Explaining the municipal pool

About a week after Obama was elected...much to my relief...I was cheerfully checking out books to one of my favorite classes, the bilingual 4th grade. It's a small class of about 14 right now, most of the kids are in their third year in the school, and five or six of them started in our "Newcomer program." The "Newcomers" are new immigrant kids who had very, very little schooling in their country of origin...in this case usually the Dominican Republic although overall most of our kids are Mexican. Because they are so way behind in all subjects and don't really know school routines, they spend a few months and up to a year in a sort of absorption class learning only in Spanish before being promoted to a regular Spanish-English bilingual class.

I don't know why so many of the Newcomers are Dominican--maybe because public education is required in Mexico but not in the D.R.? I'm not sure. Also, a disproportionate number of Dominican newcomer kids are black, not brown, and I don't know if that is a reflection of racial/economic conditions in their own country. All I know is that the D.R. shares the island with Haiti, where the power elites are white or near white. Anyway, one of my favorite ex-newcomers, who is now in the regular 4th grade bilingual, is R. He's sweet-natured, exceedingly bright, picked up English much faster than I've seen most of our kids do, helpful, funny, takes interest in the world around him...everything you'd want a student to be. He's a kid who has the right mix of smarts, sociability, compassion and attitude to succeed, and that's always particularly gratifying to see in a child who missed out on formal education until he was eight.

Anyway, he was chatting with me while I was checking in some books the other day, and said, smiling, that he was happy about Obama getting elected. As a public school teacher I wasn't allowed to say, of course, but I smiled back. "Maybe now they will let me into the pool in [the town next to his]. I gave him a baffled look.

"Do you know T---" (He named the town). I nodded. "Me and my uncle went to the pool there and they didn't let us in and my uncle say it because we are black. Maybe since Obama is President they don't do that more."

"R-- , does your uncle live in T----?" I asked. "No, he live here," he replied.

Okay. So let me get this straight. His uncle tries to get in to a municipal pool in a town he does not live in, and he assumes he couldn't get in because he is black. And he passes this information on to his nine- or ten-year-old nephew. Sigh. It's not that these things DON'T ever happen, but racism is not usually that blatant around here. It takes more subtle forms, like the fact that my urban school district is entirely racially, ethnically and economically segregated.

So I explained the concept of a municipal pool to R. "Listen," I suggested. "Next summer, you find a friend or relative who actually LIVES in T---." Then you pay a little money and they can take you as a guest. Look, I don't have a municipal pool in my town. If I went to the one in T on my own I wouldn't get in either--and do I look black?" He laughed and shook his head. "So I go to my friend's town and she takes me to her pool as her guest. That's what you have to do."