As you might have guessed from the, ahem, tone of the end of my last blog, I am often a bit amused by professors who talk about the deplorable situation of minorities in this country and the evil of the white power structures that keep minorities down, while they themselves live comfortably in a loft or ranch-style house in an all-white neighborhood of suburban Grand Rapids.
In a way, there has only been one teacher I ever had (and he was a high school teacher back where I used to live, not a professor) whose liberal political philosophy I could respect as having some basis in the way the man lived. Mr. Jagger was his name, and he was my AP History teacher in Sophomore year of high school; he taught at Lakeshore High School, in my quiet little rural town of Stevensville, but he lived (and did so by choice, not because he couldn’t afford to do otherwise) in Benton Harbor, and in the heart of that town. If you have ever heard of Benton Harbor, you may know that it is an almost entirely black community, one directly across the river from the almost all-white city of St. Joseph. The St. Joseph river, which the divides the towns in two, acts as a kind of miniature Mason-Dixon line, seperating whites from blacks. St. Joseph is middle-class to affluent, but Benton Harbor is lower-middle class to poor. Mr. Jagger chose to live there, I think, because he really did believe that the black community in Benton Harbor was in a deplorable situation, and he really did want to help improve it; and not just by theorizing, but by doing.
This leads me to the topic of todays bjournal, which was inspired by a reading of the ”blog” (if you can’t tell, I don’t much care for that word), “adventures in inner-city education” by a certain Ms. Sweetland (her first name isn’t listed anywhere that I can find). The introduction to the page pretty much says it all: “Dedicated and over-educated teacher leaves the pampered comfort of a Stanford PhD program to teach at a small, stereotypically ‘inner city’ elementary school in Washington, DC. And blogs about it.”
(I will have more later…for now, studium me vocat)
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