His commentary would have more force had he added that government-instituted school desegregation rests on the notion of white supremacy and black inferiority: i.e., that black children magically cannot succeed unless they are around white children). Of course, this notion ignores the number of talented black folks who have come out of all-black educational settings.
I don't think that's fair, Shay. After all, the issue was that blacks had to be schlepped across to town to a black school and that, all things being equal, they were worse off for having to endure that. Even beyond this, the concept of the state acting to separate races in the distribution of public institutions -- no matter how equal the separating may be -- is certainly quite noxious. As you point out, the irony that this is exactly what the "Civil Rights Community" insists on today is utterly lost on that group.
Shay, I'm with Ron here. I share your goals, but I'm not sure about one of your precepts. While there may be some people who believe "black children magically cannot succeed unless they are around white children", the common justification I always heard for desegregation was two-fold, both rooted in white racism, alleged or actual:
1. Black kids only stand a fair chance if they have equal schools; and racist whites won't support equal schools, unless those are the same schools their children go to.
2. White adults are irredeemably racist; but if we force their kids to integrate with black kids, the kids will grow up without the racism because they'll have experience with other races.
Having been born in 1963, I can't really say whether those claims were true in 1954, but I've read plenty of evidence for that.
Today, claim 2 at least is demonstrably false; for if it's true, it results in a logical contradiction. If white adults today are irredeemably racist, then the integrated schools they (and their grandparents!) went to failed to do a thing to wipe out racism. Either the remedy worked then, so we don't need it now; or the remedy failed then, and it will fail now.
I agree that the state should not be in the business of separating races in public institutions. My issue is with the argument that private choice should be socially engineered, and the presumption that an all-black setting automatically means an inferior setting.
So what if racist whites don't want to go to school with black children? This is hardly a new phenomenon. I'm just tired of black folks chasing white folks to their neighborhoods and suburbs, instead of building up what we have. The goal of black parents should be to make schools in black areas so good that other folks are chasing us. And that can happen (and has happened in certain areas, in certain times) when black parents get extremely hard-nosed about education. None of this half-assed focus that I now see in too many folks.
Booker T. Washington (born a slave), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., my maternal great-great-grandfather (the son of former slaves, and the first person in my family to go to college...a historically black college at that), my maternal great-great granduncles (who attended a historically black medical school and later provided medical care to rural black Arkansas...in the late 1800s), and probably Thomas Sowell himself did just fine in all-black educational settings. It is not the race of the setting, but the quality of the setting in question that should be the focus here.
Can't disagree with you there, Shay. Hokie, you're right, too, and that's an argument against busing for integration. Cliques is almost a neutral outcome compared to the other probabilities.
It is not the race of the setting, but the quality of the setting in question that should be the focus here.
Agreed. Desegregation is just the state's hamhanded and often ineffective way to achieve equality in that quality. I'm not defending the practice, just disagreeing about the motivation for it: I think it's all about forcing white folks to support equal educational opportunity (because if the court doesn't step in, we would never do the right thing on our own, of course).
Unfortunately, black parents are working strongly against their own interests, if vouchers are your solution -- and I think they are, and polls I've seen of black voters say that they largely agree. Yet black voters overwhelmingly vote for a party which seems too beholden to the teachers' unions to ever support vouchers wholeheartedly.
I have to agree with Shay more than the others in the comments here. My public school experience in PG County, Maryland (suburbs of DC) was exactly as she described it. Instead of black and white children going to the neighborhood schools, both black AND white children were bused long distances to achieve some racial balance. This was morphed into the Magnet School program, where they took some majority black school, instituted a special program for science, math, art, music, English Lit, whichever, and again bused in kids from around the county.
I'll grant that this probably did not happen everywhere, as PG Co. did have the largest busing program in the world. But it did happen.
I'd say most of my experience in school was mixed race, and what tended to happen was that kids of the same race tended to stick together. I even saw this at the two community colleges I attended in the 1990s (I only ever took a few classes but that's what I witnessed while there).
I'm not sure that's racism so much as instinct.
But there were always those in the groups who went out of their way to at least occasionally hang with and get to know those of other races.
The point being, separateness is not bad in and of itself. It depends on the reason for it, and whether it's enforced or voluntary, whether it's based on overt hostility or simple gregariousness.
1. Black kids only stand a fair chance if they have equal schools; and racist whites won't support equal schools, unless those are the same schools their children go to.
2. White adults are irredeemably racist; but if we force their kids to integrate with black kids, the kids will grow up without the racism because they'll have experience with other races.
Having been born in 1963, I can't really say whether those claims were true in 1954, but I've read plenty of evidence for that.
Today, claim 2 at least is demonstrably false; for if it's true, it results in a logical contradiction. If white adults today are irredeemably racist, then the integrated schools they (and their grandparents!) went to failed to do a thing to wipe out racism. Either the remedy worked then, so we don't need it now; or the remedy failed then, and it will fail now.
So what if racist whites don't want to go to school with black children? This is hardly a new phenomenon. I'm just tired of black folks chasing white folks to their neighborhoods and suburbs, instead of building up what we have. The goal of black parents should be to make schools in black areas so good that other folks are chasing us. And that can happen (and has happened in certain areas, in certain times) when black parents get extremely hard-nosed about education. None of this half-assed focus that I now see in too many folks.
Booker T. Washington (born a slave), Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., my maternal great-great-grandfather (the son of former slaves, and the first person in my family to go to college...a historically black college at that), my maternal great-great granduncles (who attended a historically black medical school and later provided medical care to rural black Arkansas...in the late 1800s), and probably Thomas Sowell himself did just fine in all-black educational settings. It is not the race of the setting, but the quality of the setting in question that should be the focus here.
Agreed. Desegregation is just the state's hamhanded and often ineffective way to achieve equality in that quality. I'm not defending the practice, just disagreeing about the motivation for it: I think it's all about forcing white folks to support equal educational opportunity (because if the court doesn't step in, we would never do the right thing on our own, of course).
Unfortunately, black parents are working strongly against their own interests, if vouchers are your solution -- and I think they are, and polls I've seen of black voters say that they largely agree. Yet black voters overwhelmingly vote for a party which seems too beholden to the teachers' unions to ever support vouchers wholeheartedly.
I'll grant that this probably did not happen everywhere, as PG Co. did have the largest busing program in the world. But it did happen.
I'm not sure that's racism so much as instinct.
But there were always those in the groups who went out of their way to at least occasionally hang with and get to know those of other races.
The point being, separateness is not bad in and of itself. It depends on the reason for it, and whether it's enforced or voluntary, whether it's based on overt hostility or simple gregariousness.