We’ve Made Progress, but at What Cost?

My mother grew up in the segregated South, and spent her childhood attending ramshackle, crowded “colored only” schools, in a state whose best-known governor was elected on a pledge of “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

I grew up in Cleveland, where I spent my childhood integrating mostly white schools, toted by my mother across town each day to share classrooms with kids whose bond with me began, then ended, when the school bells rang.

My kids are growing up in the San Fernando Valley, in a neighborhood and school where black faces are rare--a loss all but obscured by the kaleidoscope of cultures and colors that confront them each day.

Have we won what we wanted after all, in our single-minded push toward equality?

My mother would say an unqualified yes; my children’s lives are rich with the kind of opportunity and diversity she could only have imagined.

But I am not always so certain. There have been too many bumps along the road from “separate but equal”; too many breakdowns and detours for me to judge the distance traveled and proclaim the journey a success.

And in the Los Angeles of today--where we are locked in battle over immigration and assimilation--it is hard to know even how to frame the question, much less measure the gains we’ve made.

I see instead a shifting ratio of benefits-to-costs, a march through generations that illustrates both the pain and the promise of our national dream of integrated schools.

*

My thoughts turned to integration as our country honored last week those nine brave souls who integrated Little Rock’s Central High 40 years ago, to win for generations of black children the right to attend public school with whites.

Little Rock was the segregationists’ Waterloo, with its televised images of bayonet-carrying federal soldiers escorting a small band of scared black teenagers through jeering mobs of angry whites. It turned the tide in this country’s pitched battle over school integration.

But it also gave us a frightening peek at the ugly downside: the costs our children would be asked to pay, as we thrust them on the front lines in the nation’s war over race.

During their time at Central, the Little Rock Nine would be spat upon, tormented and pelted with rocks. And from then until now, our children have suffered--in ways large and small, public and private--in this long, bitter integration campaign.

They were traumatized in New Orleans, when whites rioted there to block integration. Injured in Boston, by rock-throwing mobs who attacked school buses. And abandoned here, by white families who fled rather than suffer integration.

And even those who stayed, who did not shout epithets or push black children down the stairs, could inflict harm, through ignorance or innocence.

There is, you see, a kind of collateral damage that occurs after so many unkind remarks, curious stares and stupid questions.

And while we have come, as a nation, to a meeting of the minds--polls show most Americans of every race favor integrated schools--we have not yet figured out how we get there from here or how much in human suffering we’re willing to risk.

So, imagine this: Your black son picks a desk in class, and the white girl next to him gathers her books and changes seats, and the white boys behind them gawk and snicker. . . . Do you feel angry, hurt, bewildered, betrayed?

Just what do you tell your child, and yourself?

*

We were going through my daughter’s closet--trying to find the right dress for her to wear to a friend’s bar mitzvah--when her sister’s question caught me off guard.

“What did they wear to bar mitzvahs when you were little, Mommy.”

“I don’t know. I never went to a bar mitzvah,” I told her.

Her eyes grew wide. “But weren’t you popular? Didn’t your friends invite you?”

Yes, I was popular. But I didn’t have any Jewish friends as a kid. Matter of fact, I don’t think I knew any Jewish people. I’d never even heard of a bar mitzvah as a child.

They puzzle over my ignorance, these girls growing up in a world where racial and ethnic lines seem to have shifted and blurred; where their friends include black kids adopted by white families, and brown-skinned girls who look like them but hail from Lebanon or India.

When I was their age, my world was simple and straightforward: black and white.

Black at home, where my family and neighborhood provided an identity that continues to define who I am today. White at school, where I learned what being different meant, and figured out how to navigate the frigid waters of the larger world.

My best friends then, in elementary school, were white--the daughters of immigrants from Italy and Poland and Czechoslovakia, who’d entered this country poor and uneducated, but a rung above my family on the social ladder.

We spent recess and lunch together, passed notes in class and told secrets on the playground. We liked the same teachers and hated the same set of goofy boys.

But I never saw them outside of school. When I turned 9, I invited them all to a birthday party at my home. But only one agreed to come; everyone else was busy, had other plans.

I was naive enough to believe that, until two years later, when my 8-year-old sister came to me for help making sense of a message from her friends, the Kowalski twins.

They were having a birthday party, they told her, and wanted her to come. But she couldn’t, because their mother wouldn’t let them invite any niggers.

“Sandy,” my wide-eyed little sister asked, “What’s a nigger?”

It was not until I was a grown woman that I would invite another white person to visit my home.

*

That was not the last time I’d be stopped in my tracks by a child’s concern, forced to question the wisdom of the course we’ve taken.

My 6-year-old asks, her face serious with worry, if we, like the desert tortoise, are an endangered species. Because “there aren’t very many of us around.”

Her 8-year-old sister comes home from school in tears. “I wish I was white,” she sobs, clinging to my neck. “It’s too hard being different.”

When I discover the source of her misery, my own memories come flooding back. “Is it true,” she asks as I tuck her in bed, “that all black people are stupid? That’s what Katey told me at school.”

They’re reaping the benefits, but also bearing the burdens, of the choices I’ve made. Just as I celebrated and suffered through the life my mother chose for me. Just as your children walk the path you’ve charted for them.

It’s a grand experiment and we are all partners in it, moving clumsily forward to create a world that honors the sacrifices of our parents and nurtures the aspirations of our children.

Sometimes, I believe I can glimpse success.

For my daughter’s 6th birthday, she asked her three best friends to sleep over at our house. Their mothers came the next morning, while the four little girls were still snuggled in a sleeping bag on our bedroom floor.

“It’s like a little United Nations,” one mother remarked. I looked at the girls and saw she was right. They were black, Korean, Indian, Jewish.

But when they looked at each other, the girls saw instead just Brittany, Leah, Shanaya and Katie .

And isn’t that progress, after all?

* Sandy Banks’ column is published Mondays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.