“A Very Different Elementary School”

I have a number of longer posts brewing, but this should be short enough to dash off.  Unfortunately, it’s not very sweet.

Today at lunch, I was sitting next to some co-workers discussing househunting.  One was excited about a house they’re looking at in Coralville.  After running through a list of (mostly good) qualities of the house itself, the speaker offered this final point:

“And, best of all, this one is right around the corner from Coralville Central Elementary!  The other one was near Kirkwood.  That’s a very different elementary school.”

Kirkwood Elementary is one of the 5 high poverty elementary schools in the ICCSD.  Its the only one of these in Coralville, and the only Elementary school in Coralville with a significant racial minority population. The words “very different elementary school” were accompanied by the kind of head-slightly-downward-and-eyebrows-raised look that says “this is significant and you know why.” Every person at the table was white. The speaker was dressed professionally.  The conversation indicated they had some latitude in choosing where to live, but that money was still a consideration.

I’m not writing this to demonize the speaker in this overheard conversation.  I’m not interested in parsing whether the person making this statement “is” racist or classist.  People share  ideas and fears and worries among friends that don’t reflect their best selves, and these words were not meant for a stranger’s ears.  My interest is the words themselves, though  I don’t want to oversell their evidentiary value, since this is clearly just an anecdote.  But, if I were looking for a textbook example of the kind of decision making that leads to high poverty schools remaining so or getting worse over time, I’d certainly have found one here.

I’m noting this here on the blog not only because segregation and integration in the ICCSD are core concerns, but also because there was some discussion of the Demographic imbalances between schools in the district at the Board meeting last week.  As these discussions continue, its helpful for all involved to remember that the demographics of our school zones are not a steady-state phenomenon, and that we need an active policy approach to keep ordinary people’s ordinary decision making from making these disparities worse.

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Oh how cute: a blog war with an anonymous Facebook page.

Several of the people in the ICCSD political arena have decided that the best way for them to influence policy is by running anonymous Facebook pages.  The first was the long-running “North Corridor Parents,” which has always claimed to be simply an information-disseminating page, but has a pretty distinct editorial slant, and which has even taken to endorsing candidates.  I’m not sure how that works with their stated mission, or why anyone should care about the endorsement of someone(s) who won’t actually reveal who they are, but hey, its a thing I guess.

The latest entry into this sweepstakes of fail is The ICCSD Monitor: Keeping an Eye on SES Integration In the Iowa City Community School District While Holding Down A Job As A Private Wrestling Tutor For Families Who Can Afford Private Athletics Lessons.  Actually, that’s not the name of it, or at least the last part of the name isn’t accurate.  You probably guessed that though.

I made the mistake of commenting on a thread on that page, mainly because I’m frustrated with a seriously inaccurate revisionist history that’s been floating around.  There are 3 main parts to this history: (1) that there are multiple, easy opportunities for economically desegregating the school district on the elementary level, (2) the people who have been advocating for the 2015 secondary boundaries either have not made any efforts to change those boundaries or have actively worked against them being changed, so (C) therefore they don’t actually care about socioeconomic integration, they are just trying to keep poor people and minorities out of City High.

Now, I can’t speak for every person who ever advocated for that 2015 plan, but I know that (1) is categorically untrue, and that (2) is at least very largely untrue, especially the second half, and that (3) is a spurious attack that would carry little weight even if (2) were true.  Its an attempt to discredit valid arguments about the benefits of SES desegregation of schools by casting doubt on the motivations of the people making those arguments.

So, this is pretty frustrating, especially when shadows of it come out in supposedly respectable venues, such as when Director Chris Liebig characterizes that plan as a plan to remove poor people and minorities from City High, ignoring the fact that the motions and adjustments that he and Directors Roetlin, Hemingway, and (then-Director) Yates made effectively removed a large number of poor people and minorities from Liberty High.* The latter effect, notably has no visible advocates in the ICCSD political circus, though I suspect that a small portion of the advocacy that invokes the transportation burdens of families at Kirkwood and Alexander (burdens not relieved under either plan, as I discussed here) is actually intended to achieve this end.  But that’s just a suspicion.  And, importantly, the fact that this is an unspoken aim of some of those advocates shouldn’t be taken as establishing anything about the character and intentions of the people sincerely advocating out of concern for some of the poorest families in the district. I would hope that it makes them re-think the effects that their advocacy might have on those families, but that’s all.

So, being frustrated with all of this, I posted a comment on a thread calling this out.  The anonymous admin commented back.  I answered him (he’s a him) and posted a link to an entry on my other blog, which I use just to keep track of links to online articles and sources of information. Since then, he’s replied multiple times, attempting to address some of the points made in the articles on my other blog.  I’m not taking the bait.  I’m not going to engage in a dialog with an anonymous FB page.  But, I may pick that dialog up here.  Because of this, I wanted a reference post for those replies, and that’s largely what this is.

*Regarding the title of Director Liebig’s editorial there, yes it should, at least as much as it listens to others.  But, low income families across the district don’t speak in a uniform, homogenized voice, and the voices that he is responding to don’t even necessarily speak for the bulk of the low income families at the two schools in question.

Non-Solutions: The May 10 Boundary Adjustments don’t solve the problems that Claussen, Liebig, Hemingway, and Roetlin claim they do.

One of the questions at the heart of the special school board election is the question of secondary boundaries that the current 6-member board is deadlocked on. Paul Roesler and Janice Weiner favor the boundaries adopted last year after lengthy community input.  These boundaries create something close to a demographic balance by class, and a less-dramatic balance by race, between all three comprehensive high schools in the district.
Candidate JP Claussen favors the adjustments made mid-meeting on a 4-3 vote on May 10th of this year. (It was after this vote that Director Tom Yates, whose campaign Claussen had managed, suddenly left the board, forcing the district to undertake a costly special election.)  Those boundaries would have Liberty High opening as an overwhelmingly white and affluent school, in comparison to the other two schools.

The previous plan created this rough balance by sending two of our highest poverty schools (Kirkwood and Alexander) and two of our lowest poverty schools (Wickham and Lincoln) to secondary feeders that are slightly more distant than their nearest school. Claussen (and current directors Liebig, Hemingway, and Roetlin) argue that we shouldn’t do this because the distance creates an undue burden on those Kirkwood and Alexander families, based on complaints from an unknown number of parents at those schools.  While I would always urge us to listen to the voices of parents at high poverty schools, like the one my child attends, I don’t think that these objections should determine the policy here, and I want to lay out some reasons why.

One thing that I want to make explicit is that the points below about the May 10th changes should be read in dialog with the premise that socioeconomic and racial integration has distinct benefits for every student in the district. There is much research supporting this. So, the arguments below aren’t just criticisms of the May 10 changers, they are arguments that the supposed benefits of those changes are poor trade-offs for the loss of such a benefit.

1. The issue of inadequate transportation to school is serious, and distance is an unfair burden on these families, but the changes made on May 10th don’t actually do anything meaningful to reduce that burden. Both schools are outside of comfortable walking distance to their closest feeders. Families in both zones would be bus-dependent under both scenarios.  Shortening their bus ride by 5 minutes won’t change that.  And in fact, since some of the families in question live within the 3-mile automatic busing radius of their closest feeders, sending them to one slightly farther away guarantees them busing to school that they might not otherwise have.

I want to stop here and do a double take, because it might be the most important of the points I want to make: while distance does create a real burden on families without reliable transportation, the supposed solution here does not actually ease that burden in a significant way, and in fact will increase it in some cases.

2. Regarding Kirkwood, specifically, the argument has been made that there’s no public transportation in North Liberty, where Liberty High is located.  This is true, but I think its significance is vastly overstated.  Taking public transportation to West from the Kirkwood area requires riding a bus to downtown Iowa City and then taking another bus from there to West High.  I suppose that, as long as its possible that this could happen, its wrong to absolutely say that it doesn’t.  But, former Northwest Junior High principal (and current West High principal) Gregg Shoutz has stated in public meetings that its not a resource that Kirkwood families draw upon with any regularity. Moreover, it seems much preferable to me that we demand that North Liberty create a public transportation system–something that would benefit its residents in many ways–instead of demanding that we compromise the educational opportunities of many students in the district.

3. Repeatedly in public statements JP Claussen and directors Liebig, Roetlin, and Hemingway have argued that they represent the interests of Kirkwood and Alexander parents as a whole, or that they represent the families that attend those schools with the least access to transportation.  The first claim is untrue, as neither school’s population is entirely unified on the question, and the second is unverifiable.  In fact, we don’t really, in the public arena, have any hard information about what percentage of the population of each school is making these complaints.  Some kind of quantification here would be helpful in determining what is or isn’t at stake in this trade off.

4. While the distances between these elementary zones and their high school destinations don’t differ much between the two plans, the distances to the Junior Highs are a concern.  This is particularly true of Kirkwood, which sits literally right next to Northwest Junior High, West’s feeder, but is a good distance from North Central, which feeds to Liberty.  Because of this, the original boundaries allowed Kirkwood students to choose which Junior High they would attend.  I think that similar modifications for Alexander, and perhaps for another feeder that would split between city and liberty, would make this set up less unique and make the entire plan more palatable, while still maintaining overall demographic balance at the high school level.

5. Advocates for the May 10 boundaries have repeatedly argued that low income students will be barred from participating in extracurricular activities under the previous boundaries.  They fail to notice that Hills is more distant from City and West than either of these schools are from their previous destinations, but has been assigned at different times to both City and West.  There have been no reports of Hills students being barred from extracurricular participation to my knowledge.

6. Advocates for the May 10 boundaries are fond of saying that it achieves demographic balance “at the expense of poor people” or asking when we will bus affluent kids to distant schools.  In doing so, they neglect the fact that Wickham and Lincoln were bused to more distant schools under the those borders, and that the May 10th changes threaten our ability to maintain that, by creating crowding at City and West and in their associated Junior Highs.

7. JP Claussen has argued that, rather than trying to create balanced attendance zones we should achieve demographic balance on the secondary level by  making each high school a kind of magnet, with specialized curricula, and allowing a greater degree of parental choice.  This actually deserves to be unpacked more fully, and I intend to do that, but here I want to note one of the problems with such an effort: it would require busing on a much larger and much more expensive scale than anything contemplated previously, and families without dependable transportation would be faced with much more dramatic distances to school than anything contemplated in last year’s borders.  Imagine that you’re in the Twain zone, and Liberty is a stem-focused campus and you wish to attend.  How much does it cost to make sure every kid like that has busing to the school of their choice?  What are the options for a family like that if they miss the bus?

In general, this last point underscores my worries about Claussen’s candidacy.  He has much enthusiasm for ideas that are noble and interesting, but seems unwilling to delve into the implications of specific policy proposals.  This is particularly problematic given that he would be the deciding vote on the question of secondary boundaries considered here.

Busing, Neighborhood Schools, and Quotas: Anti-Integration Rhetoric Making a Comeback in the ICCSD

As always, events continue apace with little or no consideration of whether or not I have time to right about them. I’ve been meaning to do a comprehensive post about the ICCSD School Board’s struggle with secondary boundaries, but matters pertaining to that keep coming up while that post is still under construction.

In a nutshell: last year, the Board set a secondary boundary plan in place that created a relative demographic balance of wealth, English Language Learner status, and special education status between all three comprehensive secondary schools in the district. It wasn’t perfect, by any means, (more on that later) but it was based on an extensive community input process and much board deliberation, and measures were put in place to ease the burdens of some low income students.  This May, a group of four board members approved a series of motions overturning key parts of that boundary plan, essentially creating a new set of secondary boundaries mid-meeting, while asking the superintendent for on-the-spot calculations regarding the demographic outcomes.  Unsurprisingly, this plan greatly increases the wealth and race-based disparities between the secondary schools in the district.

One of those four board members, Phil Hemingway, has a Letter to the Editor in today’s Daily Iowan.  It doesn’t specifically address the secondary boundary plan by name, but, the board is deadlocked 3-3 on this plan until next week’s Special Election, and the major point of contention in that deadlock is the question of whether two high-poverty schools (Alexander and Kirkwood) should feed into high schools slightly farther than those closest to them. Given this, its hard to see it as anything but a comment on that matter.

There’s really a lot in Phil’s letter that needs disputing, from the conflation of boundary changes for integration as busing, to the overstating of the costs of busing, to the implicit claim that sending extra resources into high poverty schools is as effective and as cost-effective as integrating them.  But what really sticks out to me on first reading is Phil’s use of language.  What’s below started out as a comment on the article itself online.  I’m adapting it here to include some references and to make it more cohesive.

Phil Hemingway’s use of words like “busing,” neighborhood schools” and “quotas is pure Nixonism.  A recent article in slate delves into how “controversies over “forced busing” [have] allowed racist school policies to persist in the north.” The term “neighborhood schools” itself was originally coined and popularized rhetorically in the fight against school integration, as a kinder, gentler way of saying “segregated schools.”  Phil’s reference to “quotas” is similarly drawn from the struggle to resist affirmative action. Iowa City liberals and progressives should have enough sense of history to do more than smile and nod when Phil says stuff like this.

 

It’s also worth noting that, per my nutshell explanation earlier, what the Board is currently at a standstill on is secondary boundaries. Its impossible for any one of the 3 high schools or 3 junior highs in the district to be a “neighborhood school” for anything but the tiniest minority of students whose families are lucky enough to own property very close to the school. Phil’s support of boundaries that increase the disparities between secondary schools has nothing to do with “neighborhood schools.”

 

The weighted resource model that Phil favors in his letter is a good partial solution. But not only does it perpetuate segregation in the long run if its used as the only solution, its simply not practical or politically sustainable in the long run. Making the class sizes small enough to do any good in high poverty schools depends on having enough available classrooms, which is not always the case. And, because we have to use state-allocated money to pay teachers, we can only make those classes so small, and in doing so, the class sizes in affluent schools will go up. As an outcome, that’s fine. But its highly unlikely to be politically sustainable, as parents in those affluent schools have more time and money to organize and advocate for their schools than parents in high poverty schools.

 

As a board member and a longtime school finance watchdog, Phil Hemingway should understand the mechanics and the politics of school funding well enough to see the flaws in such an approach.  As a community, we should have a deep enough sense of history to hear what’s going on in the rhetoric that he is using and reject it.  I wish I was more confident that either of these things was likely to happen.

Re-stating the case

Over at Michael Tilley’s place there is a thoughtful piece about how to try to account for socioeconomic status in redistricting, given that the USDA has sent a letter to the ICCSD demanding that the district stop using Free and Reduced Lunch data in its Diversity Policy. In advance of my own thoughts about how to approach this, and whether it was wise or not to use FRL data as a metric in the first place, I want to bring some comments I made there over here, since I found myself basically making (what I hope is) a fairly succinct case for the need to address socioeconomic disparities by changing attendance zones.

I was writing in response to two different comments.  One is particularly thoughtful and civil, from Iowa Citian Josiah Mclurg.  As Michael noted in his own response, Josiah’s perspective reflects a kind of common sense view of how K-12 schools work that’s pretty prevalent here and I think elsewhere.  Its also a view that, as Josiah himself says, doesn’t come from a deep experience with either local school politics or K-12 education.  Its a well-intended and civil comment, and I appreciate Josiah letting me bring it over here:

“So, I honestly don’t see the point of redistricting based on anything except population density and school size. Granted, I don’t know much about geographical politics and education law, so I may be way off base. But I had always assumed that city services like roads, power lines, water mains, fire departments, hospitals, and schools were intended to all provide reliable and effective service to the surrounding geographical community, and to be distributed in such a way that the whole city is served.

If a particular power substation isn’t working properly, the solution isn’t to redraw the utility infrastructure such that the affected population can still get power. Yes, that might work temporarily, but it’s a hack. The long-term solution is to fix the malfunctioning substation. Likewise, I don’t see how gerrymandering the school district map can help address the root problem of schools which aren’t properly serving their local communities. Might the school board’s cease and desist simply be a stern reminder to focus on improving schools rather than shuffling children around?”

My response:
Josiah – the problem is that the power substation analogy doesn’t really capture the dynamic in this situation. A substation operates in the same way, with the same efficiency, no matter what geographic area that we put it down in. That’s not the case for a school. Teaching and learning both work very differently in a school with a high poverty concentration than they do in a more affluent school. Students who come from impoverished backgrounds, who don’t get regular meals or regular sleep, whose parents are too busy working low wage jobs to be involved in the school or to provide meaningful education-related help at home, face barriers that middle class and affluent students don’t. Concentrating large numbers of those students in a single school, as we do in some of our schools where upwards of 70% of the students qualify for free and reduced lunch, concentrates those problems and makes those schools work less efficiently, especially for those kids who need the most help. This isn’t a case of a “malfunctioning” school, as any school dropped into that geographic zone is going to function the exact same way.

[Edit: What I maybe should have said is that no school is going function fully effectively if dropped into that situation. Obviously, different combinations of teachers/staff/facilities are going to function differently, but their functioning is all going to be compromised in some way. The research suggests that the small percentage of kids above the poverty line are going to be ok, but that a certain number of the large concentration of kids below the poverty line are going to fall through the cracks.  My own experience suggests that, contra test scores hobbled by transciency, the high-poverty schools in the ICCSD do an excellent job of trying to negotiate an unsustainable situation.]
Its also not a static problem. Once a school reaches a tipping point, which is usually somewhere in the high 50% FRL range, it tends to accelerate, as parents of means transfer out, or move out of the neighborhood. And, its exacerbated by the disparities in what kind of housing is available in particular neighborhoods. If there aren’t attractive housing options available for middle class or affluent families in a particular school’s attendance zone, then those families will seek housing elsewhere and attend a different school, and the high poverty concentration at the school will affect the market value of the housing that is in the school, further incentivizing those who can to move elsewhere. All of this works together to put schools in zones that become more and more economically isolated. If you want to stick with the power plant substation analogy you have to imagine substations with vastly different capabilities, and whole school zones where there are regular brownouts and blackouts and service interruptions, not because of any malfunction, but because of basic structural differences that result from the geography that they sit in. And you have to imagine that those substations become progressively less powerful as time goes on. Grant Wood school’s population was at around 40% FRL in 2008. Its now at 79%.

The other comment that caught my eye that I wanted to respond to was posted by the ever-busy-on-the-internets Anonymous.  Anonymous seems to be better acquainted with ICCSD politics and to have firm opinions about them that I think are completely wrong.

“The latest cease and desist order for Diversity Policy shouldn’t shock anyone considering the Iowa Dept of Agriculture and USDA told the school district that the policy would violate federal law back in March 2014. Murley and the board chose to ignore those warnings and continue on their path which unfortunately wasted time and resources. I agree completely with Josiah’s comments. Schools should be redistricted based on population density and growth only with students attending schools closest to their homes and provide additional resources to those schools that need them. Balancing socioeconomic status is theoretically a very noble goal but would be very difficult if not impossible to implement as a long term solution for many reasons.”

My response:
contra Anonymous above, there are a couple of reasons why it’s very hard to solve this problem with “more resources.” One is that it takes a tremendous amount of resources, specifically in the form of classroom teachers, to make a difference in a school with a high concentration of poverty, and those resources are at a premium in this district right now. We have fairly high class sizes right now, and just instituted awful budget cuts across the district. If you put the teachers required into the schools that need it, then class sizes are going to grow to an alarming degree in the more affluent schools. I’m skeptical that this will even be pursued with the necessary vigor, given that parents in the more affluent schools have the time and energy and social capital to become squeaky wheels in ways that this district has generally responded to, and in ways that most parents in the high poverty schools don’t. In any case, redistricting to achieve demographic balance is actually a lot less expensive than putting enough resources into these schools to actually make a difference. [Edit: Michael Tilley has looked at this issue in more detail and done some work comparing the cost of extra bus routes, often cited by opponents as the prohibitive cost in redistricting, vs the cost of making class sizes in these schools effectively small.]

The other problem with trying to solve this problem with additional resources is that its, as Josiah termed redistricting, a hack. It doesn’t solve the underlying problem that creates the disparities and the inefficiencies. It doesn’t do much to break the cycle that leads to some zones becoming increasingly economically isolated. And, because of this, that commitment of resources has to be ongoing, delivered year after year. This is not only expensive, it puts the district in the position of institutionalizing these disparities.

So, looking more thoroughly at this, balancing the socioeconomic demographics of the schools isn’t just a noble goal, its a less expensive and more sustainable way to fulfill a public school system’s basic commitment to deliver the same educational opportunities to every kid, regardless of their wealth or race or address.

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To be clear, I mean this more as a defense of the large principle of seeking to create balanced school demographics than as an absolute defense of every word of the ICCSD’s Diversity Policy as written.  When we get down to the level of the implementing policies designed to do that, it becomes more complex.  There were problems in each of the maps that did seem to stem from attempts to meet the policy’s hard numerical targets, and even then those targets weren’t met.  Its hard to parse how much of this is the fault of the Policy directives, how much depended on the interpretation of the policy directives by the Superintendent and administrative team, and how much was the effect of public outcry on that interpretation.  As the policy is suspended, and as its core metric looks to be unusable, my main interest here is keeping the principled and practical advantages of working towards balanced schools front and center.

There are a couple of points that came up in the discussion on Michael’s blog are related closely enough that I want to say something about them in closing. Each is worthy of its own post and I hope to put those together soon.  One is the topic of incentivized movement versus reassignment when seeking balanced demographics.  My quick take is that there are definite advantages to achieving balance through incentives like magnet schools.  Educational solutions always benefit from community buy-in, and I am glad to see the ICCSD exploring these options.  At the same time, I think that a school system has to retain the right to change boundaries in pursuit of this end, as school zones and informal neighborhood boundaries tend to become co-identified over time, leading to economically isolated school zones via the process I outlined above.  Perhaps if we make smaller changes more often we won’t have to contemplate such large scale ones, and we won’t be so prone as a community to see any reassignment as a prohibitive disruption?

The other topic, one raised by Anonymous in the post above, is the question of whether the ICCSD should have abandoned the Diversity Policy earlier because of questions about the use of Free and Reduced Lunch numbers as a metric.  I’ll definitely have more to say later, but my short take is that this is 20/20 hindsight in action and that the case against using FRL was never as open and shut as critics are now claiming it was.  There are quite a few school districts both in Iowa and in other states who use FRL data in exactly the same way that the ICCSD attempted to do, and who haven;’t received cease-and-desist letters from the USDA.  And, in fact, FRL data is one of the metrics that the Iowa Department of Education lists as approved for just such a use.  It looks to me that we have a conflict-between-agencies situation at both the state and federal levels that cries out for adjudication.  In the meantime, I applaud the efforts by members of the ICCSD Policy and Governance Committee to find a way forward.

“Intolerable Conditions”: Justice, Peace, History, and Context

I’ll be back to regularly scheduled programing next week, but I can’t ignore what’s happening in and radiating out of Ferguson, Missouri after the state grand jury decided that Mike Brown’s life wasn’t even worth a trial. Across the country, protesters are staging demonstrations in solidarity, blocking freeways, and otherwise trying desperately to signal that we simply cannot, if we have any conscience whatsoever, proceed with business as usual, because that business has been revealed to be corrupt and inequitable.  Its hard to get any kind of actual picture of this from any news aggregator as it rolls out, but I’d recommend Alderman Antonio French’s Twitter feed, and Twitter (#ferguson) in general as the best place to pick up news on the ground.

I don’t have the time or the means or the insight to offer any other overarching point, but I do have a few thoughts:

If you want a local connection to Iowa City and its surrounding areas, think about this: two decades ago, Iowa City didn’t have a large enough African American community to even have a “black part of town.” It clearly does now.  In his new book A Transplanted Chicago: Race, Place, and the Press in Iowa City, Robert Gutsche Jr. examines both the demographics that changed, and the role that the press played in assigning public meaning to that ongoing change. Understanding that we’re in the midst of this change is crucial I think for understanding the urgency of desegregating the ICCSD schools by both race and class.  Left unaddressed, our schools and our neighborhoods will only become more segregated, and these problems that the district has decided can’t be fixed without changes that are too disruptive will only become more and more acute. They’re going to be harder to fix later, not easier.

But, as this editorial reminds us, segregation isn’t the only issue at play, and in fact isn’t exactly  the main issue in Ferguson. Ferguson is 60% black and is in many ways less racially homogenous than some surrounding areas.  Instead, its disproportionate representation. Mother Jones runs down the appalling disparities between the governors and the governed in Ferguson.  Locally, Kingsley Botchway’s election to the Iowa City City Council last year is a hopeful step, as his appointment as ICCSD equity director may also turn out to be, but we have a long way to go in integrating our teachers and administrators as well as our police force, and the history of police violence that still echoes through Iowa City should help us see how urgent this is.

The history that leads us to Ferguson and so many other places is complex, and ongoing.  This summer, Ta Nehisi Coates, who might be our most important and accessible public intellectual took a deep dive into that history.  Go read it if you haven’t.  Much more recently, in the pages of Counterpunch, Robin D. G. Kelley, who might deserve the same title, frames the events in Ferguson and a multitude of other tragedies as part of an ongoing low-level war between the state and black and brown communities.  Its harsh, but its real. go read it.

Last, there is and has been a great amount of finger-wagging at the destruction of property last night in Ferguson.  I’m not here to minimize that, as I think its both morally wrong and tactically wrong.  But I understand it, and I think that understanding is aided with some context.  Some of the context for the violence is provided in the links above, but the moralizing deserves its own context.  Why do we decry  irrational destruction in response to a legitimate community tragedy, but turn a blind eye to it when its a response to winning or losing a football game?  Could it be because one affirms and the other threatens our racially lopsided social order? And, why do people continue to try to invoke Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in their finger wagging when he said this:

“Now I wanted to say something about the fact that we have lived over these last two or three summers with agony and we have seen our cities going up in flames. And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. I’m absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened over the last twelve or fifteen years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”

Thoughts?