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Reviews tagging 'Genocide'
Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side by Eve L. Ewing
1 review
stevia333k's review against another edition
emotional
informative
reflective
5.0
This book gave insight into historical information, and activist traditions. I took a lot of notes basically.
So this book looks into activist praxis that goes back as far as the 1940's and there's also discussions of fictive families. There's a lot of discussion about rhetoric & segregation too. That's the baseline.
Some thoughts, based on the audiobook the 40-55% portion & Chapter 8 are what made me think the most. There was a part after chapter 8 in the grief section where it was mentioned that black kids felt threats against them if they openly grieved the schools they lost because they worried the adminstrations would blame their families instead of the loss of the schools. further, it is pointed out in this section about how the boards are effectively a form of gang & also that the school failures should be blamed on the same administration that shuts down these schools.
This book also explained that overcrowding/lack of rooms is used as an excuse to get rid of nurses & social workers.
The part this book under-advertised is this book hints at how the struggles over integration/desegregation led to the white backlash of the school to prison pipeline. Basically, due to segregation crowding up black people into ghettos the community demanded for better quality education & integration at least into empty classrooms at white schools. The book focuses a lot on debunking colorblind rhetoric because it's what racist freemarketists use. But the book mentions that circa 1967 the black communities in USA decided that integration was a bad idea because the white people (including the white kids) were harassing & assaulting the black kids. (I've learned from a couple things I've heard online that white bullying & violence among kids in "kid preserves" as Jane Jacobs put it, is how gangs got started.) The idea being in order to prevent lynching maybe we should control our own schools instead of relying on a racist govt infrastructure. So along with Nixon's southern strategy of intensifying the criminalization of "drugs", this contributed to cops targeting the schools, even once they were agreed to be segregated, and hence the school-to-prison pipeline as got first figured out circa 2014 got developing.
Ewing emphasizes how the amount of kids per area scared the hell out of the White Bourgeois Patriarchal Dictatorship, and how this contributed to the dictatorship defunding housing developments. I'm not quite sure why, but this interests me from a youth-liberation perspective. People grieve the losses of these schools & housing developments (this book focuses on CPS & CHA -- Chicago Public Schools & Chicago Housing Authority) as losses of their homes. Further, people have fictive families maintained by these lands, which apparently fictive families is tied into a lot with the experience of enslavement, but based on what I understand it seems this exists regardless of race, it's just so much bigger in black communities. (My intuition is that this is similar to how the school-to-prison pipeline literature early on focuses on black students, then disabled students, and from there something about poor students & lgbt+ students.)
So this book looks into activist praxis that goes back as far as the 1940's and there's also discussions of fictive families. There's a lot of discussion about rhetoric & segregation too. That's the baseline.
Some thoughts, based on the audiobook the 40-55% portion & Chapter 8 are what made me think the most. There was a part after chapter 8 in the grief section where it was mentioned that black kids felt threats against them if they openly grieved the schools they lost because they worried the adminstrations would blame their families instead of the loss of the schools. further, it is pointed out in this section about how the boards are effectively a form of gang & also that the school failures should be blamed on the same administration that shuts down these schools.
This book also explained that overcrowding/lack of rooms is used as an excuse to get rid of nurses & social workers.
The part this book under-advertised is this book hints at how the struggles over integration/desegregation led to the white backlash of the school to prison pipeline. Basically, due to segregation crowding up black people into ghettos the community demanded for better quality education & integration at least into empty classrooms at white schools. The book focuses a lot on debunking colorblind rhetoric because it's what racist freemarketists use. But the book mentions that circa 1967 the black communities in USA decided that integration was a bad idea because the white people (including the white kids) were harassing & assaulting the black kids. (I've learned from a couple things I've heard online that white bullying & violence among kids in "kid preserves" as Jane Jacobs put it, is how gangs got started.) The idea being in order to prevent lynching maybe we should control our own schools instead of relying on a racist govt infrastructure. So along with Nixon's southern strategy of intensifying the criminalization of "drugs", this contributed to cops targeting the schools, even once they were agreed to be segregated, and hence the school-to-prison pipeline as got first figured out circa 2014 got developing.
Ewing emphasizes how the amount of kids per area scared the hell out of the White Bourgeois Patriarchal Dictatorship, and how this contributed to the dictatorship defunding housing developments. I'm not quite sure why, but this interests me from a youth-liberation perspective. People grieve the losses of these schools & housing developments (this book focuses on CPS & CHA -- Chicago Public Schools & Chicago Housing Authority) as losses of their homes. Further, people have fictive families maintained by these lands, which apparently fictive families is tied into a lot with the experience of enslavement, but based on what I understand it seems this exists regardless of race, it's just so much bigger in black communities. (My intuition is that this is similar to how the school-to-prison pipeline literature early on focuses on black students, then disabled students, and from there something about poor students & lgbt+ students.)
Content Warnings
Graphic: Grief, Classism, Colonisation, Genocide, and Racism
Moderate: Police brutality and Bullying
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