Imagine that, criticizing parents for wanting to place their children in a safer neighborhood, where the classrooms offer better educated teachers, probably a more challenging curriculum, in a milieu where children of nearly every skin shading and cultural tint in America abound every morning.
Culver City schools are wildly diverse, but that consideration messes up Ms. Kaplan’s Don’t Bother Me With Facts point. In isolation, her notion of staying “home” and fixing what is broken is sound. Since we don’t live in isolation, but in a huge city with a far-flung, multi-layered public education system, it will require many years and the coordination of many people to correct what ails Inglewood. By then, the children of the Ladera Heights families will be grown up and long gone from home. Before entertaining the dreamed-up race factor, Ms. Kaplan, your underlying point suffers from a flat tire.
Are You Anything?
I assume Ms. Kaplan finds the concept of self-improvement as odious as maturity, wisdom and a good education in a pleasant environment..
Why just the other evening after dinner, I was saying to my wife, “Mabel, I am tired of hanging out in this well-manicured neighborhood. After work tomorrow, I am going to search out the worst part of town. We can move over there and enroll the boys in a gang-infested school, yeah, that the state is threatening to shut down. I am sick of the good education they are getting now. I wanna go home.” Mabel wanted to think it over. That was a week after I suggested to Mabel that both of us leave our wallets on the front porch each night in case poor people came by and needed a touch.
Wonder what Ms. Kaplan would have thought of my first wife, who was black and Indian, or my oldest son, who is black, Indian and white? Was my son’s mother “disloyal” for marrying a handsome young man who was fairly white? Should she have stayed home and improved her own culture, whatever her own culture was? You call her and tell her that.
Is Ms. Kaplan envious of the black families in Ladera Heights who have developed their minds so that their world views blossomed?
Insinuating herself into a sensitive situation where her flashy style of bigotry throws gasoline onto the fire, Ms. Kaplan says the Ladera families’ attempt to enroll in Culver City “lays bare the tragic modern nuances of the relationship between race and education that are almost never acknowledged, let alone discussed.”
Color Coordinated?
It appears she is struggling to suggest that black children should sit alongside black children in the classroom. May I introduce you to Brown. v. Board of Education? What, Ms. Kaplan, would you have said about my oldest son? Should he have attended Inglewood in the morning, Culver City in the afternoon, and a reservation in the evening? I await your reflective response.
Since Ms. Kaplan is a smarty pants, I wonder how she would react to this fascinating data: The tallest boys and girls in my tenth grade class earned higher grades than the short students two years in a row. More of my classmates who preferred black oxfords fared better on their SATs than those who wore brown shoes. Well, Ms. Kaplan?
As far as I know, race has not been an openly debated issue since the transfer came into public view about five months ago although the dear lady realizes, as a liberal, that flame-throwers can poison any black-white setting.
Being a heavily invested liberal, I doubt that Ms. Kaplan, whom I do not know, is the happily married mother of a house full of children who is concerned with such prosaic matters as quality grammar school educations. She is more the Code Hot Pink type, those American patriots who wanted to serve as human shields before the Iraq War started. Given Ms. Kaplan’s regrettable views on race, one would hope she is the mother of as few as possible, the fewer innocent children to influence.
By the tone of her essay, she presumes that all of the Ladera families are black. She reasons, in a remarkable leap of logic, that all blacks should stay together because, well, because we are all black. Yes, I know you want to better yourselves, she writes. And yes, Inglewood schools are “are undesirable not only because they’re low performing but because they’re black.” Liberal envy of those who have worked harder is a constant in today’s America.
Pretty blatant and sad, I would say. What kind of race-baiting mind resents honorable people who work to better themselves and their children?
How would you like to sit across the breakfast table, bleary-eyed, from this tower of tolerance and common sense every morning?
Choose Sides and Divide
Ms. Kaplan is a beautiful example of one-note liberals, black and white, who are unable or unwilling to see life through the more cerebral prisms of choice, right and wrong, better and worse, good and evil. Division is a liberal’s favorite form of math, dividing people by almost any distinction and setting them off against one another. They do prefer chaos and confusion to peace. Look it up.
Pleasure and comfort are for others. Keep the pot boiling so we have something to talk about in our otherwise slate-gray lives. Let us see: Three black people and two white people have served me so far today. Does that mean I am ahead or behind in my race relations for this week? Don’t laugh. Some people take those kinds of notes.
Pen-wielding bomb-throwers such as Ms. Kaplan live to stir the race pot. Irretrievably unhappy with their lots in lives, they want those of us who are better off to join them in the gutter of misery and depression.
I guess if I were politically liberal I would have to live in a neighborhood with other brown-haired people, pray in a building where only brown-haired men and women pray, and send my blond haired, black haired and brown haired children to The Culver City School for Brown-Haired Children.
Reasonable people may disagree on whether the Ladera Heights families, and there is only a tiny number, should be permitted to transfer their children into Culver City. I, however, have not yet heard even a peanut-sized a persuasive argument against the transfer.
The fact that apparently many of the Ladera families are not white has been an unsettling subtext that I have detected ever since the transfer became a political issue in Culver City last autumn.
Surely Ms. Kaplan had that in mind when she mocked the tone of a letter she said the Ladera Heights Civic Assn. is circulating in Culver City for bordering on being obsequious. Perhaps Ms. Kaplan will surrender a little of the vast time she normally reserves for thinking, drive to Inglewood and address an assembly of students.
She could explain to them, pedantically, the definition of obsequious and then close with a cymbal-clash by spelling obsequious for them. No fair peeking.