I’ve often thought genealogy is a privilege not afforded to people who are adopted. But I’m reading White Like Me by Tim Wise and he has this to say:
Genealogy itself is something of a privilege, coming far more easily to those of us for whom enslavement, conquest, and dispossession of our land has not been our lot.
I was interested in what he wrote about school desegregation.
It would be 1974, the year I began first grade, before busing [integration] would filter down to the elementary level. This means that the class of 1986, my graduation class, was the first that had been truly desegregated throughout its entire educational experience.
I was born the same year as Wise, 1968, a big year for tragedy in America, with the assassinations of Dr. King and Robert Kennedy. And it’s funny, but I never thought about my education as having been shaped by the civil rights movement. Starting in third grade, I was bused to a school waaaay across town from my home. Although my family was never rich, we were white and always lived in quiet, clean, white neighborhoods. Instead of going to the elementary school down the street, I was bused to a much different sort of neighborhood, where the people were poorer and darker-skinned. The stupid part is that I was also part of the GATE program, and, basically, a bunch of rich and middle class “smart” white kids were bused to a poor neighborhood with mostly black and hispanic families, but we were pretty much isolated from the other kids in the school anyway. Our teachers were also transplanted, they were “smart” teachers brought in special for the “smart” kids. There may have been one or two kids in our class that actually lived in that neighborhood, but maybe not, it might have just been us bused kids. And of the whole class, maybe 3 or 4 were not white. We had our classes together and the only time we saw the “other” kids was at lunch and at recess, but we never mingled with them. And we obviously had a more interesting education going on, we did all sorts of cool things that the other classes did not. We did this project where we created a civilization and then made “artifacts” that were supposed to tell about our society. We then buried the artifacts in the sand outside, and the other “smart” class dug them up and tried to figure us out, and vice-versa. It was pretty fun and I’m pretty sure only our classes were doing special projects like that. So we got bused out there to that school, but we were far from “integrated.”
