Credible reports of racial slurs being hurled by Saucon Valley students at minorities have surfaced in our community, once again. Like the scum one sees at times along Saucon Creek, it foams at the edges of things, stubborn and disgusting, floating down from the borough and township and gathering into foul, gray curds.
Saucon Valley High School (FILE PHOTO)
I’ve received letters about two separate but allegedly related incidents on Saucon school buses. There was also a separate report in the spring involving suspected racialized bullying. While the latest incidents are new, all of them were addressed very seriously by the school administration.
Schools do have a few important levers to pull to help confront racism—task forces, anti-bias training, curriculum changes, assemblies, student disciplinary policies and consequences. But those things will never be enough without a culture of anti-racism in the community itself. You can be cynical about school leaders’ and teachers’ efforts, or you can be hopeful, but I don’t think you can say they’re not trying.
Racism causes deep, enduring pain to individuals and to groups of people. It assaults the dignity of human beings as well as our town’s comity. Still, children saying stupid, racist things aren’t the root problem. They’re a symptom of something deeper. Racism is learned, and it’s learned in ways very unlike how most of us think it is.
Every single administrator and teacher I’ve met in Saucon knows where the problem really begins. I’ve seen the looks on their faces. They know. I know. You probably know, too.
Here’s a hint: It’s not from schools. Schools may be the site of racism, and that makes them responsible, but they’re not the source.
By the time children in Saucon get to our public schools, it can already feel too late. Science tells us that children learn biases at very young ages through non-verbal observation of others. And children are much, much better at learning—good stuff and bad stuff—than most of us suspect. They’re like high-def security cameras inside and outside a house—constantly detecting, constantly recording, 24/7, 365.
“They study our behavior, and sometimes the nonverbal messages they receive are not the ones we intend to send,” write early childhood education researchers Andrew N. Meltzoff and Walter S. Gilliam, in a fascinating essay, “How Children Acquire Racial Biases.” “What every parent, teacher, and societal leader should think about is that children watch and learn from our behavior before first grade. When we exhibit biases in front of young children, we are unwittingly instilling our biases in their minds—biases they then adopt, practice and perpetuate,” the researchers assert.
So, it all starts young, most of it before kindergarten. You’ve all heard the old phrase, “little pitchers.” It’s not just a Little League term.
If you think we all learned our lessons after some of the disgraceful spectacles of the 2010s in Saucon, and the huge legal payout, you may underestimate the challenges posed by American racism.
Sure, we can reinforce the values of tolerance in the schools and teach accurate history and make inspirational diversity posters and murals and all that. We can—and should—sustain our anti-bullying measures, particularly those that deal with racialized bullying. But when it comes to “fixing” racism, the school district is a mere finishing school. We can’t erase hate. Anti-racism starts at home, squarely in the behaviors and the attitudes of parents of young children. That’s where the real work is.
It’s also where we should extend massive waves of compassion, even as we also help the direct and indirect victims of racism. Parenting young children is hard—it’s stressful, it’s scary and it’s incredibly rewarding. Parents who themselves feel worthless can be drawn to ugly behaviors. As the saying goes, hurt people hurt people. But the parents who are trying to do things differently than perhaps their own less enlightened parents did need praise and support, and we need to be there for them, as a community, and not find new ways to pile on the pressure.
So I think we need to be gentle and find ways to encourage and build up rather than judge and tear down. When a kid does something vicious to another kid in school, we want to help victims of racialized bullying, yes. But I also think we need to be patient with our community and its people. Self-righteous judgmentalism helps no one.
We should stop acting shocked by racism, too. It’s a real problem, but it’s neither the only problem we face, nor is it hopeless. We can improve. It’s behavior, not a terminal illness. Shock and fatalism are part of the process of denialism.
And we need to think both vertically and laterally. I may be a school board director, but there’s nothing I’m saying that couldn’t be said by a local landscaper, a lawyer, a car mechanic or a CPA. There are no elites on this topic.
A sector of our community think that those of us who talk about racism in Saucon Valley make way too much of a few stupid remarks by children. They think we’re just “virtue signaling,” that “everybody’s a racist to some degree” and so on. They even think that by talking about racism, we make it worse. But does talking about cancer or heroin addiction makes those afflictions worse?
Spending money on anti-bias training or teaching accurate history, while important, won’t alone stop racism. Most of our teachers are well-equipped to recognize and address racism, but putting it all on them is unfair and misguided. And programs and task forces and educational initiatives and “Love Over Hate” posters are all nice. But they’ll never be enough.
Other districts may have the dubious luxury of putting racism on the back burner, but in Saucon, well, we have a special history. We’ve paid a steep price—reputationally, monetarily and morally—when we’ve failed to deal with racism. We must not go down that road again.
Bill Broun, who lives in Hellertown, is a member of the Saucon Valley School Board. He is a professor at East Stroudsburg University and a novelist.