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Principal is reticent. 'He led me to the brink,' he said, recounting his response to such a query, 'but I wouldn't say it. I told him we were full up with thirty or forty in each classroom and we weren't prepared to take anyone until we got an increase of staff. Mind you, he must have taken one look at the boy and seen there was less milk than coffee and known perfectly well that wasn't my reason, but he couldn't say so.' (1970, 4445) |
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Appeals to the board about the committee's decisions, however, were often successful. Thus, there was a delicate invisible negotiation between parents and school principals-school committees. If no real reason was given for rejection, there would have been no grounds for appeal to the Board. The principals were charged with keeping up appearances as a white school, or they would risk far more serious sanctions from the Population Board, as well as complaints from white parents. As one says, "I can accept that child . . . but what do I do when I have a school function and the rest of the family comes along?" (1970, 47). Presumably, he speaks here to the racism of the local white families. In addition, "For the Principal, however, the child represents a sinister threat to the White status of his school, to his ability to attract teachers and pupils of sufficient number and satisfactory quality, and, ultimately, to his own personal prestige" (1970, 4849). Multiple convergent systems are operating here. One school psychologist held the belief that the school ratings were lowered by coloured children as they performed more poorly on IQ tests. Such was the worry about this sort of status difficulty that principals often rejected those darker skinned children who carried formal white identification cards. The schools also needed to keep their numbers up, however, and some more liberal principals sometimes wanted to help the applicants. Overall, this juggling represents another example, as seen with the ICD, of distributing the residual categories, the "others." For those who do not quite fit the given categories, distribute them around the buffer schools, rather than having them all attend school at one place and thus threaten the white status of the school. |
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As mentioned, some officials willingly collaborated in the passing process. "It takes two (or more) to complete the process of passing for White" (Watson 1970, 55). Watson writes of a zone of ambiguity in face-to-face decisions. "Is it incumbent upon me, in the circumstances, to decide whether or not this person is White? If I decide that he is White, will others go along with my estimation? And what's in it for me?" (Watson 1970, 55-56). If the zone of ambiguity remains intact, often the amount of trouble incurred by refusing someone the claimed white status is too much. At other times, officials find work-arounds |
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