I warned you about racism in southside Bakersfield schools

ACLU letter reveals non-black teacher called students "little slaves"

When I saw a July news story of a white filmmaker holding up a Black Lives Matter sign in Harrison, Arkansas, the first thing I thought about was racism in Bakersfield, California, a city where if you stood similarly with a sign and hidden camera, you’d likely obtain footage exemplifying undertones of a racist underbelly. After all, Bakersfield is a city partly built on a bedrock of white supremacists. Either way, standing alone with your hidden camera staring down the ruins of the public good, you’d quickly realize that racists don’t look like the seedy, baggy-eyed monsters of your imagination. In fact, they often wear power suits and ties. They even drive Lincolns and BMWs.

Thing is, you don’t have to stand on a streetcorner with a sign about peace and equality, pleading for an end to police brutality, to have someone scream at you, flip you off, scold and shame you. They might even chastise you because of the color of your skin. They might even use their own misinterpretation of color and culture as an excuse to berate you. Maybe you’re simply a teacher, or a student in a city like Bakersfield, better yet, one in the Greenfield Union School District, a district in a county area where racism and white supremacy has been embedded for 150 years.

To put it in perspective, Kern County cotton growers in the late 1800s, attempting to recreate an image (and economy) of America’s poor South of embittered black sharecroppers, began bussing in black field workers, undermining the cost of higher-paid Chinese workers. They even made the claim, according to historian Michael Eissinger, that if California hadn’t joined the Union, it would have become a slave state, and the area “would have had large numbers of cotton plantations” (Eissinger, p. 3).

This is the same city that after its devastating earthquake in 1952 aggressively entered a new phase of urbanization, creating a city of White Flight, according to historian Donato Cruz, cementing the segregation of poor black and elite white middle class neighborhoods. Cruz points out that “White Flight” was “designed and implemented by white communities to create new white communities with no racial minorities.” He goes on to say that Bakersfield’s urbanization campaign had utterly “reimagined the city as a new and majority white space” (Cruz, pages 15, 40).

Let’s not forget, there’s no innocence in this when it comes to Bakersfield schools. Its southside neighborhoods have many Confederate-and-Southern named streets and schools, including Plantation Elementary, which lies within the Greenfield Union School District.

This is the bedrock that Greenfield Union School District was built upon, and has existed upon, when their administration suggested in a recent damage-control newsletter after being accused of racism in one of its middle schools, “Our District has a long history of serving African American students and other students of color and meeting the educational needs of all students and families.”

Apparently, history isn’t one of that district’s educational needs. If administration officials understood, or even bothered to examine their own area’s history—without a white supremacist lens—they might come to terms with themselves (more on a white supremacist historical lens in an upcoming essay for Tropics of Meta). In fact, the school in question, Leon H. Ollivier Middle School, is on Monitor Street (one of many Confederate-named streets in that area), and is named after a former white cotton grower whose homestead was not far from the school.

Now, why do I bring all of this up? According to a July 29, 2020 ACLU letter, former teacher, Ms. Kei Jackson, of Bakersfield, had been the recipient of “differential treatment and degrading, off-handed comments.” The letter claims Greenfield Union School District refuses to investigate, and further, actually has retaliated against black teachers. In one incident, noted in the letter, Jackson was blocked from wearing a shirt with the words “Phenomenally Black,” citing the principal’s alleged claim of Jackson attempting to assert a “Black Power” political statement, even comparing the shirt to MAGA shirts and hats. This is ironic coming from a school administration in a city that has considered itself phenomenally white since the 1800s, perpetuating its own myth of phenomenal whiteness in its written histories, museums, politics, and marketing nomenclature, which in the 1950s was meant to attract both phenomenally white-only home buyers and phenomenally white-only tourists.

I agree with the ACLU’s assessment that Jackson’s shirt is a cultural statement, not a political display. The letter states: “The phrase ‘Phenomenally Black’ is related to pride in Blackness and Black culture and wholly unrelated to any political movement or candidate.” More irony abounds as Black History Month has been celebrated in the U.S. since the 1970s, and has been recognized by U.S. Presidents, dating back to Republican President Gerald Ford.

And can I just say, I told you so? The ACLU letter also states that Jackson was also aware that a “non-Black teacher referred to students as ‘little slaves.’” This is reprehensible behavior from anyone, let alone an educator. What had I said just eleven days ago when talking about a school in the Greenfield Union School District? I’d written in my Latino Rebels commentary: “I always wonder if the worst of its teachers have joked that the schoolchildren, no matter their color, are their little slaves.”

In a final positive note, I did see a Bakersfield College video this week uplifting the life of U.S. Rep. John Lewis. The video, “Celebrating the Life of John Lewis: Continuing the Legacy of ‘Good Trouble,’” featured singers, as well as college history, political science, business, and other faculty discussing the life of Lewis. The video also featured Paula Parks, who coordinates the African-American Success Through Excellence and Persistence (ASTEP) and Umoja Community at Bakersfield College. She called for a new bout of Bakersfield “Good Trouble,” citing racist street and school names in South Bakersfield.

I couldn’t be more happy about that.

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Until next time,

Nicholas

Sources:

Cruz, Donato, “America’s Newest City”: 1950s Bakersfield and the Making of the Modern Suburban Segregated Landscape, 2020 CSU Bakersfield MA Thesis in History

Eissinger, Michael, “The Transplantation of African Americans and Cotton Culture to California’s Rural San Joaquin Valley During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” Presented originally at 29th Annual Conference of the California Council for the Promotion of History, October 22-24, 2009, in Monterey, California.

https://www.latinorebels.com/2020/07/19/bakersfieldconfederacy/?fbclid=IwAR1nXxFkF4F3sGVUuJY9Nom0pEmcc0eQQ1kW5AIDuyJr1dlY_EByw9oG9hY

https://www.aclusocal.org/sites/default/files/2020-07-29_greenfield_union_letter_final.pdf

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/30/black-lives-matter-racist-town-video/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_History_Month

https://www.turnto23.com/news/local-news/aclu-sends-letter-to-greenfield-union-school-district-accusing-district-of-discrimination?_ga=2.264339535.1701257247.1596292225-1083384195.1596292225

https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bakersfield/obituary.aspx?n=leon-h-ollivier&pid=101850553

Greenfield School Yearbook, 1964