Striving To Be G&T “Because the People in It Are Just Like You”

Abstract

Amy and Joe, a young White, middle-class couple from Louisiana,¹ just moved to New York City because Amy got accepted into college. They remember being “apprehensive about moving” because they have two young children and “heard all the rumors of the nightmares of elementary education in the city.” After experiencing a brand new school in Louisiana with “fields of green grass,” they enroll their second grade son in their zoned public school. They are stunned to see how culturally and socioeconomically different it is in comparison. Joe explains that when he drops his son off the first day: “It was a shock. I mean, I took my son to school and I signed him up and I left with tears streaming down my face, literally. I was, like, I turned around. We’re not going to school here. I don’t feel good about this. I mean, it looked like a prison, it felt like a prison. Ya know, he didn’t, just culturally it’s so far from where we’re from. I know some people would say that would make me racist. But it’s not, it’s a culture and a class thing.” Joe responds that above everything else, he wants his son to “get the best education,” but his zoned school is a “non-option” because it has what he calls a “resigned failure vibe.” He is not willing to send his son there just so he can be a “martyr for Civil Rights.” As Joe explains, his son would “culturally not fit in” because it is a majority Black school.