Separate and Unequal, Brown v. Board of Education

There was a lot of information to take in from the videos and article, but what I could understand really opened my eyes. I never understood how Obama being elected as president was going to change generations of wrongful behavior and mindsets. I know now from watching the videos that it was just another steppingstone across a wide river towards equality and the obliteration of racism.

No one movement, event, or person will ever end racism and bring complete equality to America, but they can widen the eyes of Americans and open their minds to change, and that's exactly what has been happening for a long time now. Many people are blind to the racism that still exists today. "If you want to know if a problem is problem, you need to talk to those who are affected"- Tim Wise  I agree 100% that racism still does exist and it will exist until every American understands that it is unjust and unreasonable.

In Bob Herbert's article Separate and Unequal he says that schools have been "desegregated" but are now separating students based on social class. Putting all lower class students into one school and all middle class into another and all upper class into a different school creates problems of its own. Herbert says that first of all this makes a lot of schools nearly segregated by color, putting most African Americans and Hispanics in one school while most whites are in another. He goes on to talk about how awful this is because putting poorer people into the same school together has very little evidence of being good for the students.

Going back to this post I can relate this topic to Kliewer's Schooling Children With Down Syndrome and the conversations we had in class about separating students. When we separate students based on different things we are depriving them of the opportunity to learn from each other. Every difference even the slightest most insignificant one, is something that can influence someone's way of thinking and what they bring to the table.

"Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality." Bob Herbert