Reflections on an Awkward World

Suppose that, because interest rates are low, you’re refinancing the house you bought a few years ago for $100,000. Everyone knows home prices have risen. Your first two appraisals come in at $110,00 and $125,000, but your house is clearly worth much more. You pay for a market analysis: $187,500. Closer.

Finally, you try one little cosmetic change, and a third appraisal values your home at $259,000, more than double the first two appraisals. Same house. Same neighborhood.

We’ve spent much of the last year watching white folks finally “get” that driving while black is actually dangerous. Hard to imagine that those courteous, professional cops can make someone feel like a spy hiding from Stalinist police on a Soviet train in some black-and-white film. But they do. When my pal Rollin washed his classic white convertible in his own driveway, cops would sometimes stop to question him. In San Francisco.

The Las Cruces Public Schools are trying to explain to skeptical parents and citizens that our schools have been inherently unfair. The Yazzie/Martinez court decision found New Mexico schools don’t provide the constitutionally-mandated equal education to Native Americans, ESL kids, and poor kids.

When LCPS unveiled its policy, people went crazy. One skeptic yelled at an NAACP representative that kids don’t need images of successful black folks in textbooks, they can google them. (Key evidence leading the U.S. Supreme Court to order integrated schools in 1954 included studies showing little black girls preferred white dolls to black.)

At 20, I was often the first white adult that some poor black kids in Harlem or Tennessee had really talked with, and I heard and saw how their white teachers’ contempt affected them. In Las Cruces in 1972, Denise Chavez was a highly talented young writer and actress. I wouldn’t have guessed that, as she mentioned recently in Blue Mesa Review, upon seeing Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima, she “could not believe that a Chicano Nuevo Mexicano had written [such a novel]. . . I had never seen myself or anyone I knew in a book that wasn’t some self-published tome.”

Harvard Law School started accepting women just 25 years before I attended. I saw how much it meant to my female classmates to see a few female professors, though not yet any portraits of women on the walls. A professor and friend, Clyde Ferguson, related that when he’d won Harvard’s student moot court competition, his prize was a biography of Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision that negroes were not (and could not be) citizens. School officials were clueless that this might seem an odd prize to give an over-achieving Black kid.

Without enough knowledge to analyze LCPS's JBC policy, or say just how we fix the policing problem, I’m losing patience with anyone who can’t see the problem and recognize the need for significant change.

Back to that house appraisal in 2020 in Indianapolis. The small adjustment Ms. Duffy made? She stripped her application of any hint of gender or ethnicity; removed all family photographs, some pertinent books, and African-American art from the house; and arranged that her “brother” (actually a white friend) would meet with the appraiser because she had a conflict.

Without ethnic indicia, and with a white guy showing him around, the appraiser carefully calculated the house’s value – at twice the “value” appraisers gave it when it was owned by a Black woman.

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[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 23 May 2021, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website (under a somewhat mystifying headline) and KRWG's website. A related radio commentary will air during the week on KRWG (90.7 FM) and KTAL-LP. (101.5 FM – http://www.lccommunityradio.org/), and is available on demand at here, if you click on the arrow just under my picture.]

[ I’ve read the policy, which is vague, well-intentioned, and somewhat abstract. There’s a clear need to do something, partly because of the Yazzie / Martinez court decision. I’d guess a lot will depend on specific actions to implement it. ]

I haven’t yet watched the school board meeting, which others have described as “as close to violence as I’ve seen.” I hope to. We’re also scheduling a discussion, with folks from various viewpoints, on “Speak Up, Las Cruces!” on KTAL Community Radio, probably for Wednesday, 2 June, 9-10 a.m. Then I’ll have a better idea what all the fuss is about. ]

"Dreams of ?"   2001 Washington, D.C.     © Peter Goodman

[School issues often create particularly sharp divisions of opinion.  I regret that our radio discussion will probably be by phone, with no in-studio guests, because that eliminates nonverbal cues and makes everything more difficult.  That's particularly so because KTAL is now streaming the show life on Facebook.  Not sure whether or not station rules will change in time for this discussion.]