‘A Permanent Underclass, Frank! See, Nobody Wants To Talk About That!’

It was hard to figure out what to focus on for this post. I mean, there is a LOT of nonsense going on, and that’s on top of the normal nonsense.

To start, there is the abysmally stupid idea of bringing white Afrikaners from South Africa. Then, there was the unwarranted (and likely illegal) firing of Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden.

And of course, there was the arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka for being at a protest of the regime’s attempt to open up a new gulag in his city. We can also talk about Pope Leo XIV and the 'one drop rule,' a woman who gets rich after racially taunting a toddler, or the flying bribe from Qatar, later if you want.

But I’d like to get into something that everyone seems to have missed, but shows the regime’s outright racism: Trump’s flagrant attack on Black kids in Chicago, which I feel is part of a scheme to turn all Black people into a permanent underclass – I’ll explain why I’m saying this in a minute.

According to reports from earlier this month, Trump has pointed his Nathan Bedford Forrest AR-15 at the Chicago Public Schools’ Black Student Success Plan, accusing it of violating the Civil Rights Act because it emphasizes Black students. The Department of Education says that Chicago is using federal funds in a “pernicious and unlawful manner” just to favor one group of kids, so the agency is cutting off money to CPS.

Any clown knows that they could easily look up the Chicago school system’s makeup and find that out of 325,000 kids, about 34 percent are Black. About 47 percent are Latino, representing a majority. Now, while graduation rates rose to 82 percent in 2019, driven by students from both categories, officials found disparities in student achievement among Black students and devised a five-year plan to address them. The goal, according to Chalkbeat, was to “increase the number of Black teachers, slash suspensions and other discipline for Black students, and embrace more culturally responsive curriculums…”

Chicago’s plan mimics one launched by the Los Angeles Unified School District, which also finds disparities with Black students. In fact, a 2024 report from the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments shows disparities across the board, nationally, when it comes to Black student achievement. Among its findings is higher segregation of school systems, less funding in K-12 school districts serving Black students, limited access to early childhood education programs, and harsher student discipline practices toward Black children. Both the Chicago and LAUSD plans were attacked by conservatives who want to turn public education into a school voucher program, essentially privatizing schools. But the data is clear that this has a negative impact.

Education is not a condiment

But the regime does not recognize any of this. It is only concerned with its racist obsession with DEI and getting rid of any shred of it anywhere in the country. This includes higher education and the private sector. If it costs Black children better educational opportunities, so be it. And why not? The Education Department is headed by a woman who does not know the difference between A.I. and A1 steak sauce.

(For that matter, though, the person currently in charge of federal health policy swims in raw sewage.)

Anyway, I want you to imagine a future in which we let public education cease initiatives designed to help students who face a variety of challenges unique to their communities. Think about what that looks like. First, conservatives have always hated the thought of Black children receiving a good education funded by taxpayers. That idea goes back to at least Reagan. It was his idea to eliminate the Department of Education just two years after it was founded by President Carter.

But the reality is that the least educated cities in America are also the poorest, according to the most recent statistics. And these are also the most densely Black cities as well, places where federal funding and support for education have seen cuts for generations. Let the right wing tell it, it's only the schools that are evil and cause all the problems. But the reality is much different.

Morgan Freeman, playing New Jersey principal Joe Clark in 1989’s “Lean on Me,” was right: “We are being crucified by a process that is turning Blacks into a permanent underclass.”

And that is the point. A future in which Black and other children who have limited resources results in a population that is: 1) Unable to do more than low-wage jobs with little ability for advancement, 2) Subject to constant financial exploitation like high-fee check-cashing services, and high-risk loans, 3) Overpolicing and subjugation by the criminal justice system, and 4) Poor physical and mental health outcomes due to overexposure to unhealthy food resources and increased environmental stressors.

These factors are already present in every American city I’ve ever been in, and are all but the norm in Detroit, where I grew up. The system becomes an inescapable cycle, leaving the poor and disenfranchised vulnerable to whatever the regime and its oligarch backers want. And we’ve already seen the result of that.

It’s kind of ironic that last week, I wrote about one of the heroes of education in the Black community, and the week he passes away, the regime decides to attack what he fought most valiantly for, Black children. But while we are rightly concerned about the kidnappings and attacks on immigrants, including permanent residents and naturalized citizens, Black children are an even more important target because white supremacists have known for centuries that an educated Black population is a dangerous Black population to them.

So while we are engaged in a war against a regime that is seeking to install a police state that persecutes anyone its leaders don’t like, protecting education is critical and our most important fight. If we lose public education to the MAGA cult, we lose our children to them.

And they mean nothing but harm.

Madison Gray is a New York City-based writer and editor whose work has appeared in multiple publications globally. Reach out to him at madison@starkravingmadison.com.