Held to answer

It’s too bad Willamette Week’s cover story on the expulsion rates of black students in Portland didn’t run a week earlier, when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was in town.

What would he have said about Kwame Briggs, whose 12-year-old son has been suspended more times than the dad can remember, and who blames his son’s problems on skin color?

Thomas might have asked: “What’s wrong with your parenting skills, Mr. Briggs? Does the school have to discipline your son because you have failed to do so?”

These questions were not raised in the Willamette Week story. The reporter looked at numbers and concluded: “Portland Public Schools has demonstrated a historic bias when it comes to punishing black kids.”

Numbers do not tell individual stories.  Numbers do not provide specific details of each incident leading to discipline. Numbers do not provide context or back-story. Numbers alone do not reveal bias.

If Mr. Briggs cannot even remember how many times his son has been in trouble, chances are that the cumulative effect of the boy’s behavior is why his punishment is harsher. A white student who mouths off to a teacher the first time will likely receive less severe punishment than a black student who has been in trouble so many times his father can’t keep track.

The gist of Willamette Week’s story is: Even though Portland Public Schools has paid at least $2.5 million on racial-sensitivity training (called Courageous Conversations) and to send teachers to related conferences, disciplinary numbers for black students have not improved.

“White students, records show, are getting off the hook more often than before,” Willamette Week reports.

There is no way to know that white kids are “getting off the hook” without having details about the students involved.

If Portland Public Schools wanted to have a courageous conversation about race, it would explore bold questions: Do black kids misbehave more? Is there something in the black community that tolerates, even encourages, belligerent behavior?

Those are racist inquiries only if you think the obvious answer is, “Yes.” Otherwise, there’s nothing to lose by asking.

Nor is there anything singular about Portland Public Schools’ alleged racial inequities. Many American schools have been dealing with similar issues for decades.

In the 1990’s I attended a meeting of black parents and black community leaders in San Bernardino, Calif. who wanted to start a private, all-black school. They believed that segregation – in the right context – might offer some advantages to black students. One of the local high schools was a scene of periodic racial disturbances; the parents also believed that public schools offered easy access to drugs.

Unfortunately, the San Bernardino group quickly gave up when it became obvious no money would be forthcoming to help them build their school.

Had Clarence Thomas grown up attending Portland Public Schools, where would he be now — a dropout in a low-wage job? Teaching black studies somewhere?

He – and even his detractors – have credited his success to an excellent education and a demanding grandfather (who, contrary to popular myth was not dirt-poor but, in fact, owned a fuel supply company; his mother and sister, however, spent time on public assistance).

Thomas attended a Catholic school in Georgia where – between the nuns and his  grandfather – he had to work hard.

“The difference between young Clarence Thomas and most blacks growing up in Savannah was his superior education. … His segregated parochial school, founded in 1878, was staffed by a rare group of determined white Franciscan nuns who believed that the black children of the South were worth converting and educating. … (T)he sisters devoted themselves to their pupils, drilling into them a sense of purpose and academic rigor rarely found in the segregated black public schools,” according to “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas” by Jane Mayer of the New Yorker and Jill Abramson, formerly of the Wall Street Journal and now editor of the New York Times.

Those nuns engaged in truly courageous conversations.

“Strange Justice,” published in 1994 a few years after Thomas’ confirmation to the Supreme Court, is sympathetic to Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment. More than anything, though, the book’s authors grapple with how a black Yale Law School graduate like Thomas could be so ungrateful to his liberal benefactors, who presumably made his success possible.

“(Thomas) believed that the techniques that had been used to fight discrimination in the past, such as busing and hiring goals, were worse than useless. In his view, even the Brown decision, the foundation of all subsequent integration efforts, had been condescending to African-Americans by suggesting, as he read it, that minority students would do better simply by sitting next to whites …,’’ wrote Mayer and Abramson. “Affirmative action too, as Thomas saw it, was a ‘crutch,’ degrading in its implications that African-Americans needed assistance.”

The Justice Thomas who spoke recently at the University of Portland has grown beyond the angry sexist portrayed in “Strange Justice.” He has been quietly mentoring promising, young students and one of them – Dakota Garza – is studying nursing at the University of Portland.

The words Thomas uses in his outreach to students wouldn’t meet the approval of the Portland Public Schools’ board.

In “Hope in the Unseen,” journalist Ron Suskind follows a young black student named Cedric Jennings as he moves from a violent, inner-city high school in Washington D.C. to Brown University. Along the way, Thomas invites Jennings to his U.S. Supreme Court office and counsels him:

“No doubt, one thing you’ll find when you get to a school like Brown is a lot of classes and orientation on race relations. Try to avoid them. Try to say to yourself, I’m not a black person, I’m just a person. You’ll find a lot of so-called multicultural combat, a lot of struggle between ethnic and racial groups – and people wanting you to sign on, to narrow yourself into some group identity or other. You have to resist that … .”

In Portland, a black student is not allowed to forget that he or she is black. Is it any wonder that black kids act out more? They have been literally lectured that historic racism has scarred them for life. (Compare historic racism to historic misogyny, and ask why it is that black males get into more trouble than black females.)

Partly in response to the Willamette Week story, the Portland Parent Union and other organizations have increased their demands for a moratorium on out-of-school suspensions. That is a bad idea. It will send the wrong message to students like Kwame Briggs’ son.

Portland school district officials couldn’t offer an explanation to Willamette Week for why more black students are getting into trouble that leads to suspensions.

I’ll offer a theory: The increasing cockiness of some leaders in the black community, who seem to think that with a black president there should no longer be any differences between blacks and whites – whether it’s test scores, school suspensions or felony convictions. It’s all about racial bias.

“What causes those kids to get into trouble? Trigger words, or tone from the teacher,” Willie Poinsette, a former Portland Public School principal, told Willamette Week.

What will happen to these kids when they grow up and discover that part of life is enduring other people’s tones? That growing up is controlling your reaction to trigger words?

Even a U.S. Supreme Court justice, especially one who doesn’t fit a media stereotype, must learn how to endure when things don’t go his way.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

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