Escarce Speaks Out on Social Justice and the Schools

At Thursday night’s school board meeting, after heated public comment about the recent hate graffiti at Santa Monica High School, Board member Jose Escarce reflected on the meaning of the crime, and the school’s reaction to it.

First, I would like to thank the parents and the other community members who came here tonight. Clearly, people came with a great deal of anguish, a great deal of concern. But fundamentally, I’m very glad they came, and I really do thank you.

The incident at the high school was really a vile, despicable and racist attack. That’s unquestionable, and I believe that it was really against the values that the overwhelming majority of this community believes.

It’s made me very anguished. It’s made me very angry. It’s made me angry at the perpetrators and it’s made me angry at the students who seem to be in the thrall of these sorts of influences and forces in the community.

And for good reason, it has given people a great deal of worry; it has caused a great deal of concern about the safety of the children in our schools.

I have a few things that I’d like to propose or suggest, but before that I want to just reflect on the obligations and the responsibilities that our public schools take on in this society, because I think it’s important.

So, we have a society that is awash in weapons and that seems, to me at least, to glorify violence, but the schools are supposed to teach students nonviolence and to keep them safe, and to do that without infringing on their civil liberties and without making the schools look like police states.

We have a society that’s incredibly, highly racially divided, and that’s extremely segregated, but the schools are supposed to teach the students tolerance, to promote interracial understanding and have a sense of a multiracial community.

We have a society, a culture, that at least to me seems to celebrate ignorance, coarseness, acting on belief or ideology, often blind belief or ideology, but we’re supposed to turn out students who are knowledgeable, who are insightful, and who have highly developed powers of critical analysis.

And we have a society that tolerates incredible inequalities in conditions under which children are raised from infancy, and the schools are supposed to create a level playing field, have everybody reach a high level of achievement, get everybody to go to college and be successful and be a contributing citizen to society.

In my more cynical moments, I think that adults basically have said, “Look, we’ve messed everything up, but you need to fix this,” to the schools.

In different moments, I think, “You know, I think what’s going on is that people are depositing their hope in the schools.”

And for parents, their hope is in their children. You turn your children over to the schools, and you hope that things will be better for them than they are for us.

The fact that schools have been given this obligation is not surprising.

I also think it’s not surprising because I think that most educators are incredibly idealistic and dedicated people, that the schools have not only have accepted these challenges, but I think they embrace them and they tend to try to deal with them with tremendous enthusiasm and zest.

Why is all of this important?

Because I think this is exactly what’s affecting our schools and this is exactly the way our schools have responded.

I mean, you can see this at lunch. If you go on the campus of our Santa Monica High School, you’ll see the patterns of which people sit down to have lunch, it’s very racially segregated.

You can see how students criticize other students, their colleagues, who want to devote themselves to their studies -- they’re either criticized or made fun of.

You can see it obviously in the achievement gap.

But you can see it in incidents like the other day, incidents that reflect the segregation, the racial hatred, the racial suspicions and the racism in the society.

I think our own schools and their leadership have really embraced the challenges with a great deal of sincerity, with a great deal of genuine compassion…

And in particular, I think that they have tried very hard to address the issues of racial discord that were raised last April 15 and have resurfaced again in a very obvious way and have led to concern about safety that parents have now.

Escarce then went on to propose the creation of an interracial parents group dedicated to getting to the roots of the misunderstandings and mistrust that drive their children apart.