Johann Neem is the author of Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America, in which he describes the creation of public education between the American Revolution and the Civil War and recognizes public schools as an essential building block of a robust democracy.
Neem’s family came to America from India when he was a. Dry young child. They settled in California and lived in a diverse, multiethnic America. He went to public schools, to college, to graduate school, and eventually became a historian of education.
He lived what was then considered the American Dream. But now he fears it is disappearing for reasons he explain in this essay.
He begins:
I arrived—as we all do—in the midst of history. I was not yet three, and my parents had migrated to San Francisco from Mumbai to start a new life. They had been sponsored by my dad’s sister, whose husband, an engineer, had come over to work for Bechtel. We were, in other words, part of the first wave of immigrants to crash into a changing America in the wake of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Our arrival—among those of the numbers of Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans who came to the country—was largely unexpected. It was not what most Americans had anticipated when the law was passed during the civil rights era. But it was what brought me here, to a new country.
Mine was an American childhood. We were middle class and lived on a cul-de-sac whose residents were diverse in many of the usual American ways. There were Japanese-Americans and Catholics and Protestants. There were people without college degrees, and others with graduate degrees. There were Republicans and Democrats. There were immigrants from Germany, and of course we were from India. But most of us kids went to public school together, and our parents would take turns carpooling us. Gathering on the court, we rode bikes, played football on our muddy lawn (I was never much good at sports), and pretended to be motorcycle officers Ponch and Jon from the TV series CHiPs. Together, we made up games and celebrated birthdays. We grew up knowing about our differences but caring about what we shared. What bound us together was America, although I’m not sure I would have been able to say that. Perhaps I didn’t have to.
I imagined that I could become anybody. I had no awareness then that this belief was the result of more than two centuries of activism on the part of African Americans, feminists, and their allies to earn equality within the American nation-state. It was California. The American Dream was alive. Of course, that dream had been deferred for so many Americans for too long. But after 1965, it was hoped, those obstacles would be behind us. Immigrants would be welcome. African Americans would be equal. And despite the thus-far unsuccessful effort to enact the Equal Rights Amendment, I grew up in a world that took for granted that women too could be whomever they wanted to be.
There was a kind of amnesia. Maybe that’s not the right word. We were new. So maybe it was that I just didn’t know the history, and my parents had experienced a different history. Whatever it was, America was, for us, a blank slate. But it was not fully blank. It had rituals and traditions for us to learn, such as giving gifts and spending time with family and friends on Christmas or having barbecues on the Fourth of July. We gathered with neighbors to hunt Easter eggs. It had norms, like saying “thank you” for any kind of service, a sign of the respect each American owed fellow Americans for their contributions to society. It had a creed, too—that the United States promised all people a better, freer, more prosperous life…
I lived in a world where we could all be American, not because of our cultural differences but because of what we could share. This shared culture—this sense of being a people—is a precondition to sustaining the universal ideals of American democracy. We like to pretend that principles are enough, but abstract ideas are thin gruel for flesh-and-blood human beings. We are not disembodied reasoners. We belong to groups. We have emotions. Culture connects us to our country and to one another. But that culture depends on shared rituals and experiences. Today, we are so afraid of offense that we risk privatizing the very culture we once could share together…
As I studied American history, I came to appreciate the struggles so many Americans had undertaken, often in the face of brutal violence, to create the California my parents and I had entered in 1976. As a professor, I want my students to know of these struggles, of the wrenching realities of slavery and Jim Crow, of the violence unleashed against labor unions, of why a human being could be beaten and left tied to a fence to die for being gay. These stories have to be told if we are to confront the truth about our past, which continues to shape the way many Americans experience the present.
But some felt threatened by these new stories. They worried that they represented the end of America because they dethroned many idols. Jefferson did look different from the perspective of an enslaved person or a Native American than he did from that of a white farmer in western New York State or Virginia. The culture wars reflected Americans’ disagreements over which perspectives mattered most, and how to fit them together into a coherent story about ourselves as a people…
I am outside two worlds—both defined by race. On the left, race seems to be everywhere, as something to celebrate but also to divide. On the right, whiteness represents a reracialized vision of America that denies black voters access to the polls, engages in race-baiting that targets immigrants of color, and insults people of non-Christian faiths. It authorizes a president who suggests that we should deal with the problem of illegal border crossings by shooting migrants in the legs.20 I see myself distorted through both sets of eyes. But neither defines me. I don’t want to be white. I am proud of my Indian heritage. I am an American.
This sense of who I am makes immigrants like me carriers of an American Dream that is being lost. I still believe in the Dream. Most white Americans are not white nationalists, and, because I work on a college campus, I hope that I exaggerate the divisive features of multiculturalism and whiteness studies. Having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area at a particular moment in its history, I know from experience that diversity does not necessarily lead to fragmentation. Living in a diverse society depends on tolerance and mutual respect, and, I learned, both a willingness to share and to participate in American culture.
I don’t do justice to this thoughtful and provocative essay by citing disconnected excerpts. Neem analyzes the tensions created by too much pressure from the academic left, focused on identity politics, and the counter-response from conservative and radicalized whites, who assert their white identity and proclaim their grievances, with the encouragement of a president who loves divisiveness.
Read it.
It’s up at Oped. https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Johann-Neem-On-Unbecoming-in-Best_Web_OpEds-America_Democracy_Diane-Ravitch_Education-200412-487.html
I am delighted that New York gave me the opportunity to serve so many immigrant students and their families for more than three decades. My school district invested in its immigrant population during a time when more opportunities were available than there are today. Many of my former students are small business owners. I know of two doctors, social workers, teachers, electricians and some that have served in the military. Despite poverty, many of my former students have climbed out of it in order to lead productive lives. If I had to describe foreign students in a few words, I would say they are resilient, industrious and hopeful. While public schools cannot solve all of society’s ills, they can provide students with the tools they need for the future. We need to support our public schools as they are the most efficient and effective way to help our young people move forward. We need to continue to support equity and diversity in order to provide a better future for all of us.
The only people in America who are not immigrants are the Native Americans and it is the supreme irony that the immigrants have always treated the natives as the outsiders who do not belong.
But I guess that is the nature of prejudice. There always has to be someone to look down on, whether it is the ones who immigrated after or those who were here before.
That was not supposed to be a reply.
WordPress has a mind of its own
We have a shameful history with our native population. Even today, we are ignoring treaties to gain access to native lands to drill for oil.
Indeed the history that the Souix believe is that they were Eastern dwellers until the European settlement began, whereupon they betook themselves slowly away before becoming the horse-riding hunters of the Great Plains. Competition from the Crow and Shoshoni produced some real conflict during the days before Yellow Hair and his blue-coated adversaries.
Of course there is always the history of the Mongols, the Assyrians, the so-called “People of the Sea” who attacked the Egyptians, OH, I am getting out of breath.
Nheem also does not discuss that his family left a society that was affected greatly by the racism of the British imperial interest in India and the harsh conflicts it engendered there. Is there a place on earth where we are kept from each other’s throats without great learning, empathy, and forebearance?
Not just as a result of the British. India is a society that has for ages been a society rife with prejudice and division.
With a populist Hindu regime in power, Muslims are being attacked and vilified.
A salient point
A nation of immigrants
Immigrant 1 looks down
On immigrant 2 in town
And immigrant 2 looks down
On immigrant 3 inbound
And immigrant 3 looks down
On immigrant 4 , with frown
And immigrants all look down
On Natives all around
I do not recall the words, but this recall’s Tom Leher’s “National Brotherhood Week,” a wonderful satire from sometome in th e60s I think.
I can’t think of too many better places to be a Public School kid than CA in the 1960s and 1970s. States North and South in these parts (east of the rockies) were still grappling with the legacy of slavery, still are. Somehow all that government spending on bases, research, infrastructure, and schools seems to have worked over there.
We can’t lay it all at the feet of Prop13, though. Somewhere thirty years ago ed admin and other public sector unions were given pie in the sky promises. Ed admin, military admin and other admin is bloated, redundant and wasteful. Ironically, some of it to address identity politics.
Countless of our “bootstrap” multi-millionaires were a product of CA state ed from Brady Bunch times.
Long, long ago, in a planet far away, California had a great, well-funded public school system, where everyone was eligible for a free college education.