Sunday, October 12, 2014

Prep School Racism and Sexism At St. Paul's School Historically

As late as the 1990s the prep school that the ultra-rich U.S. Secretary of State, John "Secretary of War" Kerry, attended--St. Paul's School--was apparently operating in an institutionally racist and institutionally sexist way. As Columbia University Professor of Sociology Shamus Rahman Khan--who was a student at St. Paul's School during the 1990s--recalled in his 2011 book Privilege: The Making of An Adolescent Elite At St. Paul's School:

"I am surrounded by black and Latino boys...It was September 1993...I quickly realized that St. Paul's was far from racially diverse. That sea of dark skin only existed because we all lived in the same place: the minority student dorm. There was one for girls and one for boys. The other 18 houses on campus were overwhelmingly filled with those whom you would expect to be at a school that educated families like the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts...Why were there comparatively few Black or Latino students? Why did blacks and Latinos not do as well as the white and Asian students?  Why, though girls consistently did better than the boys, was the student body still half boys and half girls? If you believe that boys should not win more academic awards than girls, even though girls outperform them, then the school is not a meritocracy...It was in the 1950s...that St. Paul's hired its first black teacher, John T. Walker..."

And, coincidentally, the St. Paul's School administration apparently also required its women students "to cover their shoulders, resulting in that was called the `no bare shoulders rule,' until this rule was "challenged" in recent years by the women students at St. Paul's School, according to the same book. 

In her 1983 book The Good School, Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot also reported "that there were 45 black students at St. Paul's in 1969, but only 23 in 1980," according to Richard L. Zweigenhaft and G. William Domhoff's 1991 book Blacks in the White Establishment?: A Study of Race and Class in America.


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