Panelists praise school $15 wage proposal
On Tuesday night, the Shelby County Schools system announced a plan to raise wages to at least $15 per hour. That same night, the idea got a positive reception from panelists at the Halloran Centre in Downtown.
“When we think about those lowwage workers in schools, we know what color they are,” Nikole Hannah-Jones, a top-level journalist, winner of a MacArthur genius grant and a guest at the panel. “Economic justice is racial justice.”
Hannah-Jones is writing a book about school segregation that focuses on Detroit. She said she’s seen schools where everyone is poor: the students, the parents and the staff members, and praised the school system for moving to boost pay.
That was one of many strong statements Hannah-Jones made on stage along with Wendi C. Thomas of the MLK50: Justice through Journalism project and Tami Sawyer, an activist who played a lead role in the campaign to take down Confederate statues.
The panelists spoke under an image of the Norman Rockwell painting “The Problem We All Live With,” which depicts a little girl desegregating a school. Desegregation and re-segregation are a major focus of Hannah-Jones’ journalism for outlets including the New York Times Magazine.
Hannah-Jones said as a AfricanAmerican female journalist she’s inspired by Ida B. Wells, the Memphis writer who during the 19th century risked her life to report on lynching. And she said minority women who enter careers like hers should stay true to who they are.
“Everything about me is loud,” she said at one point, referring not just to her voice but her cherry-red hair.
The event drew a sizable crowd - 300 tickets were sold, though a somewhat smaller number actually attended, said event organizer Zandria F. Robinson with the Center for Southern Literary Arts.
Hannah-Jones said that she describes herself as covering “race in the U.S. from 1619 to the present” and that it’s easy to forget how central slavery and segregation are to the country’s history. As she puts it, the African-Americans alive today are the first generation to have full legal rights in the country where they were born.
In response to an audience question about the current U.S. Secretary of Education in the Trump administration, Betsy DeVos, Hannah-Jones said progressives tend to treat President Trump as the boogeyman and can say to themselves that at least they’re not like that.
Yet she said efforts to re-segregate schools have taken place in both Republican and Democratic administrations. And she said white people who express progressive views often want segregated schools, too.
She also cited the case of New York, one of the most liberal cities in the United States but also with one of the most segregated school systems.
“We have segregation because that’s what people who have a say want.”
She’s argued that segregation hurts black children, who get a lower-quality education. “Schools with large numbers of black and Latino kids are less likely to have experienced teachers, advanced courses, instructional materials and adequate facilities,” she wrote in a 2016 article about her own daughter and her family’s school choices. She’s also argued segregation hurts white children’s development as well.
She called on voters and white people in particular to do more to dismantle segregation, even if it means doing things like sending white children into a school where they’re only 10 percent of the population.
She said arguments against doing that are essentially arguments that black people are inferior and that situations like this are inherently bad - and she said she refuses to accept that.
Reach Daniel Connolly at 529-5296, or daniel.connolly@commercialappeal. com.