You Work at the Ghetto School
Hispanic tells you little of what the racial (or even ethnic) population is.
When I told my relatives where I was working (two generations of this family were speaking to me after having once attended the school), I was shocked by the reply:
You work at the ghetto school.
What? I do?
I really didn't know that--for two reasons. First, my own biases did not conceive of a majority Hispanic school being ghetto. However, Hispanic tells you little of what the racial (or even ethnic) population is. Hispanic doesn't mean they speak any Spanish. Hispanic doesn't mean the student or their parents were born in a Spanish-speaking country (You can read about the political history of the term Hispanic.) What I learned from looking at many of the students, and then asking them who their daddy was, was that they were biracial or multiracial--meaning they had a "white" parent and a Black parent or they had a biracial/multiracial parent and a Black parent. And typically it was the "white" parent who was Hispanic. Also, many of these kids are coded in the system as either exclusively Black or white though they have the aforementioned parentage. This makes certain types of data collection difficult [but not particularly for people/systems that wish to maintain white hegemony because you know if you look like a nigga then you prolly a nigga]. And my position was funded under CCEIS which was exclusively related to race.
The second reason was when I think of a ghetto school, I think of a school in the "hood" and by hood I mean where the projects are [or used to be but the population still hasn't changed]. However, I realize that ghetto school, in this day and age, may just be a descriptor rather than a location identifier. My old school peeps told me that Palm River/ Clair Mel used to be a place where Black people lived when they moved out of the city and up in life. It was a nice, clean area, historically. However, my new school peeps told me that the area was now crime-ridden.
But I gotta say, I am proud at having worked at this ghetto school for at least this one reason that I found out courtesy of my new generation peeps. IYKYK. Thanks, Wikipedia.
What do you consider to be a ghetto school?
