Race, class, and high school volleyball
We've been spending the year in Brooklyn and while I knew that our neighbor Mike was a high school teacher and a volleyball coach, I only found out recently when we were hanging out that WNYC, the public radio station in the city, had made a podcast about him. Not about him alone, but his school, specifically the girls' volleyball team. So I listened to it.
It's a fascinating look at the lived realities of antiracist work in public education through the lens of sports (and, to use Marxisty language, a potent example of how educational practices anchor ideologies in a space of struggle).
The podcast is called Keeping Score and I recommend you check it out. It was co-produced by student reporters at multiple schools and it's refreshing to hear the students themselves working on the reporting. This post is a summary and my take on the podcast.
Small schools
NYC schools are a world unto themselves. That's always been the case due to the district's size, complexity, and diversity, but it became more literally true for school buildings themselves in the 2000s under Michael Bloomberg's administration. He pushed a policy that divided school buildings into multiple schools, so that now, in one of the large facilities you pass by on the street, there's usually a different school on each floor, each with their own principals, curricula, etc.
John Jay High School in Park Slope, Brooklyn was one mammoth building that got broken up like that during this period. The building itself needed a ton of work that the district (here they call it the DOE) never got around to. The small schools policy just exacerbated the problem.
When they moved three schools into the building, for example, the DOE didn't provide money for a new announcement system in the building. The different principals couldn't make unique announcements to their new schools, so every school heard every announcement. One of the principals had to shell out $5,000 of her own money to fix it.
Also, the building only had one gym. The schools shared it, finding ways to schedule their different practices and games and gym classes. They actually decided to merge their teams so that all the students in the different schools played on teams together, the John Jay Jayhawks.
That's all pre-history. The story begins more recently, when a "selective high school" called Millenium moved in. NYC's selective high schools require applications for admittance. They're prestigious and elite public schools and Millenium's arrival created a situation for John Jay.
Club Bourgeoisie
Park Slope has changed over the last couple decades. It wasn't always the bourgeois area it is now. But it bourgeoisified, what gets called gentrification usually, and became an expensive area with all the attendant racial dynamics involved. During the course of this process, families with high school kids who had recently moved to the area "wanted more options" in the Park Slope area. The three high schools in the old John Jay building weren't enough for them. That is, these other schools served a diverse working class population, students that were majority "Black and Latin" (that's the language the podcast uses). The new bourgeois wanted something else.
The DOE, like so many apparatuses in racial capitalism, was eager to please them. So DOE officials called up principals in the John Jay building and said "if you agree to have Millenium come in, we'll fix up your building like you've been asking us." The principals grudgingly agreed. Suddenly there were more White and Asian students waiting to go through the metal detectors at the entrance--and no more leaks in the roof. But these new students didn't join the Jayhawks. They had their own fancy teams, like fencing, but also volleyball.
Like Stuart Hall said, race is a modality through which class gets lived and fought through, and these students' all had differentially racialized experiences of volleyball. The Millenium kids were largely White and Asian and they could afford to play something called "club volleyball," where, during the off season, a young person can practice and compete in private leagues outside school. Playing club volleyball costs thousands of dollars. The Millenium kids had more money, could pay for the fees, and thus got more volleyball experience, making them better players than the Black and Latin kids on the Jayhawks.
This situation bothered students to no end and the contradictions got sharp as the pandemic set in, particularly after the George Floyd rebellions. The students had had enough and demanded the teams be integrated. The action of the podcast revolves around this process of integration, specifically in how the process impacted student experiences during games.
Tension
The podcast is sort of bookended between two big volleyball games in this context. The first game is the Jayhawks vs. the Millenium team, before the integration. It's described as super tense, students playing against one another in the same home gym. They're competing against each other even though they're at the same school, they see each other at the entrance in the morning, for lunch, and in the afternoon when school gets out. They're in the same building but also in different worlds.
The students successfully lobby the DOE to combine the volleyball teams. They change from the Jayhawks to the Jaguars, the new team including students from Millenium. The contradictions don't go away at that point, but they become more malleable, workable. The students and coaches hold "circles" where they talk through all the challenges they're facing in the integration process. Integration itself becomes a key part of their goals as a team, not just winning games, but also making sure all these students play together on the same team successfully. But the two goals--winning and integration--grate and grind against each other. Challenges emerge immediately.
The first is the size of the team. Merging two teams means twice the players. All the previous players had tried out to make their respective teams, and none were cut. The second challenge is skill level. The Millenium players are club players. They still have more experience and skills than the Jayhawk students. Those skill differences map to the race/class dynamics.
The meaning of winning
When your goal is not only to win games but also to integrate against the larger social tendencies of racial capitalism, what do you do? If you want to include all the players, you have to give them each playing time. But giving them all playing time means detracting from the dynamics that have to build between players over time. And not all of them have the same skill. If you want to win a game, particularly a tough game, you put in your best players, namely the ones with club experience. You win the game. But if you only put in players that have club experience, this leaves out the players that don't. You lose the integration fight. The team took up and took on these tensions. And by the end of the season, they'd done a reasonable job of both setting the team up to win and including all the players.
The second big game was a citywide championship game, in which the integrated Jayhawks were up against the polished, elite Bronx Science team.
The Jayhawks lost, but the connection between the players was palpable. The season of integration--the circles, the dialogue, the shifts in team protocols--had created a bond between these players across the race/class lines that had divided them. The podcast features interviews with students at the end of this season.
Not every player was happy, some wanted to play more during the season, but they understood the tensions inherent in trying both to win volleyball games and win against racial capitalism. They appreciated one another, felt like they belonged together, rather than separately from one another, and along with this sense of recognition and belonging they actually made it to second place in a competitive conference.
More than the modality
This podcast really got me thinking about race, class, and education. In this summary, I've been switching between the language of racism, integration, segregation, and racial capitalism, but the podcast focuses exclusively on the racism framing and less on the racial capitalism framing. I think this matters, because the bottom line, throughout the episodes, is whether and how the students felt recognized, included, and a sense of belonging. This racial alienation is a potent force, no doubt. But it's not the only one at play and comes from somewhere.
In particular, the difference between club players and non-club players, as well as the process of bourgeoisification of Park Slope, are perhaps just as materially significant to these students' experiences of alienation as their sense of exclusion and misrecognition. The podcast focuses on their relatively successful battle against exclusion and misrecognition, which was inspiring.
Yet I was left thinking that, even if the students felt entirely recognized and included in this process, the material realities of some students' club experience and the bourgeoisification of the neighborhood remain in place. Unless public housing policies stop the latter and mass scholarship programs open up the former by providing full fees for diverse working class volleyball players' club experience, the racial capitalist logic of the situation will continue to impact future teams.
Going back to that Stuart Hall quote, the racial alienation at the center of the podcast is the modality through which the class differences underneath the podcast are lived and fought through. When you only address the modality, and not the class differences, you miss a super important part of the picture. I think a socialist podcast reporting on the situation would sound different, focusing as much on the latter as the former.
Of course, the podcast is great and you should listen to it!