Ms. Marshall’s belief that she has the right and the responsibility to intervene in the classroom is widely shared by middle-class parents, mothers particularly. At Swan, the middle-class, predominately white suburban school where the research assistants and I carried out classroom observations, the teachers noted that parents frequently came barging into school to complain about minor matters. For example, a scheduling conflict that resulted in some third-graders not getting a chance to perform a skit for their peers in the other third-grade classrooms prompted three different mothers to come in to school the very next morning to let the teacher know how disappointed their children were and to inquire into exactly why some children had gotten the opportunity to perform and others had not. More generally, parents of Swan students did not hesitate to criticize teachers’ choice of projects, book report assignments, homework levels, or classroom arrangements. Some mothers had a much more aggressive style than did Ms. Marshall. At Swan School, for example, Mr. and Mrs. Kaplan circulated a petition (with limited success) demanding that a song with the lyric “come let us bow and worship Him now” be removed from the multicultural holiday program. The Kaplans then wrote a letter to the superintendent charging it was a “violation of the separation of church and state.” (Over the choir teacher’s objections, the song was ultimately removed; the district also instituted a review of policy on the matter.) Yet, despite these differences in style, it was nonetheless the same approach: these middle-class families were engaged in a pattern of concerted cultivation with a close monitoring of their children’s institutional experiences.
RACE: CONSTANT WORRIES, INTERMITTENT INTERVENTIONS
As a Black mother who grew up in a town with racially segregated swimming pools, Ms. Marshall knows from personal experience that subtle forms of discrimination are always present. When her own children face difficulty in an institutional setting, the possibility that they are experiencing racial insensitivity or discrimination automatically looms:
It always comes up for me. And part of that has to do with the fact that I grew up in the [South]. I know what it is to have experienced um . . . just, discrimination. Um . . . I know that subtle—subtle discrimination still exists. Any time something happens, with my kids, you know, . . . on a sports team or whatever, in the classroom, I have to kinda grapple with . . . is, well, is race an issue? There’s a part of me that believes that . . . sometimes it comes into play—in terms of labeling or—or categorizing. You know. Um . . . when Stacey came out [from the gym at Wright’s] and she said, “Well, Tina was sayin’ these things.” I had to turn an ear. I had to wonder, you know, “Why’s she sayin’ that?”
Trying to decide whether “turning an ear” is sufficient or whether the situation calls for a more active intervention is not easy. Because the potential for racial discrimination is always present, isolating race as the key factor in a specific situation can be hard. Ms. Marshall’s response to Stacey’s experiences at Wright’s is a complicated mixture of ambivalence, second guessing, and insecurity:
[I thought] . . . that it’s, that it’s a racist attitude. And, um . . . that she’s [Tina] [is saying things to Stacey] because this is a little Black kid. You know, that . . . she’s not gonna do it [become a star performer]. However . . . from what I’ve seen, newspaper clippings, they had minority kids who had risen to the top there. So it’s not an issue of the entire team is white [or that] my kid would never get on it. That’s not true. If my kid was good enough, I—I think they would, I—I’m pretty sure that they’d let her on it. You know, primarily because the goal is to win. You know, and if you’re black, red, yellow, green, they would put their kid on the team. You know, because they want to win.
When Fern feels excluded from the camaraderie at her basketball camp (where she is the only Black child among about a hundred girls), Ms. Marshall again hesitates, pondering what the best response might be.
Fern came home one day and she was talkin’ to Stacey about it. She . . . I said, “How are things?” She said, “Fine,” she said, “except for lunch.” I said, “Who’d you eat with?” “Myself.” (Deep sigh from Ms. Marshall)
Fern sees it as a racial issue:
Fern said, “You know.” I said, “Well, did you talk to ’em?” She said, “Yeah, I talked to them.” . . . Apparently there was dialogue . . . about who scored in the game . . . and they were doing things, but when it came time for lunch—she ended up at a table by herself . . . The staff [members] are other kids—high school kids, girls on the team . . . So to some extent . . . maybe there’s not another adult that’s taking the lead to, like, pull Fern into a lunchtime group. I said to her, “Do you want me to say something?” She said, “No.” And part of it is because it’s just a week. (Fern’s camp lasts one week.)
Ms. Marshall had had only one brief telephone chat with the coach before she enrolled Fern and felt that she did not “have a relationship” with him that would provide a framework “to have a dialogue.” She considered, but ultimately decided against, speaking to him.6
In some cases, though, she does intervene, usually after a period of watchful scrutiny. She described a situation that arose with the girls’ school bus driver:
Fern had shared with me last year. She said, “Art’s racist. He makes all the Black kids sit on the back of the bus and he only yells at us. . . .” And blah-blah-blah. Again, in that, you know, I’m listening to this and I’m thinking, “Well, is this just a child, you know, being overly sensitive, or—or what?”
Unlike Fern, who by the time she was twelve brought up racial issues in conversations at home almost daily, Stacey rarely interpreted or discussed events as being racially loaded. But she too noted problems with Art:
When Stacey started riding the bus this year, she started saying the same thing. She says, “Art’s, Art only picks on us.” She says, “He won’t even let us open the windows.”
Although aware of her daughters’ concerns, Ms. Marshall did not immediately launch an intervention or share the girls’ observations with school staff. Instead, she kept her eye on the situation.
I never just leave ’em at the bus stop. The bus picks them up at the end of the corner here. I will always stay there in the car, and I began to watch. You know, just kind of look and see where kids are on the bus.
In addition to restricting where the children could sit, the bus driver also inconsistently enforced policies regarding who could ride the bus:
Policies seemed to be upheld differently for the different races. Apparently there was, on one day, a little white boy was bringing a friend home, and didn’t have a note (from his parents). The boy was allowed to ride the bus. A few days later, a little Black girl was riding home with a friend and she was not permitted on the bus.
Near the end of the school year, there was a discussion in Fern’s social studies class and other children—including white students—echoed her opinion of Art, who said, “Yeah, Art does this.” The white children’s validation helped Ms. Marshall overcome her hesitancy about complaining. She called the district’s administrative offices and spoke to the director of transportation services who told her, “You know, we don’t, we don’t stand for that.”