Exactly. The only relevant point of the whole ordeal was the revelation that kids from poverty don't read/aren't read to at home as much, which is a pearl of wisdom anyone with common sense already understands.
If HS teachers have to read aloud to students, the students should NOT be in HS. They shouldn't have passed the 5th grade.
I have a professor friend who teaches remedial English at a local college. It's not English as a second language but English at a 5th grad level for incoming freshman of all races who made it through 13 years of our education system without attaining the language skills of a real 5th grader. Reading aloud is not the solution. It's perpetuates the problem and provides the student with a phony degree. It exacerbates the problem when a student with a new diploma can't get a job because they can't read job instructions nor make change wihtout a cash register to do the math.
My grandmother didn't get read to at home or anywhere. My great grandmother was a alcoholic. Neither she nor her husband were discussed by my grandma and her sibling as adults. My grandmother was the oldest of 10 kids in Hell's Kitchen. A 6th floor walkup with little heat in the winter, stiffling heat in the summer, and candlelight because they couldn't afford the gaslights. Think Bed Stuy without the benefits. Gangs and violence without food stamps, no school breakfasts and lunches, no welfare, no social security checks, no unemployment checks much less extended benefits and neighborhood block grants, no medical clinics, community activists, nor other forms of assistance. NO NOTHING. You made it on your own or you died, usually young. At a time when there were no civilian review boards, no secruity cameras, no 24/7 news shows and people didn't have the luxury of laying in the street for hours because the coppers would have split their skulls with billy clubs regardless of race or attire because "they were blockin' the fuckin' way!"
Her white privilege was to get a job at 12 while she was also the cook, housekeeper, and schoolmarm to her younger siblings as well as tending to her "ill" parents. She didn't graduate grade school but she saw to it that her siblings did. She wasn't a victim, she was a survivor. As were those that preceded her through 800 years of oppression and a program of "racial cleansing".
As a mother she worked three jobs so her son could attend a parochial HS 4 bus transfers away and then college. He quit college after one semester to get a job to help out finanically as his father's heart was failing.
My grandfather's line was a bunch of immigrant ditch diggers and quarrymen. Manual labor 12 hours a day, 6 days a week when there was work. It was NINA time, "No Irish Need Apply". Black slaves at the time had a harsh life but they had a roof and meager food. The Irish were worth less. Some of my ancestors used their white privilege as Union Soldiers during the war to free the slaves that would compete for their meager jobs. Education wasn't required, just the ability to carry and gun and bleed.
My father owned two pairs of shoes, one brown and a one black. He had one suit. My mother's closet was 30 inches wide. She didn't have to spend time planning what to wear. She couldn't go a full week with out rewearing the same clothes. When they got married he had the white privilege of working for a finance company ... he repossessed cars. My mother would drive him to the repossessed cars. She once got shot at by an angry non-payer.
My oldest sister had a year of business school. The next sister got a associate's degree as a bilingual secretary, English/Spanish. Then my dad died at 47 of heart disease. We had no insurance as my parents didn't have much money and had to make tough financial choices. We didn't have the luxury to live paycheck to paycheck. He was a proprietor with two employees. If the week's recepits were slow he got the short end as the employees paychecks and witholding came first. When he died during my last week of high school, my ND admission went by the board as I first commuted to college and then lived near campus in the ghetto. The Central Ward, Newark NJ where there were more white street lights than white people. Where my fraternity did volunteer work (teaching and mentoring to neighborhood kids and volunteering in the local hospital during the Newark Riots in '67. There was a sniper on the roof of the brown stone where I had a room. I saw enough horror that week to last a life time. Ferguson was a student demonstration by comparison. (Google Springfield Avenue.) I worked 18 jobs from clean up work, busboy, short order cook to being a Teamster (beer truck driver in Harlem and the Bronx) while in college to pay my own way while my mother worked to raise the 9 year old and 7 year old who had no father. I became the first college graduate in my family and used my white privilege to get drafted in the "black man's war" in Vietnam. After the army I went back to engineering and used my easy stress free white privileges to have a heart attack at 33. I had my second one this week. Fourteen years ago I became the oldest living male in the 6 generations since we arrived here on a former slave ship. But enough of my white privilege.
My younger sister used her white privilege to earn two degrees in special education then couldn't find a job in her field. She worked as a waitress, retail sales, sold supplies to the Navy, and today is a very successful business person. She raised two kids as a divorced mom with a jerk ex-husband. Two of my sisters raised kids successfully while working and struggling to pay bills without food stamps, or welfare.
My brother paid his own way through college working as a yardman, hot tar roofer, framer, electrician helper, and mason's helper after my mother died of a heart attack. He used his white privilege to become a felon for Intent To Distribute. He did his time and turned his life around ... on his own initiative and has lead a productive life.
My grandmother knew hopeless poverty as a child. She broke the cycle because she would not be a victim. She wasn't the type to pitch an Abercrombie and Fitch tent to demonstrate with her $600 cell phone or with her $200 Beats or $200 sneakers while whining about her student loans she took to avoid working. Nor was she the type to burn down her neighborhood for change.
She started the climb out of the crucible before she was a teenager with no parental help, no government help, and no one reading aloud. She didn't have white privilege but I am privileged to have known her. Color, race, or nationality has nothing to do with it. You can find similar stories in all the countries on all the contintents. The journey of a thousand steps still begins with a single step but you have to take it. Not demand that another walk it for you.
