The following piece uses literature to examine the language used about school closings in Chicago.
As I listened to the dialogue about violence following the proposed school closings in CPS, I was reminded of Jack London’s Call of the Wild. London wrote,
He was a thing of the wild…. He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy was weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial (primitive) life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.
The idea that “more” blood will drip in the streets of Chicago as a result of the school closings that will force elementary-aged children to travel across neighborhood boundaries is a problematic narrative that we cannot endorse. Intimated in this narrative is a new coinage for our children – the wild. This is akin to calling African American children savages who only know how to react with violence. Secondarily, this is an indictment of the schools as they exist.
I am not writing as a naïf. I had to travel across neighborhood boundaries in Chicago, and I was forced to make a choice as a high school student attending a school in the Englewood neighborhood – carry a stick or strive for the national honor society. As I wrote in my book, Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males, I chose to do both. Students from Lindblom were often assaulted by students from Englewood and Harper high schools. Also, walking two blocks from 63rd and Wolcott to 61st and Wolcott was often fraught with tension for athletes (I should be a retired baseball player by now – look up my stats in the archives of the Sun-Times and Tribune – all-city varsity player for four years) who traveled after school hours without the presence of the Chicago Police Department. My concern at the time was about the quality of education some students were receiving that yielded a predatory stance against someone who looked like them. A closer view would yield that the same stance was taken within neighborhood boundaries by a small number of students, not the majority.
One of our colleagues often speaks about the need to move beyond language that forges a “tired narrative in favor of a new dialogue.” However, it is easier to remain entrenched in political and racial divisive dialogue and propaganda that have little leverage for interrupting the educational and economic hierarchies that find some students consistently at the bottom in ‘new schools’ and ‘old schools.’
I do not agree with the school closings and the accompanying deceitful rationales, but I have a problem with the language used by some to keep them open, namely the focus on the descent into violence. This essentially suggests that poor schools in a deteriorating society debased by inhumane actions by some children is okay as long as the violence is contained within neighborhoods instead of across neighborhoods.
As a faculty in a public research university, we have a responsibility to not only seek solutions for the impending changes, but also use language responsibly. As a child in CPS, I think I would have benefitted from both. I did not view myself as a “thing of the wild,” but I could have if I heard it often enough.
