New York City is the most diverse city in the world. Known as a melting pot or a “pressure cooker” for some, this metropolis is home to individuals of all ethnicities and cultures. Home to the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, and the Empire State Building, New York is a city rife with the American dream that has inspired so many immigrants that have chosen to call this place “home.” Despite its status as a shining testament of liberalism, New York has fallen victim to a plight that America has been burdened with since its inception: racial and ethnic discrimination.
Although the discrimination is arguably less pronounced in New York City than in other places where the “minorities” truly make up the minority of the populous, the fact that it is still very much alive remains today. In his 1960 essay “Fifth Avenue, Uptown,” outspoken writer James Baldwin famously wrote “[minorities] are, therefore, ignored in the North and under surveillance in the South, and suffer hideously in both places.” While some progress has been made since the 1960s, a large portion of the city believes that racism is for the most part over, when in fact it has just reared it’s ugly head in alternative and arguably more subdued forms including school segregation, hate crimes, murders.
School Segregation in NYC
Research conducted by The New School’s Center for New York City Affairs demonstrates that school segregation is prevalent in NYC and is not always the result of housing patterns. The study shows that there are dozens of high-poverty elementary schools which almost exclusively serve Black and Latino children that are located in far more racially and economically mixed neighborhoods. Simply stated: even diverse and integrated neighborhoods are home to segregated and marginalized schools. Housing segregation still has a large impact, however. Large ranges of the city have high concentrations of poverty and these high poverty neighborhoods are made up primarily of Blacks and Latinos. Student enrollment in hundreds of schools reflects that reality.
The maps above demonstrate that 124 of the city’s 734 neighborhood elementary schools are significantly poorer than their school zones. For these schools, the approximate household income of the zone is at least 20% higher than the estimated household income of the children enrolled.
Socioeconomically disadvantaged students that belong to a certain race receive an inferior education. With the ongoing struggle against racism in this country and overcoming inequality, a solid foundation in good education can be the first step in vanquishing discrimination. But alas, this is not the case. The lack of education only hampers marginalized individuals’ quest to overcome the odds.
Take District 13 in downtown Brooklyn, for example. The estimated household income of children enrolled at PS 287 is less than half that of all households in the school zone. While the school enrollment is 89 percent Black and Latino; the zone is just 43 percent Black and Latino.
Studies suggest that socioeconomic integration is one of the most effective and inexpensive ways to improve academic achievement for poor children due to the fact that high-poverty schools tend to have fewer resources. Therefore, these districts have trouble hiring and retaining qualified teachers; with fewer resources and less funding, the staff has little incentive to stay.
The Institutionalized Nature of Superior Teachers
These underqualified teachers in “minority” schools have become a bonafide epidemic throughout the city in recent years. The Daily News cites a specific school – Banana Kelly High School in the Bronx – as representative of schools in poor neighborhoods across the city. At this high school, many of the students had been in the institution than the teachers there. Indeed, Capital New York reports that the state’s new mandated teacher evaluation program has confirmed that teachers with the highest rating tend to be employed in affluent neighborhoods and be a comparatively rare occurrence within the neighborhoods’ poorer counterparts.
This report cites that the reason teachers prefer affluent neighborhoods is that they prefer “teaching kids who have higher attendance, who are ready to learn, who come to school with fewer distractions,” even in schools that would provide similar or identical salaries. The sad truth is that the schisms that exist among schools have become so entrenched that some of the teachers themselves have become so disheartened with the situation that they have publicly come to blame the students (see Ed Boland’s The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a NYC High School) rather than the circumstances they are victim to.
Teacher demography may also help to shed some light on the issue. Since the turn of the century, the number of teachers actively employed throughout the city has dwindled from about 77 thousand to 73 thousand in 2012, the most recent year with available data. The number of teachers employed had been relatively stagnant with no significant dips or gains between the years of 2000 and 2008. Since then, the number of teachers has dramatically dropped off. The reason for this? The recession. Though the recession doesn’t accurately justify the dip in the number of teachers as the amount of people needed to teach a given population does not change during times of economic crisis, even if pay were to take a hit.
Hate Crime Against Hispanics
Marcelo Lucero was an Ecuadorian immigrant who had been living in the USA for 16 years killed by a gang of white teenagers what called themselves the Caucasian Crew in a sport they called “beaner-hopping”, which is violence targeted against Latinos, a plain and simple hate crime. The seven teenagers were arrested and convicted for the hate crime. A vigil is now held every year in the spot that Marcelo Lucero died, the first of which included over a thousand people. Community leaders also spoke out against the anti-immigrant atmosphere in the wake of the killing. Schools also started to discuss the issues of tolerance in connection to this horrible crime. The community response was covered by the film organization Not In Our Town. Joselo Lucero, Marcelo’s brother, is active in the community to try to work with children to promote tolerance.
The violent killing called attention to violence against suspected undocumented immigrants. Police initially minimized the incident, however when the Southern Poverty Law Center sent a spanish-speaking researcher to Suffolk County, Long Island, a much more troubling pattern revealed. Attacks on Latino immigrants were found to be rather commonplace. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center website: “Latino immigrants in Suffolk County are regularly harassed, taunted, and pelted with objects hurled from cars. They are frequently run off the road while riding bicycles, and many report being beaten with baseball bats and other objects. Others have been shot with BB guns or pepper-sprayed. Most will not walk alone after dark; parents often refuse to let their children play outside. A few have been the targets of arson attacks and worse.” Hateful rhetoric and the intolerant attitudes of the local politicians and police force also contributed to a dangerous climate for Latino immigrants. Police were indifferent to reports of attacks against Latino immigrants, and at worst even contributed to the issue themselves. The Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York reached a settlement with the local police to implement new policies to ensure the safety and rights of the Latino immigrants under their charge.
Hate Crime Against Asians
While hate crimes against African Americans and Hispanics are covered widely by the media, the same does not fully apply to hate crimes against Asians. One example is the story of David Kao, a 49-year-old man from Flushing, NY who was strangled to death by two African American teens who were just 16 and 17 years old. The teens admitted to brutally beating Kao before dropping his body off on a nearby street. These teenagers had also confessed to confronting another Asian man who was also from Flushing just a month before, yet the prosecutor of Kao’s case does not believe it to be a case of hate crime. This is troubling because hate crime against Asians is a real problem, and it can’t be solved just by ignoring it.
The reality is that there is not much news coverage regarding cases of hate crime against Asians. Even for Kao’s case, which took place in 2009, it was difficult to find much information or even discussion about it online, which is surprising considering it was just as severe or even more extreme than some cases of hate crime against Blacks and Hispanics. The issue may be that cases like these are misidentified by law enforcement authorities as just regular violent crimes rather than hate crimes, which can be a problem for people in the future who may face similar experiences because the issue of hate crime against Asians isn’t taken as seriously.
