Sheer Racist Depravity

Homeless Mom Faces 20 Years for Putting Kid in Good School

Connecticut

It was a crime to teach slaves to read in the Old South. Today, 150 years after the opening shots of the Civil War, it is still considered a crime to try to get a decent education for a poor black child. Tanya McDowell, a black homeless mother, was arrested on April 14 for enrolling her five-year-old son, Andrew Justin Patches, in kindergarten in Norwalk, Connecticut. Because she was not considered a Norwalk resident, McDowell is accused of “stealing” the public school’s services. She faces up to 20 years in prison on felony charges of first-degree larceny and having to pay “restitution” of over $15,000. We demand that these outrageous charges be dropped!

The racist persecution of McDowell is shot through with Kafkaesque cruelty. Apparently police were tipped off by a lawyer for the Norwalk Housing Authority as it was evicting McDowell’s babysitter from her housing project. The babysitter’s “crime” was to permit the homeless mother to use her address, which allowed McDowell to register Andrew at the Brookside Elementary School. Although McDowell alternately stays in a Norwalk emergency shelter, a van or a friend’s house, Norwalk authorities officially considered her a resident of Bridgeport, a wasteland of boarded-up brick factories populated by impoverished former workers. This is the real crime in the eyes of the bourgeois Norwalk city fathers: Tanya McDowell and her son actually tried to get out of Bridgeport’s rotten schools instead of staying “in their place.” What’s next: pass laws like in apartheid South Africa?

The mere mention of Bridgeport evokes disdainful shudders in nearby Darien, New Canaan and other manicured enclaves of Fairfield County’s Gold Coast, home to some of the wealthiest tax dodgers, Wall Street financial manipulators and profit-drenched exploiters in the world. These types got a big bailout, thanks to Barack Obama, after their fraudulent schemes helped dump the country into the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. In the New Haven Advocate (27 April), Nick Keppler commented ironically that “there’s one shifty cheat, lying low in a land saturated by financial intrigue, who must repay what her scheme cost society”: a homeless person in trouble over “tricky paperwork and the bending of legalities” who “does not warrant a bailout.”

Tanya McDowell’s arrest is part of the brutal enforcement of racial inequality by the government, from Washington, D.C., down to the smallest one-cop town. Only a few months ago, black mother Kelley Williams-Bolar of Akron, Ohio, was convicted of the same “crime” (see “Black Mother Jailed for Getting Kids into Decent School,” WV No. 977, 1 April). The great abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery, said that in the eyes of the slaveholders, to educate a man “would forever unfit him to be a slave.” We recognize mothers like Tanya McDowell and Kelley Williams-Bolar not as criminals, but as people trying to do right by their kids against a system that considers them expendable.

Around the country, working-class parents—black, white, immigrant—try by one means or another to get their kids into the few decent schools in the rotting public education system. In San Francisco alone, the parents of some 300 children were forced to pay up to $5,000 for bending the rules. The grotesque persecution of Kelley Williams-Bolar and Tanya McDowell sends a special message to the overwhelming majority of black people, forcibly segregated at the bottom of this capitalist society, of what’s in store for them if they try to break their kids out of their assigned ghetto schools. The old Jim Crow laws enforcing formal segregation are gone. But in their place are regulations like residency requirements for public schools that serve the same purpose. Segregation is enforced by the racist courts and cops, like the ones who prowl the leafy streets of Connecticut’s WASP villages looking for “out of place” black drivers. Even minimal steps to redress school segregation, such as school busing, were long ago abandoned by the ruling class.

Four of Connecticut’s urban areas are among the top ten in the nation in growth in income inequality, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study of 1989-2004. And as night follows day, Connecticut has one of the biggest achievement gaps between black and white students of any state in the U.S.

Residency requirements combined with education funding based on local property and other taxes guarantee that richer kids will get good schools and poor kids will be isolated in lousy ones, especially in the ghettos and barrios. At bottom, the capitalists see no reason to throw money at educating the mass of black and Latino youth, whom they write off as a “surplus” layer with no prospect of getting jobs requiring any kind of skills. During the first year of the current economic crisis, there were almost one million homeless schoolchildren in America. Year after year, minority youth are put through crumbling schools that mainly serve to “train” them for a future in prison.

“We can’t spend our way out of it,” Barack Obama told the Today show last fall. In fact, the capitalist class that Obama represents has starved public schools of funding for years. And the Obama administration has waged war against the teachers unions, which cynically are blamed for the woeful state of the public schools. Massive doses of money—for teachers, books, computers, repairs—would be a start in redressing this situation. There is an urgent need for free, quality, integrated education for all; for decent, integrated housing; for jobs for all! But as we wrote in “Obama’s War on Public Education” (WV No. 967, 22 October 2010):

“Like the fight for decent health care, the battle for quality education, including bilingual instruction, for the working class and the black and Latino poor requires hard struggle against the capitalist class, a tiny handful of people whose obscene wealth is gained from exploiting labor and whose rule is reinforced by racial and other forms of social oppression. The money and resources exist for massive construction of schools, hospitals and other infrastructure gutted by the profit-bloated capitalists. To seize that wealth requires breaking the power of the bourgeoisie through socialist revolution.”

When the multiracial working class is in power, it will replace the rotting structure of capitalist property relations with a planned economy that can provide jobs and decent living conditions for all. To get there, we need to build a revolutionary workers party that will champion the cause of all those who have been thrown on capitalism’s scrap heap.