Blog 4

Throughout the 1950s till the 1980s inequality plays a major role in American society. Till today I still think inequality seems to play a role in this modern world. As I was reading a passage from the book one part that caught my attention is that, many people from various communities had to risk their lives and future for equal educational opportunities. Their lives weren’t the same no more as they were facing many death threats, violence, etc…

The question I asked myself was, why were the white people afraid of equality? What’s the reason? If you look on page 134 in the book, where an elementary school named Topeka in Kansas had eighteen public schools for white children and four for African Americans. Then I asked myself, what were the four schools like, how was the atmosphere and what kind of teachers did those children had?
I think those schools had less qualified teachers and books that won’t teach them anything serious or things that could benefit them in the future. The school also had separate proms, sports teams, cheerleading squad and student government. The book informs us of the inequality that was happening in Topeka, but they failed to provide us with more details about the school. For example, what were differences between the sports teams, like equipment quality and locker room and also what were the proms like the budget, etc. from my perspective inequality wasn’t only about quantity but quality.

I remember when I use to work for ups on my senior year of high school, where I use to get paid $10.50 per hour. But with that hourly wage, I used to do a lot of hard work, more than I should. I use to do work like loading, unloading, Air sort, etc. But then I find out that the people that were before me are getting paid more and doing less work, while they had me slaving myself. When I look back at it now, I see that they were using me because I was new, that’s the same thing many businesses use to do to new incoming immigrants, they had them doing the back-breaking work for low wages and it still going on today as many of them hires undocumented immigrant for very low wages.

Similarly, to the “Black student movement in the Boston public schools” where black students couldn’t do anything that portrays their African culture, such as their hairstyle, clothing, etc. basically, it seems to me like the school was trying to turn those students white. The dress code at English High seems to only favour the white students because they were able to do anything the blacks couldn’t, not only that I remember at the beginning of the article where a black student raises his hand to ask the teacher a question, but the teacher ignored him. To me, this shows that the African American students were locked in a cage, because they couldn’t learn from the teacher, nor have the ability to explore to have a clearer vision. As I said above the quantity of school didn’t matter but the quality of education did.