Book Review… Author challenges U.S. Education

Jul 26, 2015 Book Review…, Features / Columnists

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Book: The Stigma
Author: Sherwyn Besson
Reviewer: Dr Glenville Ashby

Unwilling to muddy an ongoing legal battle that pits a Long Island School District against a handful of teachers, Sherwyn Besson aptly changes the names of the parties involved. The Stigma is poignant and biting.

Besson comes out swinging in defence of James Calabash, the leading character. Calabash’s case is credible; and his angst, more than palpable. There is a drumbeat; an uninterrupted cadence that captures the poisonous culture that pervades Malville High School.
Malville’s twisted values are better understood through a historical prism. There lurks a sordid and ubiquitous racist past that fought tooth and nail against integration. It is a painful history that mirrors America’s South.
“There was a deliberate effort to keep this information from the community’s youth,” argues Calabash. “It was not taught in the classrooms or presented at school events. As a result, district students lacked the kind of consciousness that spurred the courage to change, improve and to transcend real community challenges,”
Calabash is a breath of fresh air that just cannot coexist with the suffocating stench of Malville. He is detailed, uncompromising, and determined to go the extra mile for his students. His business class prepares them for the real world. Community bankers are invited to address his students.
Calabash is innovative, proactive, and progressive. Coaching the fledging soccer team is also added to his growing list of responsibilities as he faces the imminent demise of his ailing wife. But an ominous confrontation with administration looms, while a disciplinary system teeters on collapse; a school culture promotes undeserving students; and a teaching staff looks the other way for self-serving reasons.
“New teachers fell in line,” Besson writes, “as many were recruited by the administration and that’s where their allegiances lay, they wanted tenure. Teachers nearing retirement didn’t want to endanger their pensions so they kept quiet…one condemnation by a powerful administrator could be lethal to a career.”
Calabash’s patience is stretched thin. It’s messy and unnerving. He confronts the problem, subtle and diplomatic at first, but to no avail. He resorts to his union and the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Both intuitions prove toothless. He then takes his fight to the state. It is here that his efforts to remove the superintendent are met with swift retaliation. The battle lines are drawn. Besson writes, “The backlash continued with slow or ignored quests for maintenance of James’ computer lab….”
He is barred from administrative training opportunities and his evaluation report is below expectations. “Are you the one sent to get me,” Calabash barks at the administrator tasked with observing his teaching and management abilities. He wins the prestigious NAACP Teacher of the Year award, but did not cop an outstanding evaluation at school. And his son, he figures, was academically derailed at another school. Malville’s fingerprints are all over this disturbing case.
Expectedly, “Mr. Bash grew tired of the graduation funerals, sending off class after class of Black, Hispanic, and Latino boys to the slow, debilitating, and certain death composed by hopelessness. Laketown’s Black boys lived the same outcome as most nationally – tops in all indicators of academic failure, like detentions, suspensions, academic performance, tardiness, class cuts, and expulsions. Malville chose to socially promote, ignore, and continue failed ideas at the expense of these boys.”
And the racial overtones of Malville are as loud as they get. “Administrative scheduling was another area where discriminatory treatment was rampant. Black teachers were easy targets,” being “asked to take on the heavily populated study halls, detentions, and heavy traffic areas of the school halls while many of the “special” teachers were excused for duty or given light responsibilities.”
And oh, readers will be taken aback by a valedictorian scandal that oozes racial prejudice. After six years at Malville High School, the hammer falls, as expected, and Calabash is “excessed,” or removed from his full-time position, and offered a bare part-time assignment. Predictably, he resigns.
Later, we learn so much more about what makes Calabash ticks – his Trinidadian heritage, and his socio-political views. Yes, Calabash recovers professionally, but Malville is still on his front burner. After a lively discourse with his Irish colleague, we get into the mind of Calabash. (He) thought the plights of blacks were more tragic than the Irish’s; they didn’t come as slaves, they had white skin; they weren’t subject to lynchings, Jim Crow, and continued racial animus.
Calabash is certain that ghosts from the past still haunt today’s institutions.
Indeed, The Stigma is more than a withering account of a school weighed down by ineptitude, cronyism, and racism. It speaks to the conscience of a nation, still trapped by the vestiges of a racist past. It warns of a generation ill equipped to compete in a global society; of young, malleable minds that are underserved, blighted by a system obsessed with image and willing to doctor scores to bolster a lie. It speaks to a people doomed to the bottom of the social strata; to an insensitive, heinous system geared to maintaining the status quo.
Calabash impugns a pervasive climate of cultural insensitivity. How could an overwhelming white staff tender to the needs of minority students who numbered in the majority? How could they emphasize and identify with the existential needs of their students?
The Stigma exposes the myth that a level playing field exists in the U.S. That we can pull ourselves up by the bootstrap is illusory, especially when the deck is stacked against us. As Calabash’s day in court nears, anxiety and tension run high. A victory may change the way school districts conduct business. Calabash is ready to widen the battlefield. Every school district in the U.S. that bears a Malville seal is in his crosshairs. He is relentless, confident that he has a definitive mandate to ably respond to the ‘clamour’ of minority students.
We are all witnesses to a new frontier in the never ending struggle for civil rights. We just cannot afford to lose our children to an education system heaving with injustice. The stakes are just too high.

Feedback: glenvilleashby@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter@glenvilleashby
The Stigma by Sherwyn Besson
Publisher: Author House
ISBN: 978-1-4969-6492-2
Available: Amazon.com
Rating: Recommended

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