Another way to assess the performance of the education system with respect to racial disparities in achievement is to compare the subsequent performance of black and white students with similar initial scores.
Southern migrants, both black and white, arrived in great numbers in Detroit in the 1940s and shared a number of southern, rural cultural characteristics.
For Claudia, the novel's narrator, Folly is the signifier of the intimate forms of exploitation inherent in the relationship between black and white families; in other words, she realizes that it is the black-white interfamial relationship that is inherently flawed and not the black family itself (as pollcymakers like Moynihan would later argue).
This framework not only must reveal the gendered histories of the whole abolitionist movement (men and women, black and white, feminist and non-feminist), but also must encompass perspective of abolitionists' greatest riva ls for Northern whites' sympathies-the colonizationists--as well as those Northern free blacks who favored emigration while expressing their hostility to white colonization societies.
It becomes evident, for example, that Jones's understanding of his socioeconomic oppression is linked to his frustration at not being able fully to sexually dominate black and white women.
One important reason is that looking at standard indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) -- income, occupation, and education -- does not fully capture the differences, in the aggregate, between black and white economic status.
As the new union was launched, Shaw declared to the group in Tyronza, "As long as we stand together, black and white together in this organization, nothing can tear it down."(2) To fully appreciate the power of that statement, we must understand the legacy of resistance that Ike Shaw carried with him to that schoolhouse in 1934.