White flight, black indifference

I donate popular newspapers and magazines to the Gainsboro Branch Library in Roanoke. I always enjoy my weekly visits to the library. I get to talk to old friends while adding to the place's reading material.


The building itself holds fond memories dating back to childhood.


I usually make my library visit in the early afternoons. For the past several years, I’ve noticed an interesting sight in the neighborhood. The number of parents, waiting in their cars to pick up their young children from Roanoke Catholic, has grown exponentially. In fact, the line of cars now stretches down Jefferson Street from the school’s entrance, around the corner and completely through Patton Avenue, then around a second corner onto Second Street. If this scene were repeated at night, it would be safe to assume that a major concert was taking place at the Roanoke Civic Center.


Instead, it is a graphic illustration of white flight from the Roanoke city Public Schools.


After the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, many white parents fled cities across the country to avoid sending their children to schools with black kids. It would be hard to argue that this “white flight” was not based, to a large degree, on racial animus. However, it would be wrong to make that assumption based on the white flight from the local city schools in 2004.


I know many of the people waiting to pick their children up from Roanoke Catholic. They are nice people. Moreover, many are very liberal, progressive and value educational diversity. They are also people who fear that their children will be the victims of violence (by black students) in Roanoke city schools. They are people who have the economic wherewithal to send their children to private schools, establish charter home schools, or sell $300,000 homes and move several miles to Roanoke County and avoid the city schools.


I first became aware of this fear, and the financial ability to circumvent the school violence issue, in the late 1990s when a colleague at Radford University decided to send his child to North Cross in Roanoke. Another student (both children are white) had been bullying his son at a Radford public school. He told me about the bullying and bought his son a cellphone to call him whenever the bullying started. His strategy was to then leave class and go report the behavior to the school principal.


He asked me what I thought about his plan. I told him it was okay but a better strategy would be to tell his son to take the cellphone and hit the bully in the head the next time he had a problem. My colleague was not impressed with my answer and enrolled his son in North Cross the next year.


Herein, I think, lies the cultural and class divide when it comes to school violence. As a black American from a working-class background, violence at school was always a potential (if not probable) reality for me. It was just something to deal with because there was no escaping the inevitable verbal and (often) physical violence that came with going to school. I doubt that any of my peers even thought of it as a big problem. Because of race, class and social conditioning, school violence is really nothing new for many American school children. It is what social psychologists call a déjà vu experience.


Conversely, affluent whites have always been able to relocate to avoid this type of conflict. My colleague’s response to his son’s situation was also a déjà vu experience for him. For me, his response was a cosmology episode. I had never talked to anyone who handled situations in his manner.


Our life experiences influence our sensemaking processes when it comes to understanding school bullying. As I’ve talked to other blacks (and working-class whites) about violence in the Roanoke city schools, I’ve concluded that for many the issue is overblown. For them, the perception of violence is much greater than the reality. They tend to pay little attention to the outrage of the affluent when their children encounter bullying or violence in the schools.


On the other hand, affluent whites in Roanoke city take school violence very seriously. They are voting with their feet and pocketbooks. Two years ago, neighbors of mine sold their home to move less than two miles to Roanoke County when their son left elementary school for middle school. In their estimation, the city schools are safe in the primary grades but become very unsafe beginning in the middle grades. Another neighborhood family currently has their house for sale because their daughter moves to middle school next year.


Many of the parents picking up their children at Roanoke Catholic did not wait for the elementary/middle school “tipping point” to leave the public schools. They have enrolled their children in the early primary grades. I am sure that North Cross has had a surge of city children enrolling for the same reason. Valley realtors are also seeing a boom in families exchanging six-figure homes and nearly identical zip codes in the county because of their concern about school violence.


The late social psychologist Abraham Maslow was most famous for his “Needs Hierarchy.” In his concept of human development, lower-level requirements like physical and safety needs must be satisfied before higher-order needs such as ego and self-fulfillment can be attained. Whether real or imagined, many parents believe that the Roanoke city schools are not safe. Until this is remedied, higher-level needs like educational integration and diversity cannot be satisfied. Furthermore, it the violence (or perception of violence) problem is not quickly corrected, there will be little real diversity left in the city schools.


I think it would be a costly mistake for Roanoke’s black community to idly watch this incarnation of white flight and blame it solely on racism. As whites abandon the public schools and move to the county, they no longer pay taxes in the city. Thus, the tax base flattens, the city gets poorer, and the schools become increasingly impoverished. This reduction of economic and human resources will most negatively impact those who can least afford fewer resources of any kind.


Whites who remain in the city, but send their children to private schools, also impoverish the public schools because the invaluable social interaction between people who are different is lost. The idea that the black kid who sits next to the white kid is going to be smarter because of the sitting arrangement is simplistic and misses the point. What these kids actually learn in these social situations is to value diverse people, ideas and perspectives. Can anyone honestly deny this type of socialization is crucial for children who will be entering the global village?


Groups with vastly different social experiences need a common point of reference to become partners in finding solutions to vexing social problems. Many white parents point to the brutal assault of a student at Roanoke's Woodrow Wilson Middle School several years ago as the trigger for removing their children from the city schools. Psychologically and emotionally, this assault remains a mini 9-11 for these parents. Black leaders and parents must also understand how this incident adversely affected the psyche of local whites and use this act of violence as a launching pad for dialogue and collective problem solving. To do this, black leaders must simply ask a humanistic question: Would they have also remain traumatized had their children been so viciously attacked, stomped, and a footprint left on his face?


We have just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Brown ruling. That legal decision was the first step in eliminating the idea that black students were an untouchable caste unfit to attend school with white students. Local black leaders cannot allow apathy, indifference, or cultural misunderstandings to create a de facto reversal of Brown in Roanoke city. Enlightened self-interest alone should make the black community search for ways to reassure whites that school safety is a human, not a black or white, issue.


The length of the afternoon parking line from Roanoke Catholic will be a good yardstick to measure how well Roanoke’s black leaders understand this economic, social and political reality.