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The principal who did that in Atlanta was black.

FireBeyond 5y ago
There's a really good book and essay called "Southern Rites" by Gillian Laub that talks about segregation in schools, particularly in Georgia, where, to be clear, _public_ schools have been called out for having segregated proms as recently as 2019. When a white girl lobbies her principal about this, part of his dismissal is "well, you should know the black parents all agreed to this at the PTA meeting, too", as if that was some validation, rather than some amazingly awkward, duressed situation where the all white school board and PTA says "we have a motion to discuss de-segregating the prom", and some parents being quite likely fearful to vote. (I say that, because in this situation, the tie between the book and the girl is that her black boyfriend was shot dead by one of her family members for being on their property). The notion that systemic racism in the US was a solved problem when MLK stood up and said "I have a dream..." is still far too popular.
- namelessoracle 5y ago
  This is alot of words that dont actually say anything other than "Georgia" bad. Your position is that a black educator in the Atlanta Public School system that has a black mayor and is defiantly against the mainstream of rural southern politics, decided to segregate the students for what reason exactly? I would venture to guess using this weird thing called "empathy" where i try to look at the other side in good faith is that the female POC Principal wanted to make sure there were classes where the black students werent a small minority in their classes. My understanding of how the makeup of this school in particular was that it was not made up of predominantly black students and that the classes the black students were concentrated into were about half black when it came to students. I would further venture to guess that it was just a tone def attempt to make it so those students were around "more people like them". This is the whole rationale of poc only safe spaces on college campuses. Alternatively there was some conspiracy where the black female principal was pressured into doing this by someone. Seeing as how the Atlanta school board immediately cracked down on it that seems unlikely. But maybe the evil pta pressured her? Let me know which scenario you think is more likely.
  - FireBeyond 5y ago
    I didn't imply any such thing. One would think though, that if things were so meritorious, then it wouldn't have been this unadvertised, undisclosed scenario that resulted in discipline and investigations, but instead might have been touted as a worthy attempt to address educational challenges of POC. I certainly wasn't saying that an evil PTA was threatening to lynch the principal if she didn't. But to discount the challenges faced by a system in a state which -to this day- has horrendous issues with systemic racism in the education system, and state that they entirely don't have an impact, subconscious or conscious on people within that system goes against every study and observation.
    - namelessoracle 5y ago
      What exact systemic challenge do you think that a black principal in the atlanta public school system suffered that caused them to do this then?

There's a really good book and essay called "Southern Rites" by Gillian Laub that talks about segregation in schools, particularly in Georgia, where, to be clear, _public_ schools have been called out for having segregated proms as recently as 2019. When a white girl lobbies her principal about this, part of his dismissal is "well, you should know the black parents all agreed to this at the PTA meeting, too", as if that was some validation, rather than some amazingly awkward, duressed situation where the all white school board and PTA says "we have a motion to discuss de-segregating the prom", and some parents being quite likely fearful to vote. (I say that, because in this situation, the tie between the book and the girl is that her black boyfriend was shot dead by one of her family members for being on their property). The notion that systemic racism in the US was a solved problem when MLK stood up and said "I have a dream..." is still far too popular.

namelessoracle 5y ago
This is alot of words that dont actually say anything other than "Georgia" bad. Your position is that a black educator in the Atlanta Public School system that has a black mayor and is defiantly against the mainstream of rural southern politics, decided to segregate the students for what reason exactly? I would venture to guess using this weird thing called "empathy" where i try to look at the other side in good faith is that the female POC Principal wanted to make sure there were classes where the black students werent a small minority in their classes. My understanding of how the makeup of this school in particular was that it was not made up of predominantly black students and that the classes the black students were concentrated into were about half black when it came to students. I would further venture to guess that it was just a tone def attempt to make it so those students were around "more people like them". This is the whole rationale of poc only safe spaces on college campuses. Alternatively there was some conspiracy where the black female principal was pressured into doing this by someone. Seeing as how the Atlanta school board immediately cracked down on it that seems unlikely. But maybe the evil pta pressured her? Let me know which scenario you think is more likely.
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  I didn't imply any such thing. One would think though, that if things were so meritorious, then it wouldn't have been this unadvertised, undisclosed scenario that resulted in discipline and investigations, but instead might have been touted as a worthy attempt to address educational challenges of POC. I certainly wasn't saying that an evil PTA was threatening to lynch the principal if she didn't. But to discount the challenges faced by a system in a state which -to this day- has horrendous issues with systemic racism in the education system, and state that they entirely don't have an impact, subconscious or conscious on people within that system goes against every study and observation.
  - namelessoracle 5y ago
    What exact systemic challenge do you think that a black principal in the atlanta public school system suffered that caused them to do this then?