Reading David Roediger's How Race Survived US History, I was reminded of a documentary that I saw about a year ago. The documentary is entitled Little RockCentral: 50 Years Later. It is a wonderful film which revisits Little Rock Central High School 50 years after the forcible integration of nine black high school students in defiance of the governor's orders not to integrate the school after Brown v. Board of Education. By looking at Little Rock Central 50 years later, the film shows the failure of policies and legislation that has intended to de-privilege whiteness as well as the inadequacies of colorblindness as a way to overcome racial problems in a nation where race has always mattered.
On a personal note, my Mother teaches in a public middle school in a rural part of North Carolina, about thirty minutes inland from Wilmington, NC. The school is a Title 1 school with students who are so poor that, living just a thirty minute drive from the beach, most have never even seen the ocean. The student body, in this school, is almost equally divided between white and black students with a small percentage of Hispanic and Native American students. After seeing Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later, I told my Mother about it. She decided to show it to her students and then she conducted a discussion with regard to the film. She said that she was amazed at the reaction from many of her students. Usually, the students are extremely difficult to manage and classtime is spent dealing with discipline problems, leaving very little time for actual teaching. But, after watching the film, she said that all of her students were animated and lively. She said that everyone was engaged in the conversation, and it was the best class that she has had since she began teaching at the school just three years prior. Many of her students expressed the fact that they loved the film and the discussion because they were allowed to discuss openly race which they can't do in their other classes where colorblindness seems to be the preferred solution to issues that arise with regard to race. While race is a major issue in the lives of these students, they are never given the opportunity nor forum in which they can discuss race and what it means to them. By no means, did the students in my Mother's class agree on issues that were raised, but they did get to talk openly about these issues and the role that race plays in their lives. So, I think that this is a realistic example of much of what we discuss in class. If you are interested in the documentary, it is an HBO film and, on the HBO website, there is a good synopsis of it.