Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !

Related: Many of you were horrified to see that a kindergarten teacher would call ICE on her own 6 year old Hispanic student.

https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/116010708111794832

For some reason this is more shocking for US folk than the fact that there are cops stationed *in elementary schools*, to quickly arrest Black children at teachers' requests.

30,000 kids under 7 have been arrested. Of course they are disproportionately Black. Because racism.

@mekkaokereke Self-fulfilling prophecy 🫢

If I told you that a formerly straight-A student whose dad was detained by ICE at gunpoint, was now food insecure, housing insecure, traumatized, and not doing as well in school? That would make sense to you.

There are ~100K people in ICE detention.

There are ~400K people in pretrial detention.

Again, all of the people in pretrial detention are legally innocent, and most of them are actually innocent.

Being in pretrial detention usually means that you are innocent, have been accused of a crime that you didn't do, but are too poor to post bail before your trial, which can be years away.

Think of how cruel and evil it would be to wait until ICE detention warehouses reach a capacity of 400,000 people, with ICE officers stationed in elementary schools, and then started a campaign of "Where are all the immigrant dads?! They just don't want to be around! No family values!"

Without the racism, Black kids do as well in school as everyone else.

As a reminder, all Nigerian school kids can not only do algebra and basic statistics by 7th grade, they can convert numbers from decimal to binary and hexadecimal, setting a good foundation for a computer science education later.

I can improve academic performance in a school district, as measured by performance above baseline on standardized tests, just by:

1) Offering free meals to all students

2) increasing the numbers of Black men teachers

3) removing "School Resource Officers"

https://www.nctq.org/research-insights/black-teachers-help-their-white-colleagues-ability-to-teach-black-students-but-at-what-cost/

Because all 3 of these things focus on *reducing racism*.

If I were a white supremacist race scientist who truly believed that Black kids were not as smart as white kids? Then out of curiousity, I would want to see the playing field leveled, so that I could see the difference without confounders.

But that would be disappointing. Because as you remove the racism, the difference in academic performance fades to nothing.‍️