School Stuff...

This semester should be called Things Shonda Has Never Truly Studied...

Tonight I've been feverishly attempting to finish Elusive Equality, a book about the desegregation of the Norfolk, Virginia schools...but more importantly the continued struggle between race relations in Virginia throughout the period the book covers and how those relations were muted or minimized in order to present a community that endured the transition from Jim Crow to racial desegregation with little problem.  The truth of course lies a lot farther from smooth transition and close to heated antagonism.... especially when black effigies are hung in front of schools to intimidate students from transferring there... or entire schools are shut down in order to make sure no black kid was able to attend.

It is a good book, these books are often hard to read...hard to imagine that someone would think another person is so inferior that they dont even deserve to be in the same room.

There was one passage where a single african american girl attended an all white school and the teacher, to antagonize her, would wear gloves when she turned in her work so as not to touch her....
in our country.... in 1958 by the way, so within the lifetimes of a lot of people I know....

that was just.... hard to grasp...and infuriating.