It's 8:00 AM and I am doing yoga upstairs. Just as I am moving into the balance poses, there is a knock, and my four-year-old daughter, Celeste, says, "Mommy? There's someone at the door."

We live in a mostly white world within an integrated neighborhood. One day, Celeste and I were playing in her friend Milo's yard. Celeste and Milo wanted to go for a walk around the block, so we started down the street. Milo's father, Drake, accompanied us down the block a while, and then turned for home.

"I'm going to go home now, Milo," he said. "Eric is working in the house, and I know he would be uncomfortable if I left him there alone for too long." He winked broadly at us. While I was used to Drake's basic, sexist assumption that I'd take up his slack in childcare without his having to ask, the coded racial politics of that wink astonished me. It isn't that I don't share some of his ambivalence about Eric. Maybe I was shocked by his confidence, by his sharing that ambivalence in front of our kids.

The white adults in this neighborhood rarely talk about race explicitly. There are certain assumptions made, so that we can talk about race without mentioning anything about people or color. People leave the neighborhood because they are "just tired of putting up with it", despite the sweeping avenues, the friendships, and the grand but inexpensive homes. "It" stands in for the property crimes associated with life in the city, whether we have experienced them or just fear them, and the substandard, majority Black schools. "It" is also a broader, related feeling of somehow being under siege. Even though white families generally move here with more financial resources than our African-American neighbors have, even though we live in a culture that is strongly white supremacist, there is a feeling of being a minority in the Old West End.

Some white neighbors voiced this feeling of being under siege during a campaign to build a playground at the local elementary school. One woman, a mother of two, was afraid that the playground would become a place for children and adolescents to hang out. She testified about the noise she endured already as a result of living across the street from the school. Later, she organized opposition to the playground on the grounds that it would create crime in the area, and subsequently moved to an exclusively white neighborhood when it was built. As it happened, she moved across the street from good friends of ours. Having spent a lot of time in our friends' front yard with packs of yelling children, I can say with confidence that her new neighborhood is, in fact, much noisier than the one she left. What she was really talking about, of course, was her feelings about Black people. But I don't remember her ever broaching the topic during the long campaign over whether to build that playground.

Celeste didn't accompany me to those meetings. But she has grown up around adults, who talk about race all the time without mentioning it. And, like all kids, she is a careful student of what adults say, even when we are not saying it.

When kids learn about gender, they learn the intricate system of differences that gives anatomy meaning in our culture. But, even though there are people in our lives that I consider sexist, even fairly misogynistic, Celeste she is consistently exposed to both men and women, and consistently told that many of these individuals are valuable, loveable, and important.

Her education about race has been different. We have a few friends of color in Toledo, a couple more who live far away and visit. I'm talking about six or seven people, total. And while she is definitely told that those friends are valuable, loveable, and important, they are few and far between. Almost all of the adults we know would say, if asked, something like what I said the day she told me she did not like brown people: "race doesn't matter." And yet, in our daily choices, race matters very much.

I began to think that Celeste's talking about "brown people" was part of her articulating, in a characteristically uncensored four-year-old way, a widespread, white common sense about race that she was in the process of learning. Her backseat racism was the tip of an iceberg that, I was confident, she would learn to bury under polite speech. But I was afraid that she would not unlearn the feelings of fear and dislike for people of color. If Celeste was in the process of imbibing a racism that surrounded her, anchored by strong historical and local roots, how could she unlearn it.

As Celeste was in her second year at the Montessori school in Toledo, Ben and I accepted job offers in Milwaukee, a city with a racial and economic profile in many ways similar to Toledo. Indices of segregation and urban poverty are high in both cities; the public schools are weighted down with aging buildings and low teacher- student ratios, burdened by high-stakes testing and starved by continual budget cuts. Close to the university where we would teach, our new neighborhood was far less diverse than Toledo's Old West End. But the East Side of Milwaukee comes with an integrated, majority-Black public primary school that we could walk Celeste to every morning.

I had to enroll Celeste in school in Milwaukee from Toledo, as I was pregnant the winter before we moved. As I researched our options from afar, it became clear to me that the school, once a neighborhood school and now a city-wide magnet, was an unusual place. Its description in the public school handbook emphasized a commitment to the arts and social justice. I talked to white and Black parents who spoke of their kids' good experiences there. They spoke of links to the university, about committed teachers, and a visionary principal.

I was delighted that Celeste could attend an integrated public school blocks from our house and workplace. But I was also terrified of it. How would she fare in an urban school where rules are, of necessity, emphasized; where students line up to go to class or walk through the hall? What would it be like for her to be in the minority? My basic assumption is that the task of grade school is to make kids like school: what if her new school prepared her to hate and fear it?

The first time we saw the Hartford University School was in the early spring of that year, new baby Sylvie in tow. Celeste was already enrolled there, and we were there to meet the principal and tour the place.

The school hunkers on a corner block in the midst of the university campus. It's a big, dark, brick building, left over from a time when elementary schools looked like the factories that most kids left them to work in. The school building is surrounded by asphalt playgrounds and chain-link fences. It looked so unlike the Montessori school, which was low and new, with flowers planted by each classroom growing outside it.

We pulled into the school parking lot, which shares the asphalt with basketball hoops and a small playground. A few middle school kids were shooting hoops in the cold. "Mommy," said Celeste urgently from the back seat. "This can't be my school! Everyone is brown."

"Well, sweetie. Let's go in and see it, OK?" I tried to sound reassuring, but my throat felt tight.

We went up the stairs and met the principal, Cynthia Ellwood, a dynamic and attractive white woman, in her sunny office. Hartford smells like a school: like cleaning fluid and missing home and tons of kids laughing, all at the same time. We toured the school, with Cynthia greeting each student by name. Celeste liked all the art in the hallway; and, especially, the water fountains.

But I wondered. In contrast to her old school, the new school was predominantly Black, with a few white, Asian, and Latino students sprinkled in each classroom. That day, I counted at most two kids per class that were not African-American. Did those other kids feel besieged? Were they picked on? How would Celeste do in a public school where kids march through the hallways in line to the cafeteria, instead of sitting at small tables in their classroom?

I talked to Cynthia who, as principal, who was used to calming the fears of anxious parents. These were unusual conversations among white people, in that we addressed race and my fears about it directly. "She's your child," she said. "You should do what your intuition tells you is best for her. Of course, as another parent I was touring with last week said, your intuition may be derailed by your underlying assumptions about race."

And there it is. There are lots of things I know intellectually about race and justice; there is my strong desire to have Celeste grow up in an integrated community. Then there is the work of parenting, which I do almost entirely by feel. I felt at that moment a clutching fear for her that, at the same time, I didn't trust. I decided to assume that Cynthia was right, that my intuition in this situation was derailed by something else: my own, deeply held, racism. And that racism was what Celeste had been studying, all this time.

Not that there aren't serious issues that come with an urban public school. In the Milwaukee Public School system, the student-teacher ratio is officially 30:1; in practice, it is often closer to 40:1. At Hartford, along with some of the other grade schools in MPS, there is special funding to keep this ratio at 30:2 before 4th grade. Six blocks north of us, the suburban schools of Shorewood sport ratios closer to 20:1.

These inequalities between MPS and suburban schools, of course, have everything to do with a seemingly intractable cycle. Public schools are funded by property taxes. Central cities have lower tax bases, and fewer resources. As a result, many people who could support city schools with their tax dollars and their investment in the system flee to the suburbs. In our neighborhood, many people go to extraordinary lengths to keep their kids out of public school, opting for charter or private schools, driving miles away. Few of the people we met in the park or out strolling the summer before Celeste started at Hartford sent their children there, though many adults remembered having gone to it years before, "when it was the neighborhood school." Hartford is still in the neighborhood, but it is widely perceived as no longer a school appropriate for middle class, white, East Side kids.

I was very torn about this decision. I liked Cynthia immediately, and I believe in what she is doing at Hartford. But I also do not believe in having my kids act out my intellectual politics. I don't want Celeste to suffer because of the social inequalities that surround us. I don't want her to be the only white kid in a sea of non-white faces; I don't want her to feel alone and scared in a towering institution.

A lot of conversations and some sleepless nights on my part later, Ben and I decided to stick with the decision to send Celeste to Hartford. I have watched carefully to see how she is making the transition from Toledo in general, and to school in particular. And I can only describe her as thriving there.

She seemed initially happy day to day. By late fall, the astounding leaps of learning that I had observed the previous year at the Montessori, had picked back up, and she was chatting merrily about letters, starting to sound out street signs. At her fifth birthday, in October, she invited her new friends from school to a party at our house. Almost all of them were white. But by early winter, she was requesting play dates with kids outside of this circle, and some of these friendships were with Black kids.

Right before Christmas break, there was an incident at school that, initially, confirmed some of my worst fears. I got a call at my office in the late morning that Celeste was crying uncontrollably, and I should come pick her up. When I got there, the teacher's aid told me that someone had teased her at lunch and then she couldn't stop crying. Celeste was very upset and complaining of a stomach ache, so I took her home.

As far as Ms Wilson, the teacher's aid, could piece it together, Celeste had been sitting in a different place than usual, away from her friends. A little boy named Rodney had teased her, and then she had started crying uncontrollably.

In the week that remained of school, Celeste mostly wanted to stay home with Sylvie and Ben and me. She would go to school only if we promised to pick her up before lunch. Lunchtime is when the kindergarten students eat with the first graders, and the teachers go on break. This translates to a lot of noise, and the absence of adults to go to for reassurance.

After Christmas, I decided to accompany Celeste to lunch, to help her get used to it again. I don't think my presence helped her very much. It made her much weepier, and she did not want me to leave when lunch was over. What eventually helped her was the patience of her teacher, who skipped her own lunch a few times to sit with the class, and the constancy of her friends, who surrounded her. Going to lunch at Hartford did help me, though. I realized that I had somehow come to imagine Rodney as a dangerous kid, a five-year-old, possibly violent, gang-banger. At lunchtime the day I went, he was the other kid besides Celeste crying for his mom, who is often in the classroom to pick him up early. Quite a contrast with what I had, unconsciously, begun to imagine Celeste confronting at school!

I have not heard Celeste talk about the issue of color as a negative thing about Hartford since our first tour. I think because it became for her, on that day, her school. She can talk freely about the skin color of different kids on the playground, something few white people I know can do. She now addresses all around our neighborhood, who ask her constantly in a somewhat surprised tone how she likes Hartford. "It's the school for me!," she says emphatically. We ask her so much that I sometimes wonder if she will learn to assume that something must be wrong. Hopefully, she will instead learn to assign the repeated questions to the category of ridiculous things that adults do.

Sometimes, though, when we walk north to play in the new and ample playgrounds of the suburban grade school in Shorewood, I wonder if I am taking something away from Celeste. I look at that school. The building is older, like Hartford, but it has been rehab-ed and landscaped. Flowers and hedges intersperse four large play areas with state-of-the-art equipment. It's a wonderful place to spend a spring afternoon.

And I feel like I am buffeted between two ideas of the public. On the one hand, there is my older idea, rooted in a social vision of equality that holds out to Celeste and Sylvie the possibility of living in a world with lots of different people, and learning from all of them. In this idea of the public, we are all in it together- rich people, poor people, upper middle class; Black, white, Latino, Asian, American Indian. Our physical plant, like the one at Hartford, is overused and antiquated, but we clash and differ and figure it out together. Our children are loved and protected, and they learn from one and other, much as Celeste has learned from her friends to deal with the noise and chaos of public school lunchtime. In this public, our strength is diversity, and the creativity and good will that come with it.

My other idea is, I think, a historically newer one. It emanates from twenty-five years of savage war against the older idea of collectivity and diversity. During these twenty-five years, funding for public education has been repeatedly, cruelly, cut. Many schools in the Milwaukee Public School system do not have the arts and music curriculum that Hartford does. Cynthia writes grants to get private funding for these.

Fleeing the battered and besieged public, many people have invented a different idea of the public. The most extreme example of what I would call the sheltering public might be gated communities, which have public spaces within them that are carefully maintained for only a select few. Like the Shorewood school building, this public is carefully trimmed and pruned; children are sheltered and taken care of. In many ways, in this second idea of the public, children need to be sheltered from the rundown diversity of the other public. This sheltering public nurtures and protects children with small class sizes, extra-curricular activities, pedagogies that inspire twenty kids rather than disciplining forty of them. Who wouldn't want their child cosseted in such an environment?
Thing is, this cozy and caring public is also remote. It can only be called public by dint of unequal tax dollars, residential segregation, and increasingly inequality. While the schools of Shorewood are public schools, such plush environments are not open to everyone.

And I want both experiences of the public for my kids -- the nurturing public and the diverse one. Thing is, they are pretty much mutually exclusive at this point. You live in the city, you get the rundown public schools; you move to the suburbs and suddenly your grade school has marigolds growing outside it. An older idea of the public might have offered small class sizes and nurturing pedagogies to every child -- a real No Child Left Behind policy -- but ours discriminates. And that injustice informs every decision we make about educating our children.

I read over this essay and see that it is anchored by the central figures of Eric and Hartford University School. So in trying to figure out how Celeste and other kids like her learn about race, I have spent a lot of time talking about a Black man who is one or two steps away from being homeless, and an urban public school that flourishes despite being, always, one or two steps away from the grave consequences of budget shortfalls. These two figures signal the difficult historical moment that our children pass through on their ways to being educated about the world and its inequalities.

mmo : november 2005

Rachel Ida Buff writes, teaches history and Ethnic Studies, and lives with her partner, two daughters and four cats in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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