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With the closing of half the schools in Kansas City, Missouri, I feel compelled to say something about the endless self-righteousness of the bourgeois press and media. It has long been standard in the Greater Kansas City area to place Kansas City and its school system on the stage of so-called news reporting and mainstream political commentary. In other words KCMO is placed on the stage of public opinion by the various profit making "news media".
The stories about KCMO are usually about crime, police action and political crisis. The Kansas City School District has been one of the central themes of this coverage for the last forty years. Of course a lot of the so-called coverage seems to be the promotion of this or that big business interest such as the billionaire owned sports teams or the downtown projects which funnel profits to investors.
Of course this leaves the two hundred and many other cities of the region largely uncovered and off the stage. Their failures are rarely if ever scrutinized and certainly never become themes for decades of reporting. This takes the heat off of the generally whiter and more affluent suburbs and they may be doing a lot worse than we think because they are almost all off the stage of public scrutiny.
The KCMOSD has been a classic whipping boy of the capitalist class because of the racial factors which allow the capitalists to pit the whites against people of color. This deserves our scrutiny from the perspective of the working class which is multinational and multiracial and has no interest in racism (unlike capitalist collabortors) or in using racism to distract from capitalist failure and capitalist exploitation.
Those in the suburbs with a better life than people in KCMO are able to imagine that they are somehow doing better and thus to feel superior in a very petty way to the poor folks in KCMO. This plays into the suburban and conservative view that the good people are in Johnson County or some unscrutinized suburb and that the bad people are in KCMO.
It is still color coded because as the mainstream media continues to emphasize, the desegregation orders of 1979 failed to desegregate the school district. White supremacy has remained intact if somewhat moderated. Whites left the city en masse and while this was largely an economic thing it is conveniently packaged as racism, pure and simple. It isn't racism pure and simple, it is class dictatorship and class exploitation with variable rates of exploitation of the various racial groups.
White workers are encouraged to think of themselves as special and superior to the bad people of color. Why? So they cannot see that they are exploited by capitalist, investors, stock holders who are also multinational in character!
Opportunists and so-called worker leaders are also willing to be house servants of the capitalists for their own personal benefit. They have no interest in the transition to working class rule and little vision about a better future.
More about this later, but if the public school system has failed it is not just in KCMO and it is not just because of test scores. Public education under the capitalists has failed because it has not taught about the class struggle but instead buries it in a pile of disconnected facts, stories about great leaders and a complete suppression of decades of recent history.
With the closing of half the schools in Kansas City, Missouri, I feel compelled to say something about the endless self-righteousness of the bourgeois press and media. It has long been standard in the Greater Kansas City area to place Kansas City and its school system on the stage of so-called news reporting and mainstream political commentary. In other words KCMO is placed on the stage of public opinion by the various profit making "news media".
The stories about KCMO are usually about crime, police action and political crisis. The Kansas City School District has been one of the central themes of this coverage for the last forty years. Of course a lot of the so-called coverage seems to be the promotion of this or that big business interest such as the billionaire owned sports teams or the downtown projects which funnel profits to investors.
Of course this leaves the two hundred and many other cities of the region largely uncovered and off the stage. Their failures are rarely if ever scrutinized and certainly never become themes for decades of reporting. This takes the heat off of the generally whiter and more affluent suburbs and they may be doing a lot worse than we think because they are almost all off the stage of public scrutiny.
The KCMOSD has been a classic whipping boy of the capitalist class because of the racial factors which allow the capitalists to pit the whites against people of color. This deserves our scrutiny from the perspective of the working class which is multinational and multiracial and has no interest in racism (unlike capitalist collabortors) or in using racism to distract from capitalist failure and capitalist exploitation.
Those in the suburbs with a better life than people in KCMO are able to imagine that they are somehow doing better and thus to feel superior in a very petty way to the poor folks in KCMO. This plays into the suburban and conservative view that the good people are in Johnson County or some unscrutinized suburb and that the bad people are in KCMO.
It is still color coded because as the mainstream media continues to emphasize, the desegregation orders of 1979 failed to desegregate the school district. White supremacy has remained intact if somewhat moderated. Whites left the city en masse and while this was largely an economic thing it is conveniently packaged as racism, pure and simple. It isn't racism pure and simple, it is class dictatorship and class exploitation with variable rates of exploitation of the various racial groups.
White workers are encouraged to think of themselves as special and superior to the bad people of color. Why? So they cannot see that they are exploited by capitalist, investors, stock holders who are also multinational in character!
Opportunists and so-called worker leaders are also willing to be house servants of the capitalists for their own personal benefit. They have no interest in the transition to working class rule and little vision about a better future.
More about this later, but if the public school system has failed it is not just in KCMO and it is not just because of test scores. Public education under the capitalists has failed because it has not taught about the class struggle but instead buries it in a pile of disconnected facts, stories about great leaders and a complete suppression of decades of recent history.
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