Geniuses and Idiots

[captainsblog]

I spent most of the day on the road in Rochester. Only one specific appointment, a successful court visit to file something an opponent promised to file close to a month ago, but ultimately good news:

My backup laptop may be only Mostly Dead and has a good chance of coming back to life!

I'd recounted the story late in March of UBreakIFixNoWaitWeCant, and had pretty much left it there in the lurch. Or rather, in the Wegmans bag. My Rochester coworkers offered me A New Hope: the owners' son, an almost graduating Geneseo senior with a brilliant touch for such things, might be able to succeed at unriveting and reriveting where others had failed.  All they wanted to know was, did I have any irreplaceable data on the machine? (No, all backed up and/or clouded.) And could I wait for him to finish his finals in two weeks? (Absolfreakinlutely- I've made it this far without the thing:)

The other news about him is where he's heading after that undergraduation: he

was admitted to the RIT doctoral program last Friday - he is super excited!

He will be working in computational physics as it relates to ion movement and interaction in fuel cells which has to do with the conversion and storage of electrochemical energy... my layperson brain thinks really important things for complex batteries but I know that is an oversimplification. The truth is - it's computational quantum physics and I really don't understand it but my kid's excited so I am thrilled.

I have more details than that, but they may involve government labs and security clearances and if I told you, they'd have to kill me and then you.  But this is my tech support dude. I, also, am thrilled.

----

About the state of the Union, less so.

It's become more clear than ever that we are as much a House Divided Against Itself than we've been since the 1860s, as much over what divides us as over anything.  There are voices on the other side seriously trying to dispute the existence of racial division in this nation, even denying the past history of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and codes, deed and other legal restrictions that persisted well into my lifetime.  A Tennessee legislator this week actually tried to defend the three-fifths compromise in the Constitution as being good for Black people.  These are the signs, now bullhorned rather than dog-whistled, that are part of everyday life in this land.

Yet it was a sign of the dog-whistle variety that really got to me yesterday. 



Seeing that freshly planted real estate sign, on my way from the bank yesterday, bothered me. I mean, really REALLY bothered me. And since few who live more than about five miles from here will understand why, I will explain.

The town we live in contains three separate school districts. The one Emily attended from K to 12 has two elementary schools, that both feed into a single middle school and then one high school. The elementary schools are in geographic-defined attendance zones, but otherwise, for all academic and other purposes, Smallwood and Windermere should be in all respects comparable. Same curriculum, same teacher requirements, similar building ages. The only difference is that Windermere draws from a more racially and economically diverse portion of the district.

This realtor sign is pure dog whistle. It is as close to “whites only” as they can get away with in this day and age. We chose a home in the Smallwood section of the district, but we did not live here at the time and it was absolutely not a consideration. I don’t mind it being mentioned, any more than I would’ve minded any elementary school being mentioned in any listing, but putting it on the sign, which is obviously used over and over, is morally offensive to me.

I posted the above thoughts and got many thoughtful comments. Some concerned the "facts" of the matter: Smallwood kids do better on standardized tests. You could look it up. Yet how much of that is chicken and how much is egg remains unclear.  I do know that Emily, who attended Smallwood, met her Windermere-educated boyfriend (who she still lives with) in middle school, and Cam received just as good an education there as she did where she was- maybe more of one because of the diversity.  The school board could fix this disparity in a single meeting, as our previous school district did to alleviate similar geographic concerns. They could make one of them K-2, the other 3rd through 5th, and merge all students from the entire district as they already do once they hit sixth grade.  But the parade of Karens with torches and pitchforks would likely prevent such a move.  I'm sure they see only the scores, and the "reputation," and that some of their best friends are Black- and would never for a second consider the impact of institutional racism.

And that's the problem.

In terms of pure self-interest, I would likely be committing financial hari-kari by advocating such a position. "Smallwood" probably adds at least five figures of value to our home compared to a comparable on the other side of the attendance zone, if there even is one. (Oddly, some of the biggest mansions in all of Erie County fall in the Windermere area, but more of their kids are likely in prep and parochial schools.)  I don't care.  What's right is right, even if you can only see it when you're on the left.

You also see it more clearly when you have your own history of falling for it.  Growing up in an almost all-white community, I was insulated from most of the turmoil of riots and busing and other causes of strife that were a fact of life in some communities in our county and most of the big New York City just ten Expressway exits away from us.  We at least had some Black kids in our schools, most coming from Air Force housing at the edge of the district that the realtors couldn't dog-whistle away from us. Most of those kids were ostracized and segregated, save for the Star Athlete exception here and there (and relatively few of those, since our sports teams generally sucked). I was still in those schools when the Supreme Court took up Milliken v. Bradley, a Michigan case that attempted to expand the Brown v. Board of Ed holding to enable urban-suburban school integration as a further means of overcoming separate but unequal education.  I'll admit: I, and most of us 600-odd white kids, were scared to death of being bused into a more urban school. Nixon's Court "saved" us from that, but how many kids in those urban schools weren't saved as a result?

So yeah. I'm ready now to walk the walk as well as blather on about it here.