In Toronto, the idea of all black schools is once again in the media. All black schools are not just a bad idea, they are a disastrously bad idea. Not for the reason that most people seem to cite –bad memories of segregation– but for another, better reason. Someone here is getting lied to and screwed out of their education. And it’s not just blacks. It’s whites.
In the Toronto Star article they mention summer camps where: “students learned that Picasso based much of his work on masks from the Congo, that Africa had a university long before Europe – in Morocco – and students based a math grid on the patterns of lush “kente” cloth from Ghana’s royalty.” Can someone explain to me why white people should not learn this?
Aside from that, I find the whole idea of there being a homogeneous group of “black people” a bit fucked up. There’s a lot of different types of black people, many of which like each other about as much as differing groups of white or Asian people like each other. What ones will be covered in these schools? I know that I’d be pretty pissed if I went to the white school to learn about my culture and they taught me about a bunch of fucking Belgians.
At the end of the day, the school system fails a lot of people. It fails whites, blacks, yellows, greens, reds. Basically everyone except the pinks. But that can’t be an excuse to fail yourself. No matter who you are, the world will provide you with ample excuses to fail and only one to succeed: Yourself. And that’s about the best anyone can expect.
