Whip hand?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Whip hand?

The term “apartheid,” of course, refers to the brutal system of legalized racial segregation that existed in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. Its use is meant to convey the sense that an elite minority population wields the whip hand over a racial majority. Most New Yorkers would probably wonder what the city’s Department of Education—not known as a nest of white supremacy—has in common with a programmatic policy of racial classification and restriction. While New York, like America in general, has divisions of income that sometimes cleave along ethno-racial lines, no well-off black or Latino families in New York are prevented from moving into any neighborhood they can afford. Ethnic enclaves in New York are largely determined by group affinity. Chinese immigrants have gravitated toward communities in Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn’s Sunset Park, and Flushing, Queens, but it would be absurd to suggest that Asian-Americans in New York are somehow victims of segregation, along the lines of Jim Crow-era Dixie.

The 90 percent black and Hispanic figure cited by Lander and Torres is striking until one considers that more than two out of three kids (68 percent) in the city’s public school system are black and Latino. It thus takes only a minimal amount of population concentration for a public school to fall into the “apartheid” category—in which, as Lander and Torres see it, poor children are concentrated with one another in schools that consign them to “steep disadvantage.” The council members assert that “the average black or Latino student attends a school where nearly 70% of the students are low-income.” But again, context is needed: according to the Department of Education, 78 percent of all students in the system are poor or attend schools where all students get free lunches. And 90 percent of all city public schools have student bodies that are at least 50 percent poor. So it’s no surprise that black and Latino kids attend primarily lower-income schools.