(originally posted at gradmommy)

“If this is not class warfare, I don’t know what is.” – The Seeker

“Here we go again.” – The Thinker

These are the words of friends of mine as they express shock over the second case in only a matter of months in which a black mother has made national headlines for pursuing a better education for her children than they otherwise would have received.

In the most recent case, Tonya McDowell, a black mother who lived sometimes in a homeless shelter, sometimes on a friend’s couch, used her babysitter’s address, where she did not live, to enroll her children in a Connecticut school. When the school found out, they had McDowell arrested, and charged with stealing over $15,000 in educational funds. In the previous case, Kelli Williams-Bolar, after refusing to remove her children from the Ohio school district in which her father lived, was arrested, charged, and spent 9 days in jail. She is now on probation for 2 years and must complete 80 hours of community service.

For the second time this year, a black mother has been arrested and charged with larceny – stealing education, defined in the simplest of terms as taking something that not only doesn’t belong to you, but rightfully belongs to someone else. For the second time, PUBLIC education has been defined as a proprietary right that only belongs to some children and not to others. For the second time, the law has allowed municipalities to decide what “public” is deserving, and what “public” is not. For the second time, the public-private distinction has absolutely dissolved.

I’ve heard a lot of arguments from folks about why what both of these women did was wrong. Most of these arguments have come from relatively well-to-do folks, who buy homes at high prices, and live in relatively high performing school districts. For them, education is proprietary, because it is paid for our of their (high) property taxes. Furthermore, they pay extra money, on a voluntary basis, to an education non-profit that supplements the property tax funding. That’s how their schools can afford art and music teachers, fully-stocked libraries, and full-time librarians.

But what is most important to these parents, and why they are so against “others” coming in and enrolling their children when they don’t live in the district, is due to scarcity. In the district where I live, children cannot always go to their neighborhood school because the reputation of how good the school district keeps the population of school-aged children growing, meaning the number of kids is growing but the number of schools is not. Parents here sometimes have siblings in schools across town from each other because one child one year had to be overflowed because there was no room in the neighborhood kindergarten class. Parents argue that they moved to these toney suburbs precisely for the schools; they pay high property taxes and contribute to the education fund precisely because they expect to get into the school and receive a top notch education. There is a sense that there is hardly enough to go around for the people who actually live here.

For these parents, while it is public education in name, they fully believe they are paying for it, in a very real sense. These parents argue that they could have lived elsewhere, could have bought a cheaper home, could have lived somewhere where there was less scarcity. But they didn’t. They chose to live here, and in some cases, sacrificed to do so. When “others,” who are not contributing to property taxes, or the education fund, come in and take a spot, in a very real sense it feels like stealing. It feels like these “others” are taking money that simply and clearly does not belong to them.

For a long time, I could not understand where these parents were coming from. It sounded like pure and simple selfishness to me. And the fact is, it is selfishness. But it’s not their fault. They are just playing the game.

We live in a society that has totally abandoned the goals of public education. Rather than the goal of creating a educated citizenry because that is what is best for a participatory democracy, education has been turned into an individualistic pursuit. Today, we speak of education as something a person has to get if they want to be anything in this world, rather than as something our nation needs to foster if we want to sustain our way of life. When the founders wrote the Constitution, while they wrote of the importance of “life, liberty, and property” they should have also wrote about the federal interests in education.

Because now, public education is no longer truly public. If public is taken to mean as “for the common good,” which public schools once were, they no longer are. Common schools were designed to educate all children, to make all children productive citizens, to foster a sense of nationalism, to develop “Americans.” But now, in our national lingo, public means “charity,” or simply, “free,” giving a sense that it’s only for those who cannot afford it. So when we think of “public education,” we think of what we have to provide to those who cannot afford “education,” and usually what we give those who cannot afford a basic provision of life – food, clothing, shelter – is a run-down form of what everyone else gets.

These two mothers – Tonya McDowell and Kelley Williams-Bolar – are on the front lines of class warfare, attempting to reclaim the commonsense definition of what it means to have public education. Public education is not just free, but it is an education that is dedicated to educating for the public, common, good. It is an education that recognizes that if some of us are uneducated, that is bad for all of us. It is an education that recognizes that equity cannot be ignored. It is an education worth going to jail for.

It started out innocently enough. But when they started reading Caps For Sale: A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys and Their Monkey Business, my heart started to beat a little faster. A little boy was called up to be a “helper;” he played the part of the peddler. The peddler stacks felt pieces on his head: checkered, then gray, brown, blue, and finally red. He walks through town, and getting tired, stops to rest under a tree. He takes a nice long nap, only to awake and find only his checkered cap remains.

The children sitting on the circletime rug are spellbound. Stories being acted out are treats; usually the teacher is simply holding up a tiny little book that most of the kids cannot even see the pictures of. My two little ones are right in the middle; buttery brown faces waiting for the ball to drop – what happened to those caps?? My five year old calls out, for he’s heard the book before, “The monkey’s took them!,” a wide grin on his face.

The teacher assisting the reading teacher whispers, “Let’s give the kids the caps – they can be the monkeys.”

I’m sitting off to the side, taking pictures of this story-play. I stop.

No no no no no no no.

My stomach flops and I feel like my lunch is about to come up. But of course – it’s a story play, and all the parts have to be there. If the kids – including my kids – were not going to be the monkeys, who were?

The reading teacher says, “No, I don’t have enough for all of them.” I exhale. “But they can all just act like monkeys in their seats.” My chest constricts again.

When I see my beautiful brown son put his fingertips in his armpits, and flap his elbows to mimic a monkey, I thought I would lose my breakfast. All the other teachers and parents in the room were giddy – their faces lit up, laughing, joyous – while all I could do is stare, steely eyed, trying my damnedest not to yank my children from their seats and rush out the door.

Afterwards, I approached the head teacher and told her that if they were going to read this book again, that under no uncertain terms were my children to be monkeys in from of the class. Even if they choose it themselves? Absolutely not. I walked away from the conversation sure that the teacher had gotten my point, but not quite sure that she understood why.

But I’m sure I was right. This was all the news this weekend:

An email reportedly sent by party central committee member Marilyn Davenport shows an image, posed like a family portrait, of chimpanzee parents and child, with Obama’s face artificially superimposed on the child. Text beneath the photo reads, “Now you know why no birth certificate.”

“I simply found it amusing regarding the character of Obama and all the questions surrounding his origin of birth,” Davenport wrote, according to the paper’s website. “In no way did I even consider the fact he’s half black when I sent out the email. In fact, the thought never entered my mind until one or two other people tried to make this about race. . .”

Tried to make it about race? Hmm. Right. Blacks have been compared to apes damn since the beginning of time; claiming ignorance about the connection makes one seem stupid, not colorblind. Even the head of the GOP saw the racism for what it was. Even so, read the newspaper online comments and people continue to defend her actions, saying that race had nothing to do with it, and this was simply a joke.

But why THIS joke, why this imagery over and over again? Type in “obama and ape” on google and see how many pictures come up, how many “innocent jokes” are associated with this rhetoric.  How can whites claim that they know nothing of the imagery associated with blacks and apes, chimps, monkeys, etc, yet use it so often to ridicule and dehumanize black folk?

Another tragic case of a mother drowning her children, and herself, come out of New Jersey this week. A young black mother of four drove her minivan, with all four of her children, all under the age of 10, into the Hudson River, allegedly after finding out that her husband was having an affair. Her oldest child, a 10 year old boy, was able to push the button to open the windows and swim out. He says that his mother, before she drove into the river, came to the back of the car and told the young ones that if they were going to die, they were all going to die together. She posted on facebook about her plans, but new reports say that she changed her mind at the last minute and tried to reverse the car. The boy told his mother he was going to get help, and the last her heard from her was “Ok.”

While the case is most certainly a tragedy, much of the discussion surrounding the case has been exactly who the case is a tragedy for. It’s obviously a tragedy for the children, both the three that died and the one that survived. Those three lives lost are three young black lives that will never get the chance to experience living out all that life has to offer. For the child that survived, he will forever suffer the trauma of this event, forever remember his mother and his siblings in this way.

But is this a tragedy for the mother? Reading the comments from the online newspaper, the opinions are mixed, mixed over whether mourning for the mother is even proper. The two poles seem to be either a) “we don’t know what was going through her mind, so let’s reserve judgment” or b) “good mothers don’t murder their kids.” I don’t think either of these are accurate descriptions of the possibilities of what we can say about the circumstance of this mother.

Both statements imply that we can pass judgment, not simply in the legal sense, but in the moral sense. Legally, of course, we could pass judgment. There are legal standards for murder, standards by which we ascertain intent to kill, processes and procedures to ensure fair trials. But moral judgments? Those are based on all sorts of things, little of which do we agree on.

If she was having a psychotic break, and that was “what was going through her mind” is that a tragedy for her? For some folks, a mental illness would automatically disqualify her from “good mom” status, for people with mental illness should not have children. For other folk, “snapping” is akin to insanity, meaning she had little control over her own actions.

We all “snap” from time to time, not to the point of killing our children, of course, but to the point of losing control for  split second and doing something that you wouldn’t otherwise do. Yet we don’t base the entirety of our character on those one occurrences, those one situations. We recognize them for what they are – lapses in judgment, bad decisions, sometimes truly fvcked-up decisions – but we don’t allow them to contaminate all of who we are.

Even when someone does something as horrible as this, I can’t bring myself to allow it to contaminate everything they are. And maybe it’s because I’ve been in that place, about to make a decision that was permanent and unalterable about taking my own life. And thankfully, I did have my wits about me to not contemplate taking my children with me, but to take my own life was still an obviously reckless and misguided and wrong and bad decision. And had I taken it, or attempted it (I got help before I took that step) I would hope that that moment did not subsume all there is to me. That that moment of weakness, of dispair, of truly being out of my mind did not become all that folks would remember about me. Even now, after being hospitalized and diagnosed, I hope that *it* is not all that people think when they think of me, that one bad thing I was going to do.

And so in this case, I wonder *why* people feel the need to pass a judgment at all. Why can’t we all just shake our heads at the sadness of the entire situation – four lives lost, lives that will not lived any longer, lives that were cut shorter than they should have been. Why can’t we mourn for them – all of them, the children, babies really, only 5, 2, and 11 months, and this young mother – as somebody’s child, somebody’s grandbaby, somebody’s niece, nephew, somebody’s loved one who is now gone. And why are we not more focused on what all the negative characterizations of this mother will have on the child who survived – a child that will forever live with the horrible trauma of his mother’s and sibling’s death?

Please: can our compassion for that child be greater than our need to judge the actions of the dead?