School Ends Discriminatory Student Election Policy — What Took So Long?

Rarely does a racial firestorm put itself out cleanly and to everyone’s satisfaction within days. But that’s what happened in the case of Nettleton Middle School in Mississippi, which has corrected its baffling policy of marking specific Student Council positions specifically for black and white students. In the aftermath, it is worth asking how racism becomes so easily entrenched and how a leadership and community can become so complacent that no one might recognize and challenge it.

The Nettleton story broke on Mixed and Happy, a blog for interracial families. Students at the school had been sent home with literature on Student Council elections revealing certain positions designated specifically for black students and others for white students. One mother wondered where her biracial daughter fit into all this and was told by the school board that a child’s race is determined by her mother, especially since fathers are absent in most minority homes.

The naked inequality, prejudice and ignorance demonstrated by Nettleton Middle School’s policy, compounded by the revelation that the school district also had separate homecoming kings and queens for black and white students, caused the story to erupt across the Internet and on television news. How could this happen in 2010?

The answer to that question is frustratingly benign. In a statement announcing the end of its practice of rotating Student Council positions among the black and white races, the leadership at Nettleton Middle School revealed the policy had been put in place some 30 years ago to help ensure diversity and added: “It is our hope and desire that these practices and procedures are no longer needed to help ensure minority representation and involvement. Furthermore, the Nettleton School District acknowledges and embraces the fact that we are growing in ethnic diversity and that the classifications of Caucasian and African-American no longer reflect our entire student body.”

So the policy was instituted with noble intentions. The concern that black students at Nettleton Middle School in the 1980s may have stood little chance of being elected to leadership positions by a majority white student body was not unreasonable. But I would argue that the school’s response to that concern was ill-conceived. What is most frustrating is that this policy went unchallenged and unchanged for so long. Year after year after year, administrators sent a message to black and white students that certain leadership positions would be closed to them because of race, while simultaneously erasing the existence of multiracial, Asian, Native American and Latino children. And parents let them do it. And lest you be inclined to blame this on a privileged majority, you should know that the principal of Nettleton Middle School and one of its assistant principals are black women.

The case of Nettleton Middle School seems to be illustrative of what happens when “the way we’ve always done things” holds sway. When we fail to give administrative tradition the critical eye it deserves, inequality and backwards racial thinking can become ingrained and institutional.

Too often in the comments here at Race in America, someone wonders why we need be so concerned with race and vigilant about inequality in Barack Obama’s America — as if the election of one biracial black man has cleansed the system of all prejudicial policies, biased processes and human frailty. Nettleton Middle School provides one answer to post-racialists’ concerns. We are vigilant, in part, because convention is sticky, people are complacent and even the racial inequality of a small Southern town’s Student Council election policy matters.