Photo credit: MChe Lee
What comes to mind when you think of the word “failure”? Perhaps a school essay has gone south. Maybe a business project was received poorly. Maybe your character has been personally attacked. Whatever the case may be, “failure” carries with it a negative connotation. Schools in Chicago are deemed “failing” when they have low enrollment and persistently low test scores. Through no fault of their own, the students are suddenly left without their learning institution. Though many times a school provides more than solely an education. Indeed, schools in the Chicago Public School (CPS) system may provide food, social and mental health services, and employment. A shuttered school thus impacts various facets of a student’s life well beyond academia.
Students may internalize a school’s supposed failure as their failure. This creates an intrapersonal pain that adds to the loss of school and all that comes with it. Of equal and perhaps greater impact, school closures create an atmosphere of danger for CPS students as the children must travel greater distances to get to the next closest school. This creates potential friction as students are forced to cross into new neighborhoods, neighborhoods that are often the territory of different gangs. As if forcing children into dangerous situations is not enough cause for concern, the students of such schools are disproportionately youth of color, this raising the questions as to whether the school-closings are racially-based. The numbers indicate that this is likely the case.
The United Nations Convention on Genocide defines genocide as “any of the
following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Of note, the United States has both signed and ratified the treaty, now bound to honoring the convention as written. However, its practice of school closures goes against this commitment. For purposes of this writing, I focus on Chicago. In deeming schools as “failed” that are disproportionately made up of students of color, the city of Chicago commits a form of genocide, meeting multiple of the above stipulations. Whether directly or indirectly, school closures in this city meet a-c as well as e. Ultimately, this insidious form of racism meets the definition of genocide as defined by the United Nations.
It is worth noting that, though this writing focuses on Chicago schools, the violence perpetrated against youth of color through school closings is endemic and pervasive throughout the United States. Such structural violence cannot be attributed to any one actor and emerges from unequal power distributions among societies. Ultimately, school closures due to a deemed “failure” emerge from an egregious form of structural violence that meets the United Nations’ definition of genocide. Indeed, the United States has a long way to go until racial equality is reached; though Jim Crow was ended on paper, the practices it created continue. School “failures” present but one manifestation of such discriminatory policies, policies created by a structural violence that is present throughout the country. This promotes the genocidal practices present in school closures.
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