The Colorblind Leading the Blind (part 4)

Michelle Malkin stole my morning. I was planning on just doing a few quick internet searches on the Ten Little Indians situation at Lakota East. Several hours later, I was fuming at Malkin’s blog posts about the controversy and still pouring over the comments all the amateur pundits had left.

For those that don’t know, Malkin is a conservative author, columnist, and media personality that occasionally shows up on Fox News and C-Span. She grabbed my attention a few years ago when she became the first Asian person (Malkin is of Filipino descent) I’d ever heard of who defended Japanese-American internment during WWII as something with legitimate "military necessity."

I’ll go ahead and launch a rhetorical preemptive strike against anyone that might accuse me of suggesting she’s a “traitor to her race.” THAT’S NOT WHAT I’M TRYING TO SAY. As much as I disagree with how she embraces injustice, she’s entitled to her opinion. I’m just saying I hadn’t seen an Asian person say what she said before, that’s all.

I think Malkin’s often smarter, more artful, and more in-your-face than Sean Hannity or even Ann Coulter. And yet she still gets less attention. Could it be that many in her conservative audience harbor a few “racial preferences” of their own?

Malkin and Fox News have been among the national voices discussing Lakota East's current events. As one might expect, she treats the issue as an example of liberal political correctness run amok. On the blog Malkin talks about personal emails form Lakota students. If that personal connection gives her telling of the story more credibility, let me tell you a little story.

I attended schools in the Lakota district for 10 years. But my younger sister Kristal has me beat. She went there for 12. She graduated from Lakota West as the first black valedictorian to graduate from any Lakota high school.

This happened to occur in 2004, the 50-year anniversary of the Brown vs. the Board of Education decision in 1954 that integrated schools in America. The other journalists out there would probably agree that the situation sounds like a recipe for giving a big national story some local Cincinnati flavor, right?

That’s probably why The Cincinnati Enquirer sent reporters to ask my family about it and collected information from Lakota administrators.

Despite Kristal’s glowingly positive descriptions of her experience at Lakota, the district’s administrators were concerned about what they saw as the negative tone of the Enquirer’s questions. Their official response to the Enquirer was something like: “We do not keep records on the ethnicity of our valedictorians.”

So The Enquirer couldn’t verify that she was indeed the first black valedictorian, and the story was left out of one of the largest newspapers in the region. A far less interesting blurb appeared instead. The historical context of Kristal's achievement was common knowledge among everyone familiar with the school system, and they even printed a story about it in the smaller Butler County newspaper called The Pulse Journal. Nearly all of my sister's comments about Lakota were positive. It would have been a generally positive story. But since Lakota administrators “can’t see race,” they probably single handedly blocked broader regional coverage of a rare positive story about diversity in Cincinnati. Lakota's phobia of racial issues won the day.

But I suspect that more than a phobia of racial issues was at work. On top of the black valedictorian, the salutatorian (my sister’s friend Jing Jing Mao) was Asian. If memory serves, less than two thirds of the top 25 students in her graduating class were white. Parents were becoming distressed about this. (And if they were willing to talk about their discomfort when the black folk could hear them, I can only imagine what they were saying when we couldn’t.)

I can’t help but wonder if there was something deeper going on in Lakota’s denial. My sister’s story alone could not have been that big a deal, but shining the spotlight on her could have been an important piece of a developing narrative of changing racial demographics in the Lakota school district. Lakota administrators probably don’t want the rest of the region to become too invested in that narrative.

It’s a story that’s been played out in suburbs across the nation. I think most of us have heard of “white flight.” There were already murmurs about Lakota becoming more “urban.” (I don’t have to tell you what that euphemism means.) The test scores and graduation rates continued to soar. But if people began to think minorities were “taking over” the district, would it start to look less attractive to parents and homeowners (of all ethnicities) who are looking for a "Leave it to Beaver" lifestyle? Could they have been trying to maintain the myth? Hmm…

~ Geoffrey Dobbins
Vice President, UCABJ
Lakota West Class of 2002