Response to a "GL Educator's Perspective on Diversity as 'Regressive' in Schools"

Hey Justin, former GL student here. As with your article, I’m having a tough time understanding your logic.

1. You seem to be saying (backtracking, really) that you don’t think diversity is regressive but in your opening paragraph you quite explicitly write: “One need only visit the DOE website to find a message proclaiming, "all students benefit from diverse and inclusive schools and classrooms". There's only one problem - students don't. In fact, when push comes to shove, it turns out that a quest for diversity leads to unintended consequences that make things worse. That is, when multiculturalists promote diversity into policy, outcomes are less equal and more regressive.”

Seems like you do find diversity as a policy regressive and not as a perhaps insufficient building block to racial equity and justice in the education system, as you’re trying to imply now. I’ll admit your argument style was kind of hard to follow, but you were successful in making that point clear. If you’re arguing that diversity is regressive as a policy but not as a concept, I’m not sure how you intend for diversity and equal opportunity to magically appear - history shows that the unfettered “invisible hand” is not an equitable one in this country, to put it lightly.

In fact, you seem to be saying diversity as a policy isn't a necessary prerequisite for these schools to succeed, but BH Unfiltered seems to be saying diversity policies are not enough for students to succeed in these schools. Two different conversations. The fact that students with access to exclusive opportunities are capable doesn't invalidate the fact that many don't have the necessary access to those same opportunities and/or access to the resources that might make them capable as well.

2.** Black people, not Blacks. Just a note for future use, referring to groups of people by their qualifier and not as people comes across as a bit dehumanizing and quite frankly lazy. I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, but that doesn’t make it less true. Also who are "the multiculturalists"? Having a hard time deciphering who exactly is included in these amorphous groups of people we should be afraid of.

3. So, what DID happen around the 1980s? A million dollar question. The answer? President Ronald W. Reagan!! What went wrong, you ask? As the BH Unfiltered team mentioned in their response, food and housing insecurity play an enormous role in lack of access to the conditions that foster educational success. During Reagan’s tenure as president, “federal spending on low-income housing plummeted from $32 billion to $7 billion.” Economic downturn in the 70s collided with Reagan’s incessant slashing of social spending, under the pretense of reducing government spending as a whole (while raising military expenditures exponentially, of course). Income inequality soared, and the “War on Drugs”* launched our current era of mass incarceration, with incarceration rates taking off (consistently affecting Black and Latino communities at exponentially disproportionate rates) between 1982 and 1984. To play fair bipartisan here, since as you pointed out Wilson was indeed terribly racist (so are most US Presidents), Clinton did not reverse policies that contributed to mass incarceration and in fact expanded them.

(As a side note, let's not delude ourselves into thinking that Wilson was the sole architect of segregation in the United States? It took an entire society - an entire moral and legal system acting every day at every level of government and in both parties - to create the post-Civil War segregationist state that we did, starting with Andrew Johnson. Lincoln didn't sign the Emancipation Proclamation because he thought Black people and white people should be equal.)

4. Anyways, why do I bring up mass incarceration? Because it is quite connected with racial injustice in the education system; as is food and housing insecurity, as are racial disparities in hiring and economic mobility, as is the legacy of slavery, as is the era of sharecropping, as are Jim Crow laws and practices, as is white terror, as is voting disenfranchisement, as is police brutality. The idea of America as a meritocracy is a myth and a tool of white supremacy. As the BH Unfiltered team has so eloquently expressed time and time again, the answer to this is not “work harder” because we are not where we are because some people worked less or cared less. We are where we are because of everything that happened before 1979 and everything that happened after. It’s quite difficult to compete with peers that do not face active criminalization and police violence, let alone the inheritance of the 80s that not only perpetuated the particular intergenerational cycles of poverty that Black and Latino communities face, but made them worse.

*The War on Drugs is the campaign that got its soft start under Nixon until it exploded under Reagan’s presidency. It’s perhaps too simplistic to say that the War on Drugs was solely a mechanism for targeting Black people, but regardless of whatever slack you want to cut Nixon or Regan on their intentions (a former Nixon aide did openly admitted that the War on Drugs was quite explicitly racially motivated, although Vox adds some nuance to that confession), it has undeniably had an incredibly pernicious impact on Black communities. From disparate laws on drug sentencing drawn along racial lines, to establishing a pretense for aggressive and ubiquitous policing in minority communities, the “fight against drug addiction and for the safety of our children” further stripped down security, rights, and access to opportunity for Black and Brown communities. In the midst of militarization, harsh rhetoric, and increasingly punitive measures as a response to drug use (but only a Black person’s drug use, keep in mind), welfare spending was absolutely gutted - housing projects fell into disrepair with no new ones coming, incomes dropped with no safety net, and access to health care or rehabilitative services was replaced with incarceration. THAT is the legacy of the 1980s. And it’s all connected with dynamics of racism today, just as it’s connected to historical dynamics of slavery and segregation - because slavery and its legacy are foundational to mass incarceration and inequity in literally all aspects of our society. Nothing suddenly happened in the past three decades to reverse course - a) there was never an anti-racist track in this country to derail b) it's not a change in direction when all of our country's history led up to the Reagan era and then his successors upheld and expanded on his - and all of his predecessors' - work.

5. Government policy IS indeed a problem. The solution is not for the US government or any city government to attempt to solve these interconnected, historically-rooted, systemic issues as they have been doing. Policies that aim to promote diversity in schools and make admission processes more equitable are a start but they are NOT the end of what needs to be done. That being said, failed housing projects or government initiatives are not a reason to throw out government policy as a concept. The solutions to these systemic issues require complex and innovative approaches - solutions that come from within communities and from elected officials that actually represent their interests. Ultimately, these solutions won’t come from the system as it is, because the problem is the system as it is.

More sources and reading (you’ll notice neither I nor BH Unfiltered included quotes from random children as "evidence" in our responses, by the way):

- https://shelterforce.org/2004/05/01/reagans-legacy-homelessness-in-america/ —> provides more info on Regan-era housing policies, including how his own rhetoric contributes to our present-day idea of poverty as personal choice or criminal

- https://www.kcet.org/shows/socal-connected/the-rise-of-homelessness-in-the-1980s

- The documentary “13th” ties all of these dynamics together in ways that are way beyond me, I highly recommend the 1hr and 40 minute watch (available on Netflix)