As a history and leadership studies double major, I especially enjoyed listening to this podcast. I chose to pair history and leadership for what Professor Bezio said at the beginning of the episode: understanding the history behind something helps us better understand that something. I am especially interested in looking at how policy decisions transcend history impact lives today in ways that are often unrecognizable. I took justice with Professor Williamson last semester, and we spent much of the class talking about these issues. Professor Hayter’s introduction touches on RVA’s coded redistricting. Although he looks at it through the lens of restricted voting rights for Richmond’s black community, in Williamson’s class, we looked at the redistricting impacts on Richmond’s Public School system.<\/p>\n
RPS is significantly more diverse than Richmond’s suburban public schools, has drastically lower budgets, small engagement in PTA, and reports lower test scores and graduation rates. The impacts of Richmond’s housing redistricting, which destroyed housing projects for marginalized communities and built highways to give suburban residents direct access to the city while also encouraging movement to the suburbs (where wealthier, whiter residents reside), which in turn eliminated the people left in the housing project’s walkable access to downtown helps to explain the disparities in Richmond’s public education. Furthermore, the\u00a0Plessy v. Ferguson\u00a0<\/em>decision, which allowed for Southern politicians to continue to segregation efforts via loopholes, such as restricting public bus access, in conjunction with RVA’s housing developments reveals these disparities. As for Hayter’s argument regarding voting, this marginalization of Richmond’s black communities left the public schools voiceless in being able to make changes for themselves. The efforts of Southern politicians in Richmond to continue racism, discrimination, and oppression have long-lasting impacts that affect the same communities today. For this reason, it is incredibly important to learn about and study history in order to understand why the problems that we have today exist, and how to solve them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As a history and leadership studies double major, I especially enjoyed listening to this podcast. I chose to pair history and leadership for what Professor Bezio said at the beginning of the episode: understanding the history behind something helps us better understand that something. I am especially interested in looking at how policy decisions transcend […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4547,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading-responses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4547"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7159,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7158\/revisions\/7159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/criticalthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}