Educating on Education, Part 5: What The Argument on Ruby Bridges In Florida Gets Wrong About...Well, Everything

 

Note: The next article in this series is going to be among the most controversial I’ve ever written because so much of the subject has essentially become a choice of one extreme or the other. If you argue that any part of this subject has the slightest level of nuance, you are branded as a bigot by the loudest voices in the room.

I have been reluctant to delve into the subject at all for that reason but since the inspiration for this series was, in a way, inspired by an article that raised the very points I’m going to – and put this argument in a way that not only had I never seen before but is almost never discussed – it needs to be talked about. And it has to be talked about in regards to education because it symbolizes, perhaps better than anything else I have argued in these series, that these battles are not about the children at all.

I have spent a lot of time and energy arguing against the outrage that has come to pass for public discourse. I don’t deny that many people have a right to their anger, and I don’t argue that anger is always unproductive. I just refuse to accept it as an alternative to solving the problem.  I know that both sides have staked their claims on this issue and many won’t budge. I expect this won’t change their minds. But I’ve gotten a lot of favorable responses over the last few months from people who seem willing to listen. It’s to those of you this article is written.

 

Over the last several months one of the biggest shouting points by progressives and Democrats have been the restrictions of teachers not being allowed to teach black history as part of the curriculum in elementary schools and high schools. Florida in particular has become a flashpoint for this level of outrage.

As I’ve argued in this series, the educational process in school is not designed to help children or teenagers to learn anything in a realistic fashion. This is true in many subjects but especially history. It is not until college that one can fully get a grasp of the nuances that history has.  I fundamentally think the outrage about how history is being taught in our schools is misplaced given how it is fundamentally taught in our schools: both sides are essentially arguing about what questions their children will have to memorize for a standardized test. Like almost everything else you learn in high school, most graduates will forget the parts that they don’t care about the moment they graduate, if not at summer vacation. The only reason I came away with a love of history at all was because my father and grandfather were historians and I had an inside track. I may very well have known more about history that some of my teachers (who, for the record, were not thrilled when I pointed out they were leaving stuff out). Growing up in the 1990s I learned very quickly how flawed the textbooks and  sources I were reading from were; I seriously doubt they’ve improved in thirty years.

One of the major flashpoints that I wish to discuss is one which I have heard about a Florida teacher not being allowed to either teach the story of Ruby Bridges in his class or even show the 1998 Disney TV movie about her life. I am a scholar of movies and know quite a bit about Disney’s films of that era and I had not heard of that particular film which according to imdb.com aired on January 1998 on The Wonderful World of Disney. There are for the record reasons I find it very ironic that this subject has become a flashpoint. I will deal with them in ascending order of controversy.

Let’s start with the near certainty that none of the students who would have been the intended audience would have given it the ‘reverence the subject the outrage seems to warrant. I speak from personal experience. I lost count of how many movies I watched from elementary school to my last year of high school – probably dozens – and I’ll admit that I was paying attention to every detail. I’m relatively certain I was the only one.

The attitude of a student when any teachers shows a movie in class is generally one of two things: “Good, I don’t have to pretend to pay attention” or “I won’t have to bother to actually read anything for the next two or three days.” (The average period was forty-five minutes when I was in school; it would take at least two classes to watch a film like Ruby Bridges). The reactions were always among laughing or talking throughout the entire film, doodling or doing something else rather than watch the movie. I can imagine that’s only gotten worse now that everybody has an iPhone.

Of course, as The Simpsons once told us, when any teacher shows a film it essentially means they want a free period themselves.  This was always considered a sign of surrender when I was in school. Maybe it’s moderated a bit over the last quarter of a century but I seriously doubt it when it comes to high school. A teacher showing a film is less someone trying to instruct rather than one who doesn’t want to prepare a lesson plan for a couple of days.  Maybe the Florida teacher had purer motives than most of the instructors I had growing up but the realist in me tends to doubt it.

This actually gets to the next point, and I’m going to go off on a slight tangent. I find it very ironic that so many on the left have found themselves overwhelming pro-Disney the last few years because it kind of flies in the face of not only everything the left stands for but so much of Disney’s own history. This is, after all, the same studio that had crows that were essentially minstrels in Dumbo went seventy years before it finally had an African-American lead in one of its animated films, and Song of the South, need I say more?

Then there’s the fact that Disney is an evil corporate overlord which, as I have illustrated over and over, the left has absolutely no problem vilifying on any occasion. The changes that have happened in Disney over the past five or six years are little more than the pop culture equivalent of the tokenism they excoriate Bud Light and Target have done in the past year.  Disney has a famously horrible background when it comes to racial and gender hiring and has not radically improved it behind the scenes over the last decade.  And its not as if Disney’s creations that seem to highlight inclusion are literally original.  I find it hard to fathom how having an African American Little Mermaid is some kind of racial breakthrough when it’s literally the definition of posturing.

But as we all know, Hollywood has always been one of the right’s outrage points and anything that can be done to make conservative medias heads collectively explode is in the case of Disney – and only Disney – enough to make many on the left basically forgive and forget a century of horrible corporate behavior.  At best Disney can be seen as the lesser of two evils, but while the left seems to always consider evil ‘evil’ in any other case, in the case of Disney, they’re the hero. This is clear when they talk about the fact there is a Disney movie made about Ruby Bridges that can’t be shown in class.

If ever there was evidence that the people shouting have no idea what they’re talking about, let me enlighten them. To be clear, I never saw Ruby Bridges. But I saw more than my share of Disney movies in my childhood and into young adulthood.  And from what I remember, the typical Disney approach to a dark time in history – be it World War II, immigration or the Civil rights South – has always been the Disney approach to history. And when it comes to race in particular, they would make the kind of films that either involved white saviors or the so called ‘Magical Negro’. You know the kind of movies that so many African-Americans have spent their lives raging about ruining their culture.

Now to be fair, I don’t know if Ruby Bridges is that kind of movie.  The director Euzhan Palcy has an impressive track record. Her 1989 movie A Dry White Season is one of the great films on apartheid that I’ve ever seen. The fact that the writer of the film Toni Ann Johnson’s most famous other scripts are Save the Last Dance and Step Up 2 is less encouraging, but I don’t know Hollywood. The film did win several awards including ones for the lead Chaz Monet. But having lived through so many movies of this type (Perfect Harmony, Back To Hannibal and Goodbye Mrs. 4^th of July are among the ‘best’ of those) I find it extremely hard to believe that the Disney version of Ruby Bridges life is as wrenching a film experience as Glory, Malcolm X or, yes, A Dry White Season were before it had been made or that Selma and 12 Years A Slave were. This is, after all, a movie for children by Disney.  I expect that the ugliness that Bridges went through is the most toned down version possible. The PG rating itself would seem to be a give away: how can one truly get the nature of Bridges’ experience down when it would have surely impossible in that film to use the word that she clearly heard the most often throughout her experience?

And is that last fact that gets me to what I just can not accept about Ruby Bridges and what I’m certain that whatever course she was taught in or the movie of her life was inadequate to express: what it was really like for her. This next part will no doubt inflame the most people but since it is the part I just can’t wrap my head around, that in a sense inspired this essay and is at the heart of what this series is about, I think it needs to be said.

Ruby Bridges was six years old when she became the first African-American child to attend a whites-only school in Louisiana. According to the page on Wikipedia, her parents responded to a request from the NAACP to volunteer to participate in the integration of the New Orleans school system. Her father was resistant but went along because her mother thought this was better to give her daughter a better education but to take this step forward for all African-American children.

‘Volunteered her’. We’ve seen the famous portrait by Norman Rockwell. According to Bridges, “she saw the crowd” but because she lived in New Orleans, “she thought it was Mardi Gras.” She was walked to school by marshals, who were proud of her courage. Did anybody even consider the fact that she might not have comprehended what was happening to her?

Only one person in the entire school agreed to teach Bridges. For one year, that teacher taught her along as if she were teaching a whole class.

Bridges was threatened with poison, marshals only allowed her to eat the food she brought from home. She could not participate in recess.

We commemorate Ruby Bridges as a hero. In actuality she went through an entire year of intense trauma, threats of violence and was essentially isolated from a proper educational experience in the name of progress. And there’s no indication she was asked if she wanted to do this. She was ‘volunteered’. Her parents basically put her through a year of immense torment that no doubt has to have given her immense emotional scars that probably she has had to deal with for the rest of her life. The fact that Bridges has essentially disappeared from public view not long after this happened is hardly surprising.

Ruby Bridges life is heroic, but her heroism is not that of Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks or Cheney, Goodman or Schwerner. Her celebration has nothing to do with Ruby Bridges but what she represented to other people. And that is the part that I keep having problems with.

Ruby Bridges, like so many other African-American students was sent into a battle she was not asked to fight. She and so many other African-American children in the South were more or less sent into segregated schools, with the military often having to stand guard, with a faculty made up almost entirely of segregationists and the hatred of an entire community – if not an entire  region of the country - centered on them.  I argued in my previous articles how difficult is to be in school for anybody, and in my article on The West Wing, I pointed out how schools have a way of ‘making kids different than other kids’ – something that all of these students had to know going in.

To be clear I believe entirely in civil rights, in every aspect of integration, in every aspect of equality. I have little doubt people will read the previous paragraph and call me a bigot regardless. But look at the world we live in now. Just as it was fifty years ago, children are still at the center of wars they don’t understand as to why are being fought.  Many of them didn’t ask to be put at the center of these wars, but their parents, then as now, considered their concerns irrelevant to the battles they are waging.  That these battles are being fought in a world that most of the combatants never set foot it should not shock us – the soldiers are never a factor to the generals or politicians.

Because that’s what these kids are – soldiers. Not ones who volunteered to fight, but who have been drafted into it and have no true understanding of the consequences around them. Most of them are either unaware of the stakes or focused on other things. It has always been hard to go to school in America as its always been hard to be a child in America. Because no one cares what your opinion is. So many adults have made up their minds about you in advance. Even the people who say they have your best interest at heart have their own agendas – and sometimes those people are your parents. I don’t presume to speak for anybody, but I’m pretty sure that Ruby Bridges wishes in her heart of hearts that she’d never had to have a childhood that anybody makes a docudrama about because none of those stories are happy ones, even if they are made by Disney. She might say in public she’s proud of her fight, but I bet a part of her wishes she could have spent her childhood playing with other kids uneventfully rather than having to have marshals with her walking to and from school. 

The left argues that we shouldn’t be teaching ‘the great man’ story of history. I think it might be worth remembering that for many of the ‘great people’, they honestly wish they never could have a place in history at all.  Some parents might be angry that Ruby Bridges isn’t being taught in history classes. If they do, the first thing they should tell them is that Ruby Bridges never had a choice to become part of history at all.