Rod Dreher kicked off a lively discussion about Woodrow Wilson High School last week by writing an op-ed about it for The Dallas Morning News that was … well … how to put this in polite terms? Fine -- seriously demented.
Dreher said the white people who send their kids to Woodrow, where whites make up 20 percent of the student body, instead of sending them to all-white private schools, where their kids would be a 95-percent majority, are racists, because way more of the white kids wind up going to college than the children of the black and Latino parents whose kids are at Woodrow.
Just … please, don’t even try.
For a week many honest and well-intended persons have been trying to rebut Dreher, but, you see, we must all remember Schutze’s Fifth Law of Rational Discourse: It Is Not Possible To Rebut a Butt-Head. In the meantime, however, many parents from all points on the racial and ethnic compass have offered interesting opinions and insights into what goes on at Woodrow, including lots and lots of debate about whether or not Woodrow is “safe.”
Why put “safe” inside quotation marks? Because it’s never clear what that word really means when ethnic mischief is afoot. Often when white people say a place isn’t “safe” what they really mean is that that black or brown people are present in that place, and they are afraid of black and brown people. By the by, I think that’s what Dreher’s real problem is.
But let me ask you a question: What do you think the kids at Woodrow care about? What do you think is on their minds? Walking my dog down the alley today, I found this flier, which I thought was sort of interesting. --Jim Schutze