By Daniel Cash, One KC Voice
Time Magazine is famous for its end-of-year top 10 lists, which cover topics such as the top 10 albums, feuds, celebrity breakups and more. One such list is the “Top 10 Underreported Stories.” According to Time, the most underreported story of 2009 was “Continuing Segregation Is Hurting U.S. Competitiveness.”
Author Laura Fitzpatrick writes:
Talk about a dream deferred. African-American and Latino schoolchildren are more segregated, according to a January report from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, than they were at the time of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, in 1968. Nearly 39% of blacks and 40% of Latinos attended schools composed of 90% to 100% students of color in the 2006-07 school year, the report found, and blacks and Latinos are far more likely than their white peers to attend high-poverty schools and “dropout factories” where huge numbers of students don’t graduate. With the segment of nonwhite American students at 44% and climbing, the potential economic consequences are dire. “In a world economy where success is dependent on knowledge,” the report said, “major sections of the U.S. face the threat of declining average educational levels as the proportion of children attending inferior segregated schools continues to rise.”
Isn’t interesting that, 41 years after King’s death, segregation and education inequity rank as the most underreported stories of 2009? Isn’t interesting that segregation and educational inequity are the most underreported stories at the end of President Obama’s first year in office?
Greater Kansas City, even today, remains one of the most segregated regions in the nation. So how can we expect our underperforming schools to improve without dealing with the structural inequities that weigh them down? Can we talk about race, segregation and racism openly and with candor? And most importantly, can we do it among others who are not the same race as us?
Is it time for us, as citizens, to start talking to each other about the realities of structural inequity? You tell me.
Anyone calling KC one of the most segregated regions of the country hasn’t lived in other cities or traveled much. Were about the same as most US cities.