The man leaned out over the podium, looking at the robed students seated in the first rows of the auditorium.
“You’re multicultural with different lifestyles and beliefs,” he said, “and together, you represent the face of America.”
Those words could have come from the mouth of another of last weekend’s commencement speakers, President Barack Obama. The President has made multiculturalism as American as apple pie, and invested what used to be fraught cultural territory with a sense of shared destiny. In this case, though, I was listening to Dr. John Ruffin of the National Institutes of Health address the 25th graduating class of Morehouse Medical School, a class which includes my cousin.
The medical school is affiliated with Morehouse College, a historically black male undergraduate institution founded after the Civil War. Yet though the majority of students and families were black American, other families helping to robe the newly-minted doctors included women in saris or wearing Muslim headscarves; mothers and fathers in lavish matching garb from West Africa; parents with the last name Chen or Rodriguez; and families from our nation’s racial majority for another three decades, plus or minus: white Americans.
Just a decade ago, America was in denial about our rapidly changing racial and cultural landscape. The U.S. Census had released projections that by the year 2050, America would have no racial majority. Today, they’ve moved that projected date up to 2042.
Some people think that having a black President means we can afford to put away the topic of race altogether. That complacency, combined with our current economic crisis, could put the lives and futures of students at risk. Education is what turns the American Dream into the American Reality. And education is in deep trouble, first as a thing-in-itself, and also as an indicator of our racial future.
As Dr. Ruffin called on these young doctors to end health disparities, I flashed back to experiences I’d had a decade ago reporting a book called “The Color of Our Future.” For two years, I crisscrossed America from the Crow reservation in Montana to the Georgia/Florida line, to get teens’ take on the role of race in their lives. Many of them struggled to reconcile the fact that the deck was stacked against them–because of race, income, immigration status, and more–with their own righteous belief that they could break through the barriers and fulfill their dreams.
The Media Academy at Fremont High School in Oakland put those struggles in plain sight. It lies on a street filled with idling day laborers, and operates out of worn trailers or “portables” over a decade old. But it has a track record of doing big things with tough or educationally challenged kids.
Earlier this year, I brought graduate students from the journalism school at The University of California, Berkeley, to meet the teens at Fremont High. The grad students were a mix of races, themselves; but the Fremont students included immigrants from several countries including Vietnam and El Salvador as well as black students born in the neighborhood. As was true a decade ago, the high school was what I call “ABW”–Anything But White.
We talked about media, education funding cuts and local school closures (which one brave Fremont student was investigating, much to the consternation of some officials), plus issues including the economy and the fatal shooting of a cuffed man by transit police on New Year’s day. A mix of student and professional crews videotaped the event so we could leave some record of who we were and what are struggling with in our time.
In another environment, many of these kids would be tracked low-achieving or low-literacy and put on the back burner of society. Instead, this graduation season brings moments of joy as students from this tough little program get their diplomas and gear up to go to college. That kind of scene doesn’t happen often enough.
Yes, the Obama Administration is juggling the crises of jobs, foreclosures, banking, wars, and healthcare. We still have to ask when our President intends to foreground educational opportunity, and what he will ask of us as a nation. For example: how will we balance short-term stopgapping (like the State Fiscal Stabilization Funds) with “big think” long term change? Why are so many public schools today, even high-achieving ones, “ABW”? Is school integration effectively dead, fifty-five years after Brown v. Board of Education? How can not just white but middle- and upper-middle-income families be reconnected to public schooling? Will the new political rainbow coalition lose its might once people start debating who should get affirmative action–rich and black, or poor and white? Will “equality,” in this economic crisis, mean that more white Americans are poorly educated, as opposed to more students of color doing well? (That prospect should chill our bones.)
Let’s take a moment during this graduation season to ask how we can raise the profile of educational equality among the issues our nation faces. When I looked at the smiling, multi-ethnic group of newly minted doctors marching out of Morehouse Medical School, I saw an extraordinary example of how shared struggle and success brings people together. The question for all of us is how we can take this kind of achievement, broaden it to the education system at large…and make it the rule, not the exception.
_________
Farai Chideya is an award-winning journalist who has written three nonfiction books on media, politics and race, including “The Color of Our Future”; plus the newly released novel “Kiss the Sky.” She is now researching “The Color of Our Future in the Age of Obama.”
You can find the rough cut of the video about the Media Academy and U.C. Berkeley students here download the return .
