Back to the County, a place apparently lacking Official Diversity.

Today I returned to WCHS after school was canceled last week due to widespread illness. I must say, despite having a solid experience at Williamsburg, I am thankful to be back with my own supervising teacher and my own students. At the same time, I feel a certain sinking because I know this week will be all the more intense -- the weight of two weeks crammed into the final five school days before fall break. There are fears of sickness leading to more cancellations, and students are ready for an additional half-week; already, several have begun "packing it in," as my former college suite-mates often said, meaning to cut one's losses, put forth no additional effort, quit.

One specific struggle this week is going to be completing my homework from last week (which I wasn't able to complete without access to certain paperwork only available on campus) on top of homework for this week and preparing for my second observation, which is coming up on Friday.

Returning to my experiences last week, on Thursday I had the chance to participate in an interview/ meeting regarding UC's Education Department's re-accreditation. Two nice ladies sent from the State interviewed me and a few other undergrad and grad student-teachers. Although they asked questions on a variety of topics, the topic we discussed most was our experience of "diversity" (or lack thereof) in our placement schools and classrooms.

According to the US Census Bureau, the racial makeup of Whitley Co., KY, is:

-98.37% White
-0.76% multi-racial
-0.69% Hispanic/ Latino (of any race)
-0.34% Black or African American
-0.23% Native American
-0.20% Asian
-0.09% other races

I'm not entirely sure that those percentages add up to precisely 100, but the picture is clear: the vast majority of people here are of mostly European descent. It is rare to see anyone who is not white without being on the college campus. And the State is apparently significantly displeased that student-teachers are not in schools with more skin-based diversity.

I have no doubt that the diversity standards set forth by the State originate from good intentions: teaching in inner-city Chicago would be vastly different than teaching in Whitley Co. Furthermore, they believe that a teacher should be able to teach in any situation or place. They then, it seems, assume that the way to prepare education students for such situations is to put them in places where there is an acceptable ratio of white people to non-white people. Clearly, the ratio of whites to non-whites in Whitley County is significantly lob-sided; therefore, schools in Whitley County (and by extension, all of Appalachia, which tends to be predominantly populated by European-Americans) are unacceptable for student-teacher placements.

And there is a certain logical progression from proposition to proposition to conclusion.

However, I question the State's purely skin tone-based understanding of diversity. According to Webster's Dictionary, "diversity" means:

The inclusion of diverse people (as people of different races or cultures) in a group or organization.

So, yes, racial differences are a piece of the puzzle; however, the State has completely ignored the fact that Eastern Kentucky and Appalachia offer a unique and typically misunderstood, caricatured, and belittled cultural experience. Being a native of the Midwest, the language, values, religion, customs, and overall worldview is starkly different than my own. My experience living here over the last four years has been no less diverse than if I had moved to Gary, Indiana, or Kensington, PA (inner-city Philadelphia).

In fact, in many ways, my experience has been more "diverse." I grew up as a city kid. My county in Indiana is the smallest in terms of square mileage in the state, but it leads the state in terms of population residing in government housing. I lived for well over a decade one block away from the projects. I played baseball in the inner-city league alongside friends (both white and black) who lived in the projects or who were on some form of government assistance. My home was located in a predominantly African-American voting precinct. My family and I had a paper route for a few years in our immediate neighborhood that further acquainted us with the lives of our neighbors and instilled a more tangible sense of community within the inner-city. I attended school in Louisville's west side, a part of the city feared by friends of mine who grew up in upper middle class subdivisions and schools. My childhood and teenage years were steeped in inner-city life and experiences.

Leaving the city life of Louisville and Southern Indiana and moving to Appalachia was indeed a culture shock. But for the first four years here, most of my time was spent on the campus where most people differed from me very little. Still, I learned certain things about the culture -- the accent and dialect, the pastimes (four-wheelin', huntin', muddin', and other words with truncated present participle suffixes). I also learned that there is a lot of need in the area -- health care, addiction counseling, education, jobs, and often even basic necessities.


However, it wasn't until I began student-teaching at Whitley County that I began to face Appalachia's litany of needs on a daily basis. And those needs have faces, stories, hopes, fears, and dreams. Being in the school has been jarring and has caused me to question my assumptions about education, stewardship, and ministry.

This place and its people are different than I am in every respect save skin color and ancestral continent. In fact, since being here, I have found that culturally speaking the Indian-American pastor of my church (who is also a local medical doctor) and his wife (who also educates their children at home) share more similarities with me than any of the students I have encountered. They and I speak the same sterile, accent-less, "non-regional diction" native to the Midwest, are highly educated and well-read, and feel at home in the traffic, busyness, and building-littered skylines of urban life. These two Indian-American friends of mine, one of whom of was born in India and grew up in Chicago and the other who was born and raised in New York City, seem to have a corner on the diversity market, yet they readily and often admit that they are culturally more "white" than the local people who are actually of European descent.

And yet, the State maintains that my experience at WCHS through the Education program at UC lacks diversity. What would have truly lacked diversity is if I would have gone back to a school in inner-city Louisville. That's old news to me. I have lived that life. I know the people and lived alongside them, and when I say them, I mean "us," because that is who I am to begin with. Furthermore, several of my students at WCHS have taken it upon themselves to teach about life as an Appalachian and member of the Whitley County community -- everything from pointers on the accent to offers of free tutorials in dressin' a deer. There is very clearly a cultural barrier, but together we are trying to learn about each other, and I am trying to become a part of this place.

Historically, Appalachia has been forgotten by the rest of American culture. The region and its people have been exploited for their natural resources and labor, ridiculed for being backwards and ignorant rednecks, for being primitive and simple, and have been summarily disregarded as being unable to provide anything of value or substance for the rest of society, except for, of course, the coal that keeps the everyones lights on (while depositing the remnants of destroyed mountains in headwaters, streams, creeks, and rivers).

By disregarding the cultural diversity of Appalachia and Whitley Co., the State (whether intentionally or not) both participates in, perpetuates, and encourages the further marginalization of this place and its people. Though I doubt they are listening (nor would listen to a lowly student-teacher), I strongly recommend that they reconsider their position -- to extend their thinking and priorities beyond numeric representations of skin-deep diversity to account for potentially stark cultural differences between people of like color as well surprising similarities between individuals of differing color. Furthermore, I suggest they spend a considerable amount of time studying the life and work of Wendell Berry, a fellow Kentuckian who has explored the struggles, strengths, sins, and beauty inherent in the Kentucky/ Appalachian experience. For starters, I would suggest his essay, "The Prejudice Against Country People." In it he states:

Disparagements of farmers, of small towns, of anything identifiable as "provincial" can be found everywhere: in comic strips, TV shows, newspaper editorials, literary magazines, and so on. A few years ago, The New Republic affirmed the necessity of the decline of family farms in a cover article entitled "The Idiocy of Rural Life." And I remember a Kentucky high school basketball cheer that instructed the opposing team:

Go back, go back, go back to the woods.
Your coach is a farmer and your team's no good.

I believe it is a fact, proven by their rapidly diminishing numbers and economic power, that the world's small farmers and other "provincial" people have about the same status now as enemy civilians in wartime. They are the objects of small, "humane" consideration, but if they are damaged or destroyed "collaterally," then "we very much regret it," but they were in the way--and, by implication, not quite as human as "we" are. The industrial and corporate powers, abetted and excused by their many dependents in government and the universities, are perpetrating a sort of economic genocide--less bloody than military genocide, to be sure, but just as arrogant, foolish, and ruthless, and perhaps more effective in ridding the world of a kind of human life. The small farmers and the people of small towns are understood as occupying the bottom step of the economic stairway and deservedly falling from it because they are rural, which is to say not metropolitan or cosmopolitan, which is to say socially, intellectually, and culturally inferior to "us."

In addition, in "The Joy of Sales Resistance," Berry outlines the assumptions of modern education, business, and politics (which are largely the same thing). Among such assumptions is:

1. Tolerance and Multiculturalism: Quit talking bad about women, homosexuals, and preferred social minorities, and you can say anything you want about people who haven't been to college, manual workers, country people, peasants, religious people, unmodern people, old people, and so on. Tolerant and multicultural persons hyphenate their land of origin and their nationality. I, for example, am a Kentuckian-American.

Of course, Berry isn't the only necessary reading. And I've not arrived at an answer for how to best prepare teachers for the "real-world" of the classroom. But I am looking, reading, and thinking. And thus far, coerced pigment diversity seems an ineffective and myopic (albeit well-intentioned) solution.