After Rahm Emanuel announced a wave of school closures in 2013, Chicagoans took to the streets in protest. But before we can understand whether the closings are racist, we must understand what racism is

Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools. The fodder of tsk-tsk, it’s so sad, and that’s why we send our kids to private school and we’re so lucky. They’re the stuff of legend, material for inspirational movies and shocking prime-time news exposés. In Chicago they were once famously called the worst in the nation by William Bennett, secretary of education under then president Ronald Reagan. More recently, Illinois governor Bruce Rauner called them “inadequate”, “woeful”, “just tragic” and “basically almost crumbling prisons”.

Chicago’s public schools have been positioned in the nation’s imagination as, at best, charity cases deserving our sympathy; at worst they are a malignant force to be ignored if you can or snuffed out altogether if you can come up with something better. In this sense Chicago is like many other urban school districts that primarily serve students of color, viewed with pity and contempt.

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So in 2013, when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closures, perhaps he expected public approval. The city and the school district were facing a $1bn budget deficit, enrollment had dropped in the district overall, and many of the schools on the list had long records of low test scores. Chicago public schools (CPS) first said that as many as 330 schools could be closed, then pared the number down to 129, and finally announced 54 that made the final list. Of those, 49 ultimately were slated to be closed by the end of the 2012-13 school year. Students attending these schools were assigned seats in other schools nearby.

Thousands of Chicagoans took to the streets in three days of marches that proceeded from one closing school to the next. But Emanuel was unmoved. On the day the Chicago board of education formally approved the closures, his office released a statement: “I know this is incredibly difficult, but I firmly believe the most important thing we can do as a city is provide the next generation with a brighter future.”

But if the schools were so terrible, why did people fight for them so adamantly? Why do people care so much about schools that the world has deemed to be “failing”?

Chicago is my home. I grew up here, went to public schools here, and attended college here. After I graduated, I became a public school teacher in Bronzeville. I have my fair share of startling memories from growing up in the city that shaped me, but one of the most jarring moments I ever encountered took place when I was away from home. It was 2013, I had left the classroom for graduate school, and I was visiting my father in Florida on spring break. I was alone, sitting on the edge of the bed with the door closed, my grip tightening on the glowing rectangle of my phone as I read a Chicago Sun-Times article listing the Chicago public schools that would be closing at the end of the school year.

When I got to the school in Bronzeville where I had been a teacher, I had to read and reread it and read it again to be sure I wasn’t missing something. Surely this was a mistake? How could our school be on a list like this? I thought of each of my colleagues in bewilderment, thought of my principal and our students and the many hours we had all dedicated to providing a quality education. My eyes flicked upward to the statement from the superintendent, Barbara Byrd-Bennett. (In Chicago this position is referred to as the chief executive officer – the CEO.) CEO Byrd-Bennett had been quoted as saying:

I believe that every child in every community in Chicago deserves access to a high quality education that will prepare them for success in college, career and in life. I believe that that’s the purpose of public schools. But for too long, children in certain parts of our city have been cheated out of the resources they need to succeed in the classroom because they are trapped in underutilized schools. These underutilized schools are also underresourced.

Two words emerged that I also read over and over: the schools, she said, were underutilized and underresourced. “But,” I said aloud, “that doesn’t make any sense.” How could the person charged with doling out resources condemn an institution for not having enough resources? I read it again, then again, growing sadder and angrier and more confused.

And then there was the question of race. Of the students who would be affected by the closures, 88% were black: 90% of the schools were majority black, and 71% had mostly black teachers – a big deal in a country where 84% of public school teachers are white.

In the coming weeks, the explanations the district offered struck me as inconsistent at best and illogical at worst and left me tongue-tied when my fellow education researchers at Harvard asked me to clarify exactly what was happening in Chicago. The researcher in me was intrigued and puzzled, the teacher in me was mourning and the Chicagoan in me – witness to a seemingly bottomless tradition of corruption, political abuse and dishonesty – was skeptical. At the intersection of these identities, I became obsessed with teasing out something deeper.

Who were the people –the teachers, the children, the neighbors – who would be affected by the decision to close so many schools

What role did race, power and history play in what was happening in my hometown? Behind the numbers and the maps and the graphs, who were the people –the teachers, the children, the neighbors – who would be affected by the decision to close so many schools? I chased the story to boarded-up schools and dusty library archives, to city hall and to Saturday picnics, to the empty lots where public housing projects once stood and to the brown-brick complexes where they remained. When I felt I had answered one question, it inevitably led me to another.

Bronzeville, a community on the city’s majority-black South Side, saw four schools slated for closure in 2013 (including the school where I’d taught), and since 1999 it has had 16 schools either closed or entered into a “turnaround” process (where all faculty and staff lose their jobs and the school is turned over to a third party to hire new teachers). In some ways Bronzeville could be considered typical of African American communities of our era. The fortunes of the community have risen and fallen with the broader tide of social forces affecting black urban centers across the country, including segregation, housing policy, school policy, and economic trends – what sociologist William Julius Wilson calls “cycles of deprivation”.

At the same time, Bronzeville is special. Beginning about 20 blocks south of downtown Chicago, bounded by Lake Michigan and the Dan Ryan expressway, the region occupies a singular place as Chicago’s historic hub of African American culture: the community was the destination of thousands of migrants heading to Chicago from southern states during the Great Migration and home to luminaries such as Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks. Bronzeville is also special to me. As an African American woman writer born and raised in the city, I have long held the cultural legacy of the community as a source of identity and an inspiration – which is why I felt so fortunate to teach in a school there.

There has not been a great deal of research on the CPS school closings, but what we do know helps us understand the big picture beyond Bronzeville. First, and perhaps most important, we know that the students affected by school closure tend to be some of the city’s most vulnerable. Researchers have found that the closed schools served disproportionately vulnerable student populations compared with the rest of the district, including more low-income students, more students who moved often, more students who had repeated a grade at least once, and more students who received special education services.

The argument that school closings can be good because students will end up in better schools is theoretically possible. But research suggests that this happens only for students who find themselves relocating to top-tier schools, which turns out to be a very small percentage, and those children on average have to go pretty far from home to get to the new school. The reality is that students who experience school closure end up at new schools that are not thriving academically, so they don’t receive any boost or improvement in their education. This makes sense, because the history of segregation and inequality has left struggling schools largely clustered together across the landscape, meaning that students leaving a school facing challenges are likely to end up in an equally challenged school close by.

What did the parents of those children who were displaced by school closings have to say? They reported that school closings had a negative effect on their children overall; they criticized the academic offerings, extracurricular options, and resources of their children’s new schools and said that school closings severed their relationships with school overall. They also said the schools that closed had deep personal meaning beyond being an academic resource, leaving children with a sense of loss. Parents reported feeling excluded from their children’s new schools; alienated from events, meetings and opportunities to participate or volunteer at school; or just generally discouraged.

Many parents interviewed openly expressed their view of the racism inherent in the closings, stating that CPS decision makers “don’t care about African American communities. They don’t care if we get an education.” Others were suspicious of the motives behind school closings, believing they were designed to expand charter schools and displace low-income residents to the periphery of the city or beyond its borders.

Our culture has an odd relationship with race: it structures every aspect of American social life, but in ways that can often seem invisible and undetected. Like an electrical current running through water, race has a way of filling space even as it remains invisible. In the news and the media we talk about it constantly – especially during election seasons – but in our everyday lives many people are uncomfortable discussing race and racism, especially with people from different backgrounds.

Before we can understand whether school closings are racist, we have to understand what racism is, and those who support or oppose school closings seem to disagree on that front. Byrd-Bennett, when accused of racism, said that school closure proposals were tied to “demographic changes, and not race” and called such accusations personally offensive to her as a woman of color. Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis, on the other hand, called the school closings racist and classist. To those two black women, does “racist” mean the same thing?

For many, the word racism conjures up images from history: whites only signs on water fountains, burning crosses, angry mobs screaming at the Little Rock Nine or at Ruby Bridges. Others may recognize racism in the present, but only when it is overt: the harsh words of those who would see all Muslims banned from the United States, or Donald Trump referring to Mexican people as “criminals” and “rapists”. But in the decades since Jim Crow, racism has become less obviously bound to formal institutions and laws, making it more difficult to identify. Instead, we see laissez-faire racism, a form of discrimination that does not depend on the law, but instead “relies on the market and informal racial bias to re-create, and in some instances sharply worsen, structured racial inequality”. We might think of this form of racism as being like a mechanical toy: you wind it up and it goes off on its own. In the United States, the racist structures that were inscribed in law generations ago – when “separate but equal” was perfectly legal – established the framework for the way our society currently functions.

Often, when people talk about “racism” they are using the term to refer to a set of ideas or personal values. In their view, racism is a disease that afflicts some individuals and causes them to discriminate against others just because of the way they look. It is often complemented by the idea of color-blindness, exemplified by the common claim that “I don’t even see race” or “everyone is the same to me”. This perspective locates racism within individuals, our beliefs and opinions and what we “see”. It also suggests that even to acknowledge racial difference is a form of racism; this creates a conflict, since those harmed by racism require an acknowledgment of their racialized status in order to have a conversation about injustice. (For example, to talk about the contemporary legacy of slavery, the genocide of indigenous people, or the internment of Japanese Americans, one needs to admit that we are in fact not all the same.)

For sociologists – as well as for many activists and others – it is more accurate to think of racism as a set of structures organizing the way society works. This view characterizes racism as something that lives not in individuals, but in systems – in the fabric of American society. Through this lens, what is in one’s “heart” does not matter. Rather, the question becomes how our society follows a pattern, churning out different outcomes for different people in ways linked to race. This happens with or without the consent, awareness or intentions of individuals.

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Many people believe racism is like a skilled equestrian’s choosing, through decisions and commands, to go faster or slower, to jump a fence or avoid an obstacle, to follow a certain route or not. However, thinking structurally, we can understand that racism is more like a merry-go-round. You may be going up, down and around, and you might feel as if you’re riding a horse, but the machine is functioning with or without you.

In other words, the question of whether something is racist may be more complicated than it appears on the surface. We might consider events and policies racist not because an individual is hurling epithets or explicitly trying to harm black people but because they result in the systematic disenfranchisement of black people and harm to black children – regardless of intent – and because they are bound up in the perpetuation of historical policies rooted in more explicit racism. And this, in part, is why people fight so hard for their schools: because the fight is actually about a great deal more than just one building.

I began this inquiry to understand something that confounded me. Along the way I have heard from people like Martin, 17, a young man who has seen both his grammar school and his high school close, as he discusses the threat school closure poses to community memory and legacy – all intertwined with race. “As you’re getting older,” he says, “and you’re listening to these stories, at some point you still gotta move on and you can’t … you’re not going to remember everything your parents told you. So that’s how you get black history to go away. That’s how you get black history to go away.” Here, standing on the shoulders of the many storytellers who have made Bronzeville’s reputation the stuff of legend among black Chicagoans, is where I hope to intervene. I hope I can keep black history from going away. I hope to help us understand, and remember.

Excerpted from Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, by Eve L Ewing. Copyright 2018 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved