My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White

11. Return

174 Return since 1986 (my high school graduating year, incidentally), we observe the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Holiday on the third Monday of every January. This year, the holiday falls on January 15, not too long after my return from L.A., and my thoughts are still whirring about my improvised high school reunion. My children greet the holiday enthusiastically . Like me, they have the day off from school, so once lunchtime rolls around I take them to Taco Bell. For Henry and Sophia, this qualifies as a special culinary treat; for me, it’s simply the path of least resistance. ”So, do you know why you have the day off from school?” I ask my kids over the tabletop chaos of burritos, quesadillas, tacos, and their crinkly paper wrappings. I’ve found that at six and eight my children have, without warning, reached ages at which they demand thoughtful, wellreasoned conversation. “It’s Martin Luther King Day,” my son replies through a full mouth. Then, anticipating my pesky line of follow-up questions, he elaborates through a single exhale: “He was a great man, who gave an important speech, ‘I Have a Dream,’ and then he won the Nobel Prize.” “Yeah,” my daughter, seated beside me, chimes in with a bit more spirit. “He wanted both white people and black people to be treated equally. Black people couldn’t use the same bathrooms as white people, they had to sit at the back of the bus, they used different drinking fountains . . .” She nearly sings this litany of racial wrongs. “Wow,” I hear myself reply. It surprises me that they’ve learned as much as they’ve learned about King and the Civil Rights movement in Return • 175 school, my kindergartner’s font of information, especially. Sophia knows that she has impressed me. “You’re very proud of me, aren’t you?” she inquires, wearing a Cheshire grin. I am proud of her. I’m proud of my son too. For Black History Month— a month never celebrated during my childhood—Henry has been working feverishly on a rather detailed poster-board project on Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress. It would be folly, indeed, to claim that we haven’t enjoyed significant racial and interracial advances since the time I attended elementary school. But something about the scripted, rote quality of my kids’ remarks unsettles me. Their public school, I’ve noticed, adheres to a fairly traditional pedagogy, owing in part to the unrelenting pressures of the FCAT (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test), administered to students in grades three through eleven, the results of which carry significant consequences for schools, administrators, teachers, and students. Accountability, bordering on the draconian, is the name of the game in Florida these days. Public schools in my state—institutional funding and salary increases on the line—understandably teach to the exam, equipping their students with the “right” answers to any number of mathematical, reading, science, and writing questions. This isn’t all bad. There’s a place in the curriculum, I believe, for memorizing one’s multiplication tables. (I’ve been working doggedly on the 4s with Henry for several weeks now.) All the same, schools should teach children to utter at least as many questions as answers, and this mode of thoughtful inquiry, I’ve noticed (along with second-language acquisition, music, and art), is not a particularly salient feature of the public education my kids have enjoyed, perhaps because it’s so difficult to assess in an exam. And so, treading warily— they’re only eight and six, after all—I pursue a different tack, one that seems required given their almost too self-assured remarks on King. “An important thing to know, kids, is that it’s not like everything’s all better now. Black people and other minorities, even Jews, still aren’t always treated equally by everyone, everywhere, even though they should be.” “I know,” my son utters, chomping down on his taco, unimpressed with my observation. 176 • My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White “When you look around at our own town,” I continue, “at the jobs that black people and Latino people have, and the jobs that white people have, in the restaurants we go to, for example . . . at the neighborhoods where white people live, and the neighborhoods where black people and other minorities live, what does...