How Jack Became Black - FAIR SCREENING
Why I could not enroll my son until I agreed to rank his race.
Hi all,
Years ago, I was told that I would not be allowed to enroll my son at the local public elementary school in Los Angeles because I refused to check a race box.
The LAUSD application wanted his race — a primary race and then a secondary race. I remember staring at that form for a moment. My father is black and my mother is Jewish and I thought which side is the primary race? My son Jack is black, Jewish, white, Native American, and, through his mother, Mexican. There was no honest way to fill this form out. To pick one race for Jack was to deny or demote the others and for what good reason? All these “races” were people who had made him, who had faced tremendous personal obstacles, and who had crossed the color line for love. They were not a “race box.” I filled out the entire application and left the race boxes unchecked. I was then told that his application would not be accepted, despite the California Constitution guaranteeing a free education to every child. I was not willing to cost or delay Jack his education over a box so I checked black. That was how Jack became black.
It was that moment that sent me across the country chasing a question I could not shake. Why does race matter so much? What truth did checking that race box reveal? What justice was being served by these boxes? Why does a nation that calls itself free insist on racially identifying us? I made a film out of what I found. It is called How Jack Became Black, and on this Wednesday, July 1, 7 PM EST, FAIR is screening it to open their Summer Film Series, with a live discussion to follow.
I hope you will join us.
I have spent years asking what that moment revealed. Not just about Los Angeles, or about school enrollment forms, but about where we are right now as a country.
Here is what I found: we have not moved beyond race despite having more freedom and wealth than at any other time in human history. We have doubled down on race. The same impulse that made a bureaucrat reject my son's application — the insistence that a person's race must be named, ranked, and recorded before he can be seen as an individual — is now policy, culture, and moral consensus. We are sorting people by race in hiring, in education, in medicine, in the arts. We’ve even created the class of whites as oppressors. We are told this is justice. What it actually is, is the same old mechanism with a new set of winners and losers.
And here is the part that always bothered me. It is always the weakest and most cynical among us that reach for race as a means to power. They have been doing it for centuries in America. Why do we continue to give them power and at the expense of our greater humanity?
This film is the record of one father trying to keep one boy out of a category, and finding a whole country built on the practice. FAIR has framed the night around the right questions. Will we ever see people as individuals rather than members of groups? Who belongs? How should we think about race?
So join us. Watch the film, then stay for the conversation, where I will be with FAIR Director, Monica Harris, and take your questions. It is online and free.
How Jack Became Black
Wednesday, July 1, 7pm ET / 4pm PT
Online via Zoom, discussion to follow
Register here
I hope to see you there,
Eli
People may claim they want to dismantle hierarchies but mostly they want to overturn the hierarchy so they're on top and their enemies on the bottom and/or they want to be the ones who create and police the hierarchies.
But you can't get to love from hate, you can't get to creation from destruction, and promoting racial division doesn't achieve racial harmony.
The American liberal obsession with race and racial classification (especially applying a moral weight to skin color) may have served some purpose forty or fifty years ago, but it's now devolved into a creepy fetish of sacralized tokenism.
"The racialization of the world has to be the most unexpected result of the anti-discrimination battle of the last half-century. It has ensured that the battle continuously recreates the curse from which it is trying to break free." Pascal Bruckner
Eli, perhaps you should have drawn a separate box , called it mosaic and checked that. Jack is perhaps t he perfect example of the stupidity of the question because no.rules are specified for multi racial kids nor does the question provide guidance about how many generations are to be taken into account in determining one's race ( the generational question of course being used a little less than 100 years ago by a nation dedicated to identity politics)