Racism, Part 1

I live in the South. I was not raised in the South, though if you ask Northerners they will say I was, and Southerners will say I wasn't. No one really knows what to do with West Virginia. It is partly above and partly below the Mason Dixon Line, which is supposed to be the watermark to prove where you belong.
So it is from this mixed background that I now attempt to remark on a subject that some would say I have no business remarking on: racism.
For most of the country it was a topic revisited this week with the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida, but in my little town in East Carolina it is a topic that is weekly in the newspaper. I must admit that it has baffled me for many years now. In this part of the country, black people or African-Americans or people of color, have a loud public voice. They often comment that whatever is happening...Board of Education decisions, zoning, drug charges, police protection... decisions are made according to race. The general population, or at least the loudest population, believes that whites are out to get them, and all decisions are made in Whites' favor.
Because of this, our school system is still trying to meet desegregation requirements. Whenever the Board tries to reshuffle the kids, everyone goes up in arms. When they try to leave the kids in neighborhood schools everyone is upset that the "White Schools" are better. There seems to be no way to satisfy government requirements and the entire community.
Though I agree that at one time this was an issue in this part of the world, it is no longer. When the schools with a larger black population don't score well on tests, it is blamed on white schools getting better teachers. When black kids are bussed into the "good" schools, the test scores drop. One might look at that and say that race plays a part in intelligence. I don't see it that way. Economics is what is playing a part.
Like I said, I grew up in WV. You could run down the middle of the road for a week and still not run into a black person. BUT, you can go to a school where test scores are low, or you can move kids around and test scores will change at the good schools. What is the difference? Not race, but economics.
When you expect poor kids to score as well as rich kids, you are fooling yourself. Kids from privileged backgrounds have an unfair advantage. They have parents who are educated. They go to summer camps, museums, attend library programs, travel, take special extra-curricular classes, play instruments, and have much attention lavished upon them. They then have all of the experiences that help them achieve in life and on tests. This is true of black, white, green, and purple kids. Experiences equal achievement.
Of course there are exceptions to this. There are some kids who just don't have the mental capacity to achieve high marks, and there are some kids who, despite their backgrounds, will achieve high marks. But most definitely it has nothing to do with race.
So instead of the loud, useless conversation about which schools are better, the conversation needs to turn to discovering a way to help parents achieve so that their kids can too.