A Private School Education

Map of Sacramento, CA characterized by race.

I can still remember being three years old and taking a basic test of the skills I had gained thus far including my knowledge of shapes and letters.  It wasn’t until a year later that I began to understand what that test was for.  I had been accepted into a private Catholic school.  Starting the next academic year, I was going to attend kindergarten at a school that my parents sacrificed much to get me enrolled to.  At the time, my five year old self did not quite comprehend the significance of my parents actions or the test I took years prior.  Yet it did not take me long to realize the significance of attending a school that had the power to choose who was and who was not admitted.

Not unlike the rest of the Catholic schools under the Diocese of Sacramento, a majority of elementary schools are located in predominantly white and wealthy areas of the city.  However, the school I was enrolled in was not in my neighborhood, instead it was closer to my parents’ worksites.  Location does play a heavy role in student enrollment, however, what is even more significant is the power that these administrations have in selecting students for admission.  Although my neighborhood and most notably my family did not look like the demographic make up of my elementary school, it is not uncommon for Catholic schools to have a majority white student population.  I remember particularly when I was on the school's basketball team over the span of my elementary school years, it was normal to play against all white teams from other Catholic schools in the city.  I came to understand many years after my Catholic education that I had an education under the guise of segregation fueled by institutional racism.

Granted, I had an enriching education; it could also be characterized by a lack of diversity.  I can count on one hand how many students in my own class from kindergarten to eighth grade that identified as non-white.  Though data for race demographics are not available for either the Diocese of Sacramento or California as a whole, the data at the national level is not surprising to someone who attended Catholic school.  According to the National Catholic Education Association, 74.1% of all students enrolled in Catholic elementary and middle schools in the United States in 2014 are white.   The student demographics of these schools do not represent the racial make up of the city of Sacramento nor that of the United States.  In Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics are Remaking America, William Frey, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, asserts the racial make up of the United States population currently aged 5 to 17 is 55% white.  Racial segregation accounts for the fact that in 2006, only 1% of white students attended schools that were over 90% non-white (Golash - Boza).  These statistics are further proof of the institutional racism in the ever-present form of segregation that engulfs any kind of private school, from the religious to the charters.  The ability to pick students, especially those that can pay tuition, with particular locations in majority white neighborhoods, allows schools to legally practice institutional discrimination based on race, religion, class, parent income, student achievement, or any other particular human characteristic even with the disclaimer that they do not discriminate.    

Race persists even with laws that do not allow discrimination because there is a cognitive gap that surrounds whiteness.  Whiteness has been thought of as the dominant power for centuries and has since become the norm.  As the norm, people who identify as white do not have to think about what their skin color means because it is always going to benefit them to differing degrees based on the intersectionality of class and gender.  The cognitive gap that eludes whiteness and white privilege has led to an unlighted entitlement that evades the existence of color in America.  This gap is also responsible for the recent pressing of the need for a kind of colorblind utopia that has been smeared across conservative talk shows and pundits themselves.  Ignoring race and opportunities based on race and even life events based solely on skin color is not a way to deal with the issue.  Colorblind approaches to race blame those who feel the tinge of discrimination and attempts to put the white experience leveled at that of the minority experience.  It needs to be known what minorities have faced in the past and in the present to help change the future.  American history is not filled with peaceful dinners with Native Americans or proper labor conditions for workers in the fields.  American history is filled with the dehumanization of many at the expense of maintaining white privilege and the top spot on the racial hierarchy.  It is not something to be proud of, granted there are things in America’s history that are noteworthy of pride, however those are overshadowed by the idea that dividing the nation in policy and people will divert the attention away from race relations when in fact, race has been and will forever be a pressing issue.  Historical moments play out in the present and it is not helpful when laws support the racial hierarchy, like those of education funding based on property tax, jail time for crack versus cocaine, or showing ID to vote.  Race is a past and present entity that needs to be acknowledged and a majority of those who consider themselves white are doing the country a grave injustice by ignorantly pressing for a colorblind nation and lacking the acknowledgment of their privilege.  The United States needs to become racially conscious and aware of both the good and bad history that has shaped our nation and present dealings.  We, as a nation, need to unanimously admit we have a race problem, nearly 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act.