OPINION: Black children and youth are falling behind disproportionately and its impact is devastating.
theGrio’s ‘What We Have to Lose’ series provides a response to Donald J. Trump’s question posed to Black America on Aug. 19, 2016: “What do you have to lose?” With less than 80 days until Election Day on Nov. 3, a list of academics, activists and thought leaders provide answers to Trump’s question exactly four years later.
Four years ago, Donald Trump asked Black voters, “What do you have to lose?” For far too many Black folks like my students and staff, the losses have been incalculable, and impossible to convey in a single word.
As a founder, leader and teacher at a Black-led charter school in Brooklyn, in one of the communities most ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, mine is an optimal purview from which to survey the carnage wrought in Black communities by Trump’s presidency and his sycophantic enablers in government.
While these losses have been immense for Black people writ large, they are gargantuan for Black children and youth on whom they fall disproportionately and impact devastatingly.
With the abrupt closure of schools in mid-March, Black children and youth have suffered through the loss of hundreds of hours of learning and instruction that they can never regain. In the subsequent and abiding retreat indoors, our children were home to witness firsthand how the soaring coronavirus death rate claimed the lives of Black people three-times more than Whites.
In major cities like New York, Black and Brown people died most, and too often at home. No amount of education could have prepared our staff for the calls from our students asking us what to do when Mom or Dad or Auntie or Grandma or Pop-pop would not wake up. Under Trump’s watch, thousands and thousands of Black parents and guardians are dead and gone, no longer here to guide or care for their children.
The substantial trauma that Black children already bear while ensnared in generational poverty, has increased manifold as they experience the colliding maelstroms of Trump’s incompetent management of a once-in-a-generation public health crisis and the virulent racism he promotes to distract from his derelict and cruel leadership.
By the time the New York Times wrote in June of the lasting and deeply debilitating impact of the botched pandemic response on Black children and youth, those of us here on the ground working directly with Black families and children already knew that Trump’s presidency had turned the digital divide and achievement gap into a vast opportunity chasm.
Black and Brown students across the country failed to get the computers and internet service they desperately needed to engage with even the limited schooling available for them online.
And as we prepare for the start of another school year, uncertain whether or when students will return to the classroom, these gaps will continue to expand, the losses will continue to mount, leaving Black and Brown children further and further behind.
Source: What we have to lose with Trump: Education for our Black children
