I find this post confusing. Brown does not say that every student has a right to attend her or his neighborhood school. Can you explain your post?
What has led you to believe this?
I saw many benefits for both races. Just try to remember how the races related to each other in the 1950’s and compare that with the way things are now. Much of that change I can credit to integration and getting to know each other as regular human beings instead of stereotypes.
And certainly African-American children benefited by getting new and up-to-date textbooks instead of the cast-offs from the white kids’ schools. Everything had been second hand. The libraries were better equipped. The rooms were more likely to be air-conditioned. The list just goes on and on.
No one complained when the African-American kids in my hometown were bused seen miles to a black school when a perfectly good high school was in our town.
It still counts.
We continue to bus students away from their neighborhood schools. Do you have a cite to indicate that this change you describe is in the works? It may well be, but I’ve seen little sign of it. What judicial rulings are you referring to specifically?
Blacks weren’t the only ones forced to go to seperate schools in the United States. Education programs in the US have also specifically and explicitly disenfranchised Hispanics and East Asians.
So your contention is, we need to give a group of kids, born after the year 1990 or so special treatment because in 1950 people in the “same group” were de jure segregated?
When do we draw the line? When do we start to say “being race blind is ideal” and move away from “reverse retribution?”
DSYoung has good points. I went to High School with a kid with a Catholic kid from Nigeria. He was definitely “black”, never set foot in the United States til he was fifteen, and not a single one of his parents, grandparents, great-grandparents or great-great grandparents was ever discriminated against or put into segregated schools in the United States, they never even set foot in the United States. Should he be counted as “black” for quota systems like this, or not? His skin may be dark brown, but it’d be ludicrous to associate him with people whose Ancestors were slaves. His cultural history is totally different.
It’s also worth noting that you’re wrong about Hispanics/Asians, they were also discriminated against significantly in education in the United States. However, they don’t get near as much attention because they were never enslaved, and until very recently they were not a huge portion of America. Asians were statutorily prohibited from even immigrating to the United States for decades, which is why the Asian American population is relatively small. Those from Asia who did manage to come over were not treated well.
Here is an article discussing some of the problems with busing. The judicial cases I’m talking about that have shown to me the tide is turning against “forced integration” “quota systems” “affirmative action” and et al. are cases like the one concerning the University of Michigan, in which quota systems were prohibited, as well as widespread movements in many states to establish race-blind admissions processes. Both California and Texas have taken State-level action to more or less dismantle the old affirmative action system, in California the reforms were championed by a black leader.
Most school districts no longer bus, busing had many practical problems. I don’t discount it’s possible wherever you live the practice continues. However, most “court supervised” busing initiatives are no longer in effect, even if local officials continue the practice. Magnet schools and more race-conscious decision making when it comes to placing new schools was viewed as the “replacement” to busing.
It should be noted that members of a school board are elected, if public sentiment was against “forced integration” why have constituencies all over the United States consistently voted for board members who espouse this view? When parents were upset about intelligent design being taught in public schools, the voters got rid of those members who who supported the measure.
I am not going to join in some kind of pity pissing contest to discern which minority has been treated the worse in the United States. We’d could go on and on forever.
I’d also like to see a cite on your contention that Hispanics and Asians were discriminated (to same degree as blacks) by school districts before Brown. There were “black only” and “white only” schools. Was there another poorly funded “Asian only” or “Hispanic only” schools? I rarely call people to cite I’ve never heard of such a thing.
We should be blind to race when there is equality in America. Clearly, however, the majority in this country believe that minorities have achieved equality and that the “free ride” is over. Fair enough. The more the majority deprives blacks access to schooling, whether that be abolishing diversity programs or getting rid of Affirmative Action, the more realistic the possibility that the penultimate chapter of the The Bell Curve will occur.
And what is “reverse retribution”? Do you think blacks support diversity and affirmative action programs because they want to “get back” at white people?
Do you have data that shows constituencies all over the US “consistently voted” for this type of stuff?
Seems to me that every time this is actually put to the voters, they turn it down. Witness the situation in CA (the largest and, arguably, most diverse state in the country). Prop 209 passed in CA with 54% of the vote, and a similar initiative passed in Michigan recently. Further, if you look at public opinion polls, they consistently show a considerable majority favor merit-only based decisions in public schools.
Check the 1927 Supreme Court case Gong Lum v Rice, which was a case where the courts ruled that a Chinese-American girl, Martha Lum, living in Mississippi, was “colored” under Mississippi law, and agreed with the Mississippi Supreme court that:
Also, check the amendment to the California Poliical Code 1662, enacted 1885, saying:
As for Hispanics, check out the 9th Circuit “Mendez v Westminster”, decided in 1947, which ruled that California’s policy segregating Hispanics in schools was unconstitutional.
It should also be noted that the SCOTUS has consistently ruled against numerical quotas in Affirmative Action cases, going back at least to Bakke in 1978. There is no getting around the fact that this school board uses numerical quotas, no matter what they call it.
As I was composing my list regarding the United States discrimination against blacks in education, I decidedly stop to ask you a question: Do you have anymore or is this it? If I don’t hear a response in the next few hours, I’ll post my list anyway.
Well, Lum v. Rice is all I have off the top of my head right now. I could actually do research on it and get back to you. Part of the thing is, the laws you’re going to find regarding discrimination against blacks in education, as well as in other things, for the most part, applied to Asians, for instance, too. So, for instance, my state, Virginia, passed the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which defined “white” like this:
So people in other groups, to wit: “Negro, Mongolian, American Indian, Asiatic Indian, Malay, or any mixture thereof, or any other non-Caucasic strains,” were all considered colored under the law.
And you’re going to find that in a lot of state statutes dealing with segregation. There’s no doubt that segregation affected blacks most, but that’s because blacks were the largest minority group in the US. Other minorities, though, also suffered by being legally lumped together with blacks under the law.
Of course whites don’t like affirmative action, never have and never will until 2150 when they become the minority. I am talking about diversity programs in the public school system. If the tide were against diversity programs in school districts, why have constituents in those districts voted for members who upheld these programs?
There could be all kinds of reasons-- not everyone is a single-issue voter. The only way you can really get a sense of how people feel about one particular issue is when that issue is a ballot initiative. And whenever race preferences are put up for a vote, they inevitably lose.
But you still have not shown that people are consistently voting for these programs all over the place. And you are erroneously equated “diversity” with skin color. People generally think “diversity” is a good thing, but they don’t like using skin color as a proxy for that attribute.
There seems to be some contention that blacks have no special history with the education programs in America. I have, quite unsuccessfully, attempted to show that blacks are treated as a special minority under the program in litigation because these districts have had a sordid past in discriminating against blacks. No one here agrees. Instead, posters have argued that (a) hispanics and asians were discriminated just as much as blacks (the plan in litigation also caters to these minorities as well in addition to blacks which should attest to these school boards are cognizant of past discrimination against Asians and Hispanics) and (b) that integration programs aren’t necessary in 2007 because state-sponsored segregation occured just fifty years ago.
Under this logic, we should start taxing Native American tribes and relaxing eminent domain protections. Right? The United States has already massacred so many Native Americans that most of them reside in protected sanctuaries surrounded by trees and casinos.
Posters have claimed that the public tide is against forced integration in our public school system. Where is the evidence for this? School boards aren’t immune to the democratic process, indeed all of the members are elected, and the plan under question has been upheld by both the District Court and the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Perhaps I am a maverick, but I submit that many of the posters here are short-sighted. Many continue examine these policies without looking at the history. Posters here seem to think that fifty years of integration after hundreds of years of slavery and over a hundred of years of educational disfranchisement is enough to attain equality in America. You can’t wave a wand and erase hundreds of years of history and a century of educational disenfrachisement, and proclaim, “Go forth and be equal!” How absurd.
So yes, I will post my compiled list discrimination against blacks in educational systems in America . It is clear to me that many posters have forgotten that racial relations in this country extend a bit further than 2005.
I don’t think anyone is saying that Hispanics and Asians were discriminated against “just as much as blacks”. I know I’m certainly not. There’s no doubt that the segregation laws had as their intent black-white segregation, and other races just got “caught up in the net”, by the principle of white superiority. But this is due in large part, I think, to the fact that blacks are, and were for the history of segregation, the largest and most visible minority group (as well as one that had occupied a specific underclass).
I think what people have pointed out to you is that, however the courts rule, at the most, they’ll reverse Grutter. They won’t, like the title of this thread claims, reverseBbrown.
Emphasis added. People have a problem with forced integration when there is no evidence of institutional segregation. That’s the main problem. It’s contrary to what most people think is reasonable action by the government, and it doesn’t appear to do any good either-- unless Blacks and Whites actually live in the same neighborhoods, the kids just self segregate on the school yard and in the cafeteria. We’ve seen this over and over again.
There’s never going to be equality in America. Your arguments however, are specifically advocating inequality, preferential and special treatment based on race and et cetera. In sum, it’s people like you that are promoting greater inequality.
The tide is definitely moving against you. I’m not sure how you can deny that when affirmative action at the college level has been significantly rolled back, every indication is, it’s a dying trend, not one that is going to be applied further.
There’s a very strong chance the SCOTUS is going to rule this particular public school initiative doesn’t pass muster, especially since it uses a clear quota system.
