Blacks homeschooling due to racism?

Yesterday, I came across an article posted by HSLDA on Facebook. It was about the increase of black homeschoolers, and the reason mentioned for it was parents wanting to remove their children from racism.

The comments section was not pretty. People said things like:

 newsflash - at most public schools where the behavior of the students is unruly and out-of-control, teachers bark and yell. it has nothing to do with the color of the students!

So OK. I get it, we're supposed to ignore racism and micro aggressions and keep our kids in school, or say that we are homeschooling for some other reason... any other reason.

Well. what about this?

https://www.ted.com/talks/alice_goffman_college_or_prison_two_destinies_one_blatant_injustice

In the United States, two institutions guide teenagers on the journey to adulthood: college and prison. Sociologist Alice Goffman spent six years in a troubled Philadelphia neighborhood and saw first-hand how teenagers of African-American and Latino backgrounds are funneled down the path to prison — sometimes starting with relatively minor infractions. In an impassioned talk she asks, “Why are we offering only handcuffs and jail time?”

So about NYC

We're supposed to be living the dream with our fancy schmancy apartment due to my husband's job in NYC... and in theory, it is going great, but the timing is wonky.  We don't want to sell he house in GA and we have dogs that we can't have in the apartment, so hubby is spending a lot of time alone in NY and I am spending a lot of time alone in GA.

I am managing to keep myself busy enough with the community theatre, but this distance is just difficult.  The fact that he's not exactly thrilled with his job does not help... so I am keeping an open mind about what might happen next because I certainly don't want him to stroke-out in order to make me happy with a little time in NY now and then.

I'm kind of frustrated. I need to try to enjoy my minutes in NY as much as I can while I am here because I don't know how long it will last.

Oh, and also, I am working on getting my homeschool book finished and my time in NY is the best time to work on it... so that's good thing.

How I got on the board of a Community Theatre

So after I decompressed from homeschooling (vegetated for about a year), I gave a though to what I had liked and what I did not like about the activities I'd participated in as the kids grew up.  What I loved the most, was working on costumes, so I volunteered for a few local theatre and eventually, found one that would allow me to costume and learn at the same time.  That was just what I needed.

A year later, and a few hundred costumes later, I was asked to join the board.  Hmmm... Ok.  Not easy, but important.  Cool.

So that is where we are right now.  I love this place.  I love the people.  I love how we entertain, encourage, and include the community.  I want to help raise money for our little theatre, so we can be a big theatre and we can get more kids engaged, we can get more community members creating.  We can make more people like me more involved in the community.

With that said, here is the link to my fundraising page.

https://www.gagivesday.org/c/GGD/a/liveartstheatre/p/ahermitt

This is just one of several fundraising pages for Live arts.  Today is GA Gives Day (Nov 12).  Please give if you are moved at all.  I thank you and Live arts thanks you.

Ps. If you want to visit the main GA Gives Day page for Live Arts, please note that I worked on most of the costumes show.

Thanks.

(main page: https://www.gagivesday.org/c/GGD/a/liveartstheatre/)

Is racism leading to homeschooling?

Apparently, yes. 

According to the Washington Post, "the reasons for black kids to be homeschooled may not be the same as for white kids. (Ama Mazama's research) shows that black parents homeschool their children due to white racism."

Problems include:

Covert Institutionalized racism
Eurocentric teachers' attitudes
Racial stereotypes of black children
Harsh school punishments

As a former public school parent who is black and has black children, I can attest to many of these problems. We certainly experienced them.  The worst for us was the racial stereotypes of my family in general. When we moved to GA, for example, there weren't many black families in our kids school, and it was abundantly clear that the staff had ideas about black people and just assumed that those things were true about us.  I had people purchase my kids' field trip shirts because they assumed we could not. ( I'm pretty sure we made more than those folks.)  I had teachers thank my husband for having lunch with his kids and ask him when was the last time he saw them (as if we were divorced).  I had teachers tell me how they "understood" how hard it was to be a single parent.  Since I was married, I  had no idea why they would say that to me.  

In short, I felt that they had low expectations about us as people, and so also had low expectations for our kids.  So while we may have not realized it at the time, racism may have had something to do with while we pulled the kids out of school.