Did integration negatively affect discipline for black kids? That’s the question Carol Forsloff asked at Digital Journal. Some folks claim that interaction with white teachers and the adoption of white parenting styles led to the breakdown of discipline. I haven’t stopped thinking about the post since I read it.
As a young girl, I lived through the revolutionary experiment of integration. I was born in 1969 and was part of the first generation of Americans for whom integrated childhoods were possible. My parents, raised in segregation, knew the price people paid for exclusion. For them, integration was about access to opportunity—the opportunity to compete.
My parents practiced a full-contact variety of integration. We didn’t live in a black community and attend predominantly white schools. We lived in an overwhelming white suburb. I attended the local schools and was a little chocolate girl in a sea of white kids. For much of elementary school, I was the only black girl in my class and my grade. We didn’t worship in a black church on Sunday. We were the only black family in our Presbyterian congregation. Like anyone, my parents may have made some mistakes along the way, but the spirit of their intent was right.
Integration produced mixed results for black children, but I’m not convinced that it was in the areas of discipline or values. If African Americans cultivated and transmitted unique cultural values from one generation to another through slavery and Jim Crow, I’m not persuaded that integration could undo that.
As a woman who spent my childhood living the rigors and demands of integration, I'll say it absolutely produced new pressures on African-American parents and children. Those very real stressors took a toll. I endured fights, unrelenting visibility and the need to conduct cultural translation for peers and adults alike. But discipline didn’t suffer in my experience. My parents wanted access to the best opportunities this nation had to offer, but had no desire to imitate white people or their values. In fact, my parents derided and denounced the ways that some of my best white friends interacted with their parents. If anything, my parents were even more committed to discipline because of integration, not less so.
What am I missing?
—JENNIFER BASZILE
Jennifer Baszile is the author of "The Black Girl Next Door".