The dominant narrative of the civil rights movement is a story about selfless Whites fighting Southern injustice. Usually the movement is presented as made up of devout Christians and freedom fighters, struggling against the prejudices of ignorant Southern Whites. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is the civil rights movement was plagued by the same forces that plague any setting where Whites and Blacks intermingle: violence, theft, criminality, resentment, and sexual dominance.

White civil rights workers who left the North to organize resistance to Southern segregation approached their jobs with religious fervor. One White woman captures this spirit: “There is no doubt in my mind this is worth dying for. … This love is growing every day and will continue to expand and expand until it defeats all hate all over the world” (Rothschild, 1982, p. 133). Please note the woman’s messianic mentality: she wants to defeat hate “all over the world.”

White civil rights workers were shocked to discover that local Blacks in Mississippi resented and resisted White domination of the civil rights movement. Grassroots Blacks wanted local, Black control of civil right organizations and sought to ensure White men and women were in a subordinated, powerless position (Rothschild, 1982, p. 132). Blacks believed Whites were smug and acted superior to Blacks (Watson, 2010, p. 267). On the other hand, White civil rights workers came to view Blacks as essentially lazy and stupid (Watson, 2010, p. 267). White volunteers were greeted with suspicion and mistrust. Read more

What it is Like to Teach in Failing Schools: A Memoir, an Inquiry and a Critique (2016)
by A. Teacher

Even without the students present, a visitor familiar with middle-class White schools would notice that Atlanta’s “Fairfield Junior Academy” is different. Walking the halls he would observe that there were no lockers. “[W} e moved all the lockers into the classrooms because most of the fights and drug deals took place during transition time when students went to their lockers” (76). If the visitor was unfortunate enough to need the restroom, he might see “dried diarrhea on the walls and toilet in the bathroom stalls” (111). Venturing into a classroom he might encounter vandalized computers and locked file cabinets that had been broken into.

As the subtitle indicates, this book is part a memoir, part a scathing critique of the educational establishment that some call Big Ed. This reviewer has twenty years’ experience in secondary and tertiary education. Fortunately, I have not experienced many of the problems the author relates, at least not to the same degree. Thus some of the dysfunction A. Teacher (AT) describes is particular to his type of school — a failing junior high — while other problems are systemic and likely to be experienced by most public school teachers in America.

The reader might conclude from the opening paragraph that Fairfield in one of those neglected, underfunded minority schools one hears about. While it is a non-White school (70 percent Black, 27 percent Hispanic), it is not underfunded. “Our school was flushed with money” (12). There was plenty of technology — computers, iPads, smartboards, and printers in every room. There was also widespread theft and vandalism, plus poor maintenance of the facility.

American education is often top heavy with administrators. This is particularly true of urban schools. So, in addition to student misbehavior, a major complaint of Mr. Teacher was the reams of paper work and endless meetings his position required. These demands left little time for lesson planning, and made classroom management more difficult. Because every behavior issue needed to be thoroughly documented it was less likely a teacher would take action.

One way a bureaucracy insulates administrators from day to day problems is the put-it-in-writing strategy. A “Response to Intervention” form was required “to document every infraction a child commits, complete with where the incident took place, what preceded the incident, what the infraction entailed, and the consequences that followed” (89). Even with documentation teachers at Fairfield felt the administration did not support their efforts to maintain order. Read more

A review of Facing Reality in American Education by Robert J. Walters

There are over 1200 schools of education in the United States awarding upwards of 175,000 Masters Degrees each year. Prospective students are increasingly selected on the basis of demonstrated commitment to egalitarian ideology; in any case, all of them are  intensively marinated in that way of thinking for a couple years or more before being let loose in America’s classrooms. There, of course, they observe White, Jewish and Asian students outperforming Blacks and Mexicans—over, and over, and over again.

Some teachers’ beliefs are unaffected by even a lifetime of observation contradicting what they have been taught; such close-minded ideologues are the successes of our ed school system. But for many of their colleagues, cognitive dissonance is painful, and their inability to “make a difference” in the lives of their young Black and Brown charges can be deeply discouraging.

The education establishment makes sure these well-meaning teachers have nowhere to turn. Some become cynics who go on mouthing the platitudes they have been taught while learning not to care about their students. More than a few drop out of the profession entirely, at a considerable sacrifice of time and money invested. Very few, we can be sure, ever stumble across American Renaissance or any other publication that might allow them to make sense of their experiences. Read more