Status Updates From The Strike That Changed New...

“Moreover, since America is a procedurally egalitarian nation, it was only a matter of time before whites demanded and received the same treatment as blacks, and appropriated the mechanism of community control for their own uses. And this, of course, left blacks once again disadvantaged.” (Pg. 212)

The word “procedurally” is doing so much heavy lifting in this quote.

“This black cultural critique was a powerful one. It exposed the weak underside of American national values: mindless materialism, rampant individualism, and invidious competition.” (Pg. 207)

“Like Jews in the 1960s, Latinos and Asians are making their peace with New York’s white population, creating the potential for blacks to become more isolated than ever.” This was written in 2004.

Unions + just cause + racism = bad

Okay, I’ve gathered that in NYC in the 1960s the general racial education divide was based in that white educators were promoting the idea that they worked an “objective” meritocracy, and blacks communities and educators were show in their actions that prioritized values like the cooperative and legitimizing of lower-class black culture, that the city’s governing bodies did not.

Meritocracy is unusable as a system of valuing people without first unpacking the entire history of the ideology’s use! How can you say you’re judging people by merit without acknowledging that less than a hundred years ago much of what grounds U.S. “merit” as we know it today was racism, misogyny, homophobia, and imperialism!

And of course after WWII the NYC government transitioned it’s advertisement of production line jobs to promote government jobs. The transition from the factory to the cubical.

“New York was now a middle-class city, if one went by statistics. Approximately 67 percent of its households earned between $5000 and $25,000 a year (national household income averaged $7400 in 1967). New York was also a predominantly white city: approximately 75 percent in 1960” EXPLAINS SO MUCH ABOUT WHY NEW YORK IS SO EXPENSIVE NOW! If that was the average in the 60s!

It makes total sense that black communities after years of being attacked for going along with the federal government’s attempts to desegregate the United States would be exhausted! And it makes sense that a group of those people in Ocean Hill-Brownsville would suggest just allocating better ressources to black schools to be run by black communities.

Queens-based Parents and tax payers or P.A.T.s reaction to government issued integration is interesting to hold on the historical knowledge voids I have regarding Queens, NY.

This book points out the problems with liberalism in the 1960s and how it assumed that New York City black and white people both viewed the issue of segregation agreeing that individualism, meritocracy, and a race-blind, all existed and were functional reasonings to be used to distribute educational resources to NYC redline and privileged communities.