Shifting language

The thing I like best about language, and poetic language in particular, is its changing nature. Dictionaries become obsolete because words change, meanings change, usage changes.

Yet it is this precise characteristic that allows the survival of many of the ugly things about human beings.

Namely, in this case, bigotry and racism.

When we began looking to buy a house in the Atlanta suburbs, our real estate agent continuously steered us away from the areas I was most interested in living. His way of doing this was to talk about the school systems. Forsyth county, he claimed, had great schools. It was not until we were about to buy our house that I finally "heard" what he was saying to us. In a final discussion about living closer to the city, the agent said, "Well, it is just more [pause] diverse there." My immediate thought was, GREAT. Then I realized, he meant "diverse" as a euphemism for not-all-white and, therefore, undesirable for us white folk.

So, we bought a house where we were told. When a child became a real possibility for us, I started researching the schools. What I found astounded me. In every measurable way, the schools in this "more diverse" area are better. The test score are much higher; more students from those schools go to colleges; the colleges they go to are higher ranked than the schools the graduates here go to. What, I asked myself, could be the basis for all the talk about better schools? For, now that we've been here a few years, I hear the rhetoric everywhere: the gym, the yoga studio, and with coworkers. So, I started looking at the racial make up of the schools.

There it was. Forsyth county is 99% white. North Fulton county schools are only 60-75% white. One person even told me, "if you want to know about a school, go sit in the parking lot at 3:00 and watch the kids leave. That will tell you everything you need to know."

Really?

Now that I'm moving again, I'm finding the same to be true elsewhere. White people in Montgomery claim that they send their children to private schools because the pubic schools are unsafe. When I start looking at racial statistics, I have suspicions that this conversation is not about safety, but about segregation. You see, Montgomery public schools are 23% white. I've read blogs and online discussions that talk about weapons in elementary schools and sub-standard teaching. Maybe there are such things, but I have my suspicions otherwise.

My point?

Well, I have been operating under the assumption that things are progressing. That with every year that passes, we are more tolerant, more integrated, more equal. But what I see is a shifting in the politics, a shifting of language, that just masks the same old racism in new language.

I have a wise friend who teaches special education in Seattle. She says that until white people like me quit sending our kids to the private schools, nothing will change.

This time I will buy a house where I want to be. And I'll send my child to school right there. I won't live in the homogenized suburbs, and I will hope that my child, no matter what his/her color turns out to be, will see that the world is full of colors.