan to send an additional 3,200 Marines into southern Afghanistan at least reflects a dawning understanding that the struggle to neutralize jihadism and jihadists may be going on more directly in Afghanistan and Pakistan than in Iraq — and the struggle is not going especially well. In the past few days a suicide bomber killed seven people in a just-built luxury hotel in Kabul, the Dutch government is looking into a “friendly fire” incident, and the Taliban and or al-Qaida forces effectively control much of the country outside the capital.
Not surprisingly, most of the NATO countries whose forces make up about half of the 54,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan are publicly rethinking whether they want to keep their military people at risk. The U.S. and Great Britain have disagreed publicly and sometimes nastily over counterinsurgency tactics. A Canadian government report notes that proportional to the number of troops deployed (2,500) the Canadian death rate in Afghanistan is higher than the U.S. death rate in Iraq. The Canadian commitment to Afghanistan expires next January and is not popular at home.
As remarkable as U.S. Marines are in their capabilities, it is unclear whether 3,200 more Marines, reportedly to be deployed in the opium-rich and Taliban-infested province of Helmand will make an appreciable difference on the battlefield. But their deployment is a signal to other NATO countries that the U.S. is more serious than it has seemed in the past about securing what at first seemed an easy victory in Afghanistan.
