Review: ‘America to Me’ Is a Searing Lesson in School Inequity - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/arts/television/america-to-me-review.html
When does racial inequality begin? To answer the question, you could go back centuries. Or, as the empathetic, eye-opening documentary series “America to Me” does, you could go back to school.
The filmmaker Steve James, who followed two African-American high school basketball players in “Hoop Dreams,” spent a year with students, teachers and parents at Oak Park and River Forest (O.P.R.F.) High School in suburban Chicago. In this integrated, progressive school he finds a community of white and black students whose education is not separate, but whose experience is not equal.
O.P.R.F. is the sort of school you might think would have race figured out better than others. In the 1960s, its community resisted white flight as black families moved in, along with liberal whites. Now, the school has a faculty conscious of diversity and reflective about bias.
But for all the good intentions, students of different races find themselves on different tracks, in different classes, with different outcomes, in a school that one teacher says “functions as two schools in one.”
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“America to Me” is full of moments like this, where you see how racial imbalances are perpetrated by people who don’t see themselves as perpetrating them. It just somehow happens, they believe. Technically.
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Part of the point of a series like this is that its issues have been relevant for generations. But “America to Me” rings especially urgent now, when charges of “reverse racism” fill our politics; when a majority of white people believe that whites are the victims of racial discrimination; when the cry “Black Lives Matter” gets dismissed with “Actually, All Lives Matter.” (The series begins with the aftermath of a controversy over a B.L.M. assembly open only to black students.)
All these reactionary arguments feel like a demand that we declare racism solved, settled — that the past is past, and whatever happened, happened.
“America to Me” is ample evidence that in fact, what happened keeps happening — even if it happens in more subtle ways, with coded language and among people who talk the talk of inclusion. It’s an invaluable look at where inequity begins, as well as the difficulty of getting to the place where it ends.
