Posts Based on Reading: Post 2

11/30/14                           Reading: Blog Post 2

In the next bit of reading in The Making of African America by Ira Berlin, the meaning of Movement and Place in the African American past. The African American people are a “moving” people, they have been so for the past four centuries or so. With this movement comes inevitable problems and drama. Having to leave what you are comfortable and used to, having to adjust to the unfamiliar, and the journeys to the new destination. The four main migrations I mentioned in the previous post are still only examples. Movement was frequent for African American people, and is considered by Berlin, the “backbone” of of African American history. Place. Place is often where one has come from, where one is, or where one is going. However, place was also a social construct carried out by white supremacists that still lingers in our country today. Place can be about “staying in your place”, a tool of subordination. Frederick Douglass speaks of “Rootedness”, and claims that slaves are forced to root to the land they work for, while a free man develops less attachment to the land. Rootedness speaks to personal and material attachments within a certain geographic frame. It can definitely be restrictive. 

I think it’s pretty remarkable how through so much movement, African Americans have still carried their culture with them. It must have been incredibly hard to have to unroot from a place where you are familiar to a new , unknown area. An unknown area with new people, a new tongue, new food, new clothing, new work (for better or for worse), new climate, etc. I have had to do that only once and I found it to be quite an adjustment. So moving that frequently must have been very hard. The idea of place stuck with me. I’ve always thought of place as a location. It’s interesting and disturbing that it plays into a social hierarchy as well. I see “place” in a lot of injustices committed in history and in the present. “Place” was the underlying factor in the Emmett Till case, in the Trayvon Martin case, in one of the more recent that has captured national and maybe international attention, the Ferguson case involving Michael Brown. There is a long list of other cases as well that are just as important. I made the connection reading this that the second class citizen treatment of African Americans is a result of racism and discrimination, but to simplify a result of “place”. 

Posts Based on Reading: Post 1

11/24/14                      Reading: Blog Post 1

The book I am reading in order to write a blog post is called The Making of African America by Ira Berlin. The first chapter leads us into the main four migrations of African Americans. The first migration was the forced deportation of Africans from Africa to North America. The second forced migration was twice the size of the first. This was the movement of men and women from the coast of the North American Atlantic to the interior south, where the slave regime as we know it began (not the beginning of all slavery of course!). The third was the Great Migration, the journey from the South to the urban north to become wageworkers. The fourth, and most recent “main” is going on currently. It is the immigration of people of African descent into America from countries ranging from the greater Caribbean, to South America, and Europe. Berlin described the Middle Passage as a “nightmarish”, traumatic journey across the Atlantic Ocean to North American enslavement.“the Middle Passage also represents the will of black people to survive, the determination not to be dehumanized by dehumanizing circumstances (14). 

First, I’ve realized that the world of Africa/African America has been going through an evolution through each of these main migrations. These massive movements separated families, dehumanized even young children, created new neighborhoods with new unfamiliar neighbors, new types of work, new music, etc. In my African American Studies class we’ve been learning more about the Middle Passage, which relates to the first few pages of the book. It was an extremely grotesque journey. Men and women were packed in the ship like cargo, which made it difficult to breath. People were chained to chambers full of urine, feces, and blood. It’s important to keep in mind that some ships didn’t make it, whether that be due to rebellion, mass murder, illness, suicide, storms, etc. It really took a lot of resilience to survive that journey to America. The section of reading was more powerful having this context. The first main migration may have been later, but the very first slaves were taken out of Africa by Europeans around 1400 to the Iberian Peninsula. By the time the Middle Passage came around, slavery was relatively old. The opening of this book spaces out the timeline of the migrating African American people well. This mental organization is important to understanding the history and the present.

Minority Achievement Gap at BHS

Eli G

11/10/14           Blog Post: Minority Achievement Gap at BHS

I’ve discussed the minority Achievement Gap in a previous post, but this past week in my social justice class we were shown a power point that revealed discrepancy between students of color/white students and low-income vs. high income students.

What we found was that higher income students tend to do better academically in school because they tend to have parents who are proficient in English, have expectations and the money to put their kids through college, higher expectations from teachers, better communication with the school etc. Interviews done by the Sagamore (the school newspaper) demonstrated consistent reports from students of color, particularly black and hispanic students that they feel uncomfortable in higher level classes for two reasons. One, a higher population of black and Hispanic students are tracked into standard level classes, people like to be with people similar to them, at least some. And second, these students mentioned that there is a pressure in dominantly white, high level classes to disprove stereotypes. Anyhow I want to share some facts that the power point showed: Again this is specific to BHS!

-       Hispanic/Latino Students are twice as likely as white students to drop out of high school

-       Black students had an even greater chance of leaving Brookline High without a diploma

-       At BHS is 2013-14, 10% of all students were Hispanic but only 3% of all teacher were Hispanic. The staff clearly doesn’t mirror the student body

MCAS:  2013 ELA, percentage of advanced scoring: Whites about 70%, Blacks about 25%, Hispanic/Latino just under 50%

2013 Math: % of proficient or advanced scores: Whites about 90%, Blacks about 55%, and Hispanic Latino about 85%.

These were some eye opening statistics, and was the first time I was able to see a statistical reflection of the discrepancies among students of different demographics at BHS. Along with the numbers came the reasoning and faults of the school system.