School in Mississippi Assigns Class Officers by Race
SOURCE:
I learned something new last week.
It turns out that just because our nation elected a black president does not mean students at a middle school in Northern Mississippi can.
That’s right: School officials at Nettleton Middle School in Mississippi decided to assign class officer positions by race.
In all three grades, only white students were allowed to run for class president. African-American students could only run for secretary and recorder in eighth grade, secretary in seventh grade, and reporter in sixth grade.
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According to the school’s website, this decision has been in place for over 30 years, but hadn’t seemed to stir up any controversy until last week when a few blogs and news outlets picked the story up.
The blog MixandHappy.com featured an outraged mother, Brandy Springer, who wrote a letter to the Nettleton School Board asking how her bi-racial children would be classified and this is the response she received:
They told me that they "Go by the mother's race [because] with minorities the father isn't generally in the home." They also told me that "a city court order is the reason why it is this way."
Last Friday, Springer conducted a phone interview with MSNBC after her decision to pull her kids, ages 12 and 13, out of the school made headlines.
During the interview, Springer said, "My daughter brought home the paperbecause she wished to run for school reporter and was told that she couldn't because she was classified as white."
After being asked what it would take for her to put her kids back in the school, Springer said, "I'm not sure I would put my kids back in the school system where the school officials have this attitude. Even if they changed the policies due to this, the attitude hasn't changed. Someone thought that this was okay up until now.”
Following the media uproar, the Nettleton School District released a statement announcing their decision to eliminate their race-based elections system. In the statement, Superintendent Russell Taylor maintains that the policy was initially conceived to “ensure minority representation and involvement” during class elections while making sure that African-Americans were represented“ in each student office category through an annual rotation basis.”
Gawker described the whole ordeal as a “misguided attempt at affirmative action, a very backwards method in encouraging minority involvement within the school’s student government."
Misguided indeed — by creating racial quotas for elected positions, school officials have failed these students. Such an elections system gives lip-service to racial diversity without delving into the more complex barriers to minority representation in politics or other prominent portions of public life. Minority students in Nettleton may have watched a black man become president of the United States, but they have been told by their own teachers that they cannot be elected president of their own class.
While the verdict is still out on whether or not any efforts are being made by the school to create and foster racial equity, it is especially troubling to know that a policy like this was taking place down South — a region plagued by centuries of segregation policies, both official and unofficial. Policies like this one at Nettleton Middle are proof that modern Jim Crow-style segregation still rears its ugly head today.
Eliminating such a racially segregated policy in Nettleton, Miss., may be a small feat, but we have to start somewhere. Paying attention to backwards policies like this one is where we begin to shift the national paradigm in thinking about racial and social justice.
Jessica Strong is a staff writer for Campus Progress.
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