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Damaged goods
The parents of a murderer sue adoption workers, claiming they should have been told about the boy's mentally ill birth mother.
By Beth Broeker
[02/24/00]

Be fruitful and multiply
Infertile couples who are members of strict religious organizations often find themselves vilified by the church.
By Michael Kress
[02/23/00]

Don't call me Mrs.
When the local Catholics couldn't face my surname, I went church shopping.
By Donna Cornachio
[02/23/00]

Brother knows best
Dave Eggers talks, with some reluctance, about the staggering work of being a genius parent.
By Amy Benfer
[02/22/00]

Breaking the silence
It is time to tell the secrets and share the pain of Japanese internment.
By Rahna Reiko Rizzuto
[02/18/00]

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The New York Times Magazine seems to think so.

I usually dismiss this magazine as being altogether irrelevant to our lives because of its blatant class bias. But in a recent issue, I thought that I saw a photograph of the apartment complex in upper Manhattan where my son and I live. The photo depicted a black boy on a bike, riding in the courtyard between two apartment towers. (As it turns out, it wasn't actually my building, but it could have been taken at another, similar complex three blocks from here.) The article by James Traub that accompanied the photograph was called "Schools Are Not the Answer" and represented yet another tired attempt by a middle-class writer to answer the question of what to do with other people's children -- the children of the poor.

Traub is writing about me and my 13-year-old son. Does he get it right? No, he does not.

The photo caption summarizes Traub's main point: "Education may not be enough to conquer the disadvantages impoverished children bring with them to school and return to at home." Traub argues that no matter how much "we" do to try to bring inner-city schools up to the level of suburban schools (the "we" in this article, as always in the New York Times, is the white, largely male, professional/managerial class) the poor children in those schools will be doomed to failure because of the bad influences of their families and neighborhoods.

Like many other middle-class pundits, Traub doesn't seem to be particularly concerned with family values, when the family in question happens to be poor. The article bemoans, more than once, the fact that "You can't take children away from their mothers." (Though one assumes that if you could, Traub would be all for it.) Fathers are never mentioned -- the unspoken assumption is that poor children don't have any. Traub dismisses any possibility of changing a child's lot in life by changing the family's environment (read: social class) since "directly addressing the environment through jobs programs, housing, health care or the adoption of a living wage survives only in the fringes of political discourse."

His solution is to inculcate "middle-class parenting practices" into the lives of poor families: "We have to unambiguously embrace the virtues of a middle-class parenting style." What does he mean by that? "Reading to your children, taking them on trips, using reason rather than the flat edict." Poor children -- in contrast to middle-class children -- he says, grow up in homes without books, "where their natural curiosity is regularly squashed."

In case you missed it, Traub's real subject is race. "Poor" in the article is shorthand for "black." (Traub takes pains to say that his arguments apply to affluent blacks as well; he cites studies that show middle-class blacks do far worse academically than middle-class whites.) It's as if he thinks white skin is sufficient inoculation against a poor outcome in life.

I'm particularly suited to blow the air out of Traub's tires, not because I am your (his) typical impoverished inner-city mother, but because I am not. My son and I are white. White and poor.

Next page | Yes, you can change mothers -- if you do it at birth