Читать книгу Black in America - Christina Jackson - Страница 19

Education is widely recognized as a means to upward mobility. Slave owners were adamant that slaves should not read, because literacy was perceived as a threat to the institution of slavery. Population control in the postbellum South took the form of restricting the former slave populations’ access to quality education. The purpose of classical education was preparation for good citizenship; however, Lieberson argues, this goal was incompatible with the economic and social structure of the South where Blacks were disenfranchised (1980:135). Instead, “special education” was devised for Blacks, notes sociologist Henry Allen Bullock, “that would prepare Negroes for the caste position prescribed for them by White Southerners” (Bullock 1967:89). Access to a higher-quality education by Whites during the post-Reconstruction era in the South was gained by racial privilege. It was a direct result of the disenfranchisement of Blacks, which allowed Whites to institutionalize their political power, exert their economic privilege, and confer educational advantage.

Even in the North, Landry (2000:52) notes, Blacks were “denied access to the educational establishment” and, when they were granted access, obtaining an education did not translate into mobility. In reviewing the occupational distribution of Black women in 1900, Landry finds little difference between their overrepresentation in domestic service and laundress roles in Southern versus Northern cities. He remarks: “In spite of their educational parity with the daughters of immigrant and native-born White working class families, the daughters of Black migrants were generally excluded from clerical and sales employment in all but the small Black enterprises of the growing northern ghettoes” (Landry 2000:48–9). Contrary to the classical goals of education, the express purpose of Black education was to hinder any change in the status of Blacks, in order to restrict their occupational choices to service and laboring roles that did not conflict with the scripted notions of their “proper place.”