Dreams from My Father

and an indifferent state legislature. The more I learned about the system, the more convinced I became that school reform was the only possible solution for the plight of the young men I saw on the street; that without stable families, with no prospects for blue-collar work that could support a family of their own, education was their last best hope. And so in April, in between working on other issues, I developed an action plan for the organization and started peddling it to my leadership.
    The response was underwhelming.
    Some of it was a problem of self-interest, constituencies misaligned. Older church members told me they had already raised their children; younger parents, like Angela and Mary, sent their children to Catholic schools. The biggest source of resistance was rarely talked about, though—namely, the uncomfortable fact that every one of our churches was filled with teachers, principals, and district superintendents. Few of these educators sent their own children to public schools; they knew too much for that. But they would defend the status quo with the same skill and vigor as their white counterparts of two decades before. There wasn’t enough money to do the job right, they told me (which was certainly true). Efforts at reform—decentralization, say, or cutbacks in the bureaucracy—were part of a white effort to wrest back control (not so true). As for the students, well, they were impossible. Lazy. Unruly. Slow. Not the children’s fault, maybe, but certainly not the schools’. There may not be any bad kids, Barack, but there sure are a lot of bad parents.
    In my mind, these conversations came to serve as a symbol of the unspoken settlement we had made since the 1960s, a settlement that allowed half of our children to advance even as the other half fell further behind. More than that, the conversations made me angry; and so despite lukewarm support from our board, Johnnie and I decided to go ahead and visit some of the area schools, hoping to drum up a constituency beyond the young parents of Altgeld.
    We started with Kyle’s high school, the one in the area with the best reputation. It was a single building, relatively new but with a careless, impersonal feel: bare concrete pillars, long stark corridors, windows that couldn’t be opened and had already clouded, like the windows in a greenhouse. The principal, an attentive, personable man named Dr. Lonnie King, said he was eager to work with community groups like ours. Then he mentioned that one of his school counselors, a Mr. Asante Moran, was trying to start a mentorship program for young men at the school and suggested that we might want to meet him.
    We followed Dr. King’s directions to a small office toward the rear of the building. It was decorated with African themes: a map of the continent, posters of ancient Africa’s kings and queens, a collection of drums and gourds and a kente-cloth wall hanging. Behind the desk sat a tall and imposing man with a handlebar mustache and a prominent jaw. He was dressed in an African print, an elephant-hair bracelet around one thick wrist. He seemed a bit put off at first—he had a stack of SAT practice exams on his desk, and I sensed that Dr. King’s call had been an unwelcome interruption. Nevertheless, he offered us seats, told us to call him Asante, and as our interest became more apparent, began to explain some of his ideas.
    “The first thing you have to realize,” he said, looking at Johnnie and me in turn, “is that the public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period. They’re operated as holding pens—miniature jails, really. It’s only when black children start breaking out of their pens and bothering white people that society even pays any attention to the issue of whether these children are being educated.
    “Just think about what a real education for these children would involve. It would start by giving a child an understanding of
him
self,
his
world,
his
culture,
his
community. That’s the starting point of any educational process. That’s what makes a child hungry to learn—the promise of being part of something, of mastering his environment. But for the black child, everything’s turned upside down. From day one, what’s he learning about? Someone else’s history. Someone else’s culture. Not only that, this culture he’s supposed to learn is the same culture that’s systematically