Stay Black and Die? No. Study, Work and Live Free. Don’t Be Confused

"I am not confused, you are. You act like I was raised in indentured servitude." — Justice Clarence Thomas

As another Indiana school year begins, Hoosiers should reject both racism and the politics of racial helplessness

Justice Clarence Thomas is Black. Someday, like every human being, he will die. But between birth and death, Thomas’s extraordinary journey from poverty in segregated Georgia to the Supreme Court of the United States illustrates a truth increasingly difficult to discuss in America’s racial debate: history matters, discrimination existed, and opportunity still matters.

America enslaved Black people. Jim Crow was real. Segregation was real. Those chapters cannot be erased, excused or rewritten. But neither should they become a permanent instruction manual telling a Black child born in Indiana today what he or she cannot become. That is especially important as another school year begins.

Across Indiana, schoolhouse doors are opening again. Teachers will teach, libraries will contain more knowledge than previous generations could have imagined possessing, and students will once again have an extraordinary opportunity to prepare themselves for adulthood. Mathematics does not ask a student’s race before revealing its answers.

"Wherefore Rejoice;" Shakespeare does not change according to skin color. Chemistry does not recognize Republican or Democrat. A child who learns to read well has acquired an instrument of independence that no politician can easily take away.

Public education is provided without tuition to Indiana children, but that opportunity carries responsibilities. Students have to show up, read, study, do the homework, ask questions, participate and put down the phone long enough to learn. They need mathematics, science, history and writing. Some will attend universities; others will learn trades, enter apprenticeships, join the military or build businesses. Whatever path they choose, education requires effort from the person being educated.

Those expectations should apply to every student. There is nothing racist about expecting excellence from a Black child. Indeed, lowering expectations because a student is Black should trouble Americans who genuinely believe in racial equality.

America’s continuing racial disparities deserve serious examination. Poverty matters. Family instability matters. Neighborhood violence matters. Poor schools matter. Discrimination can matter. So can absenteeism, discipline, study habits, parental involvement and the decisions individual students make. A serious society should be capable of discussing all of those things simultaneously rather than pretending every disparity has one convenient explanation.

Yet American racial politics too often offers two simplistic choices.

One side can behave as though centuries of racial discrimination left no consequences. The other can describe disparities almost entirely through systems, structures and historical oppression, sometimes leaving remarkably little room for personal agency. Neither explanation is sufficient, and Indiana children deserve something better than excuses from either direction. They need adults willing to tell them that circumstances matter but decisions matter, too.

Clarence Thomas and the power of refusing a predetermined future

Whatever one thinks of his jurisprudence, Clarence Thomas’s biography complicates simplistic narratives about race in America. Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, and grew up amid poverty and segregation. He eventually attended the College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School before serving in government and becoming the second Black justice in Supreme Court history.

One does not have to agree with Thomas’s constitutional philosophy to understand why his life matters to this discussion. He did not get to choose the America into which he was born, but he did get to make choices within it. That distinction is enormous.

Thomas has long rejected the proposition that Black Americans must embrace a particular political philosophy because of their race. His critics are equally entitled to reject his conclusions. That is what citizenship means. A Black American can be conservative, liberal, socialist, libertarian, apolitical or something that fits none of those labels. Skin pigmentation does not come with a party registration card, nor does it determine intelligence, ambition, morality or destiny.

The danger of expecting less or thinking small or being a victim

One of the most destructive messages adults can give disadvantaged children is hopelessness dressed as compassion. Imagine repeatedly telling a child that the system is stacked against him, that achievement is largely determined by structures beyond his control and that failure primarily demonstrates society’s injustice. Then imagine telling that same child something different: yes, life can be unfair; yes, prejudice exists; yes, some people begin with advantages you don’t have—but open the book anyway, complete the assignment anyway, graduate anyway and pursue the future you want anyway.

Become an electrician, engineer, nurse, machinist, teacher, entrepreneur, physician, soldier, scientist, lawyer or Supreme Court justice. That message doesn’t deny injustice. It denies injustice the final word.

Indiana should consequently be uncompromising about educational standards. Chronic absenteeism should alarm communities regardless of the racial composition of the students involved. Children who cannot read proficiently need intervention, not euphemisms. Schools that consistently fail students deserve scrutiny. Parents should know whether their children are attending class, completing assignments and performing at grade level. Standards cease to mean very much when adults become afraid to enforce them because the resulting statistics might be uncomfortable.

Students themselves must eventually understand something generations before them learned the difficult way: education is an opportunity, not something that can be done to you while you refuse to participate. Teachers cannot study for students, parents cannot take their children’s examinations and government cannot legislate curiosity. No appropriation from the Statehouse can make somebody read tonight’s chapter. Opportunity requires participation.

Teach slavery. Teach Jim Crow. Then keep teaching.

None of this requires sanitizing American history. Indiana schools should teach slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan and lynching. Students should understand Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education and learn about Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.

But then keep teaching. Teach the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the constitutional principle of equal protection. Teach students about Black Americans who became generals, governors, senators, CEOs, scientists, professors, cabinet secretaries and Supreme Court justices. History should neither conceal America’s sins nor freeze the country permanently at its worst moment.

A Black Indiana first-grader entering school this year is not an enslaved person. A white first-grader is not a slaveholder. Neither child should inherit personal guilt or predetermined victimhood because of ancestry. They inherit something much more important: American citizenship, with both rights and responsibilities.

Indiana should expect more from everyone

The Hoosier Enquirer believes equal opportunity has little meaning without equal expectations. If a white student skips school, refuses assignments and fails, adults should intervene. If a Black student does the same thing, adults should intervene with precisely the same urgency. If a Hispanic student struggles, provide help. If an Asian student excels, challenge that student further. Race should never determine how much excellence adults believe a child can achieve.

Indiana should therefore enter this school year with a proposition that shouldn’t be controversial at all: every child can learn, every child should be expected to work, every child deserves competent teachers and safe classrooms, every parent should be expected to participate, every school should be accountable for results, and every student must gradually accept responsibility for his or her own choices.

America has not always lived up to its promise of equality. That fact belongs in every honest history classroom. But America also should not teach another generation that history has already written its future. Clarence Thomas was born into a segregated America and ultimately took a seat on its highest court. His story doesn’t prove discrimination disappeared, nor does one man’s achievement erase the struggles of millions. It demonstrates something narrower and perhaps more useful to a child beginning another year of school: circumstances influence your life, but they do not have to dictate its destination.

As Indiana’s classrooms fill again, reject racial fatalism from every direction. The optomist always succeed.

Demand good schools, expect parents to parent and teachers to teach, and expect students to study.

Tell every Hoosier child—Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, multiracial, or otherwise that education belongs to them, opportunity is theirs to pursue, and nobody gets to decide their future merely by looking at their skin. As the young generation will likely see the population triple during their lifetimes they need to remember that as markets grow so will their good fortunes, investments, and opportunities. This is the start of the Golden Age of America.