A Rosa by any other name would smell just as bad
My wife recently sent a letter to the editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer in which she is pointing out the problem of the current Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) director's position on "haves and have-nots." The director, Rosa Blackwell, recently claimed that CPS was made up of haves and have-nots. Stick with me here, this is not about CPS or school budgets.
The thing about CPS is that it's so dog poor and terribly governed that to claim that someone is one of the "haves" is like trying to decide which homeless person in Cincinnati has it too easy. So as per the published letter, referenced above, my wife wrote the following statement:
"Her [Rosa Blackwell] division of CPS schools into "have" and "have-not" schools is small-minded; and judging by how she's managing things, her response to slavery would have been to make everyone equal by making everyone slaves."
Now I thought that was a delightfully crafted point. However, it appears that it has bothered some people (White people) for reasons we can only assume are race based or based on the pain of slavery. It so happens that Rosa Blackwell is a black woman . . . not that I see color, a la Colbert . . . and God. But I thought that the statement was not racist at all; indeed, for me it uses the pain of the reality of slavery to illustrate a current political failure. For those who know us, we are not Americans, so maybe we're missing something. But is it now the case that we may not even employ an historical event in the context of our conversation and debate? Is it that we fear that we might suddenly start enslaving people again? Or are we just so ashamed of slavery in US history that we dare not mention it's name? A Rosa by any other name would smell just as bad.
5 comments:
Slavery isn't even exclusive to American history. It isn't merely an historical concept! One of the biggest black market industries running today is the sex-slave industry, for crying out of loud.
I suspect the objections come from well-intentioned ignorance -- or, the weak-hearted liberal suspicion that racism lurks around every corner.
Indeed. I recently heard that there are at least 25 million slaves today. Of course, this figure redefines slavery a little, but only by broadening the term, so it's not as if there are no slaves existing in the way the US had slaves.
I assume the difference here is that slavery occupies a unique position in the American discourse, and when we speak of it here, we do so with reference to a government or nationally sanctioned atrocity.
It's nice of you to label ignorance as "well-intentioned." I wonder about this though, because I wonder about the degree to which knowledge in our culture has become an ethical product and not one only born of epistemological inheritance: is it really liberalism if its manifestation is paranoia; isn't that the province of conservatives?
I wonder about the degree to which knowledge in our culture has become an ethical product and not one only born of epistemological inheritance.
Has it ever been any different, though? This seems unavoidable to me.
On one level, I think that people have always chosen (the ethical act) to believe or not believe something (taking "believing" to be the acceptance of information as knowledge) for reasons quite apart from whether it appeared epistemologically reasonable or unreasonable.
But I think about the real world experiences of say someone now growing up in Darfur who is so positioned socially so as not to be able to reflect on whether a certain chunk of knowledge is held by choice. I'm loosely saying this right now, perhaps more later, but I extrapolate from that to imagine the pre-self-reflexive age as one ignorant of knowledge as a choice.
Read the blog and the letter to the editor. I am very frustrated by the school system right now. I think the efforts toward fiscal responsibility are warranted. The problem is that the most successful schools like Hughes (& Fairview) are being hit hardest. The rules for the local schools keep changing. The morale of teachers is incredibly low at schools producing the best results.
Regarding the metaphor of slavery, it is extremely powerful in our culture. We have never really dealt with its legacy in a wholistic way, and we also don't know how to dialogue about slavery in the US. Because of that, I would not have used a slavery metaphor because it muddies the waters. That is clearly not the intent, but it is so loaded that any use of slavery in an argument will automatically raise the temperature.
Race and racism are alive and well in the dialogue about our schools and in why they are in the shape that they are in. It would be interesting to simply step back and analyze all the racial and class dynamics at work in this situation, and add to that gender dynamics.
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