The Real Victims

I worked as a community liaison for 2 1/2 months for a predominantly Latino school in this city, and it is on the basis of that limited but shocking experiential background that I make the following observations on Shirley N. Weber’s commentary (“Where Is the Public Outcry for Black Students,” March 11).

The reason that there is no public outcry over the dismal educational performance of black and Latino students is that it is not the public--but us--who are most directly affected by educational malpractice in our public schools.

It is we, and not the public, who are most likely to be victimized by both brutal police practices and high crime rates, on account of the predators that white liberalism releases in a state of functional illiteracy into our communities every year.

It is we, and not the public, who are most adversely affected by a hierarchally established school system that allows psychologists, counselors, nurses and social workers to treat us as mental incompetents and moral misfits for disciplining our children in accordance with methodologies that may be repugnant to the sensitivities of Western liberalism but that are a part of our culture, our identity construction and parcel of the tradition of respect for our elders, courage and moral fortitude that served our communities well in centuries of interaction with a destructive and hostile social reality.

It is we, and not the public, who are forced to most directly subsidize through our taxes a public school system that is more likely to ensure that our children enter state prison than be granted admission into any of our state universities.

It is we, and not the public, who have to tolerate on a daily basis the offensive condescension, inane arrogance and irritating insensitivity of an army of bureaucrats who, in spite of their almost total ignorance of our language, culture, history, traditions, and internal dynamics, presume to dictate to us the terms of our existence and the definitions under which we will be judged and perceived.

Consequently, it is we, and not a fundamentally racist and culturally obtuse public school system, or a somnolent and apathetic public, who must work to denounce and reverse these clearly genocidal trends. The war is ours, and no one else’s.

RAMON OCEGUERA

San Diego