Blaming The Victim?

What follows will be criticized (if, that is, it is read by critics) for “blaming the victim.” The critics may have a point, in the sense that calling someone a Jew can be anti-semitic. Of course, it can also be merely descriptive. In fact, to continue peeling this onion, one can also say that criticizing an argument for blaming the victim itself blames the victim, because it assumes he is a victim and not an agent.

These musings are prompted by an editorial in today’s Boston Globe, pointed out to me by Geitner Simmons, that claims “Boston is losing the desegregation battle.”

Boston, for instance, educates 44 percent of all the black public school students in the region but only 2 percent of whites.

Many schools are racially stacked. More than a quarter of black students attend schools where the black enrollment exceeds 90 percent. And — amazingly — seven in 10 white students attend schools where 90 percent of their peers are white….

Another troubling issue is poverty — 97 percent of intensely segregated minority schools have a majority of students eligible for free or reduced lunch, while in the intensely segregated white schools, only 1 percent are similarly poor.

These findings are contained in yet another study by Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard, who never fails to find segregation on the rise.

Perhaps the central, enduring question unanswered by Brown is whether the fact of racial separation — as opposed to segregation produced by law or policy — is a problem to which either law or a moral public policy demands a solution. This is indeed a good question, one that demands analysis by our best lawyers, scholars, and pundits, and it is probably just as well that it is not addressed in the BG’s editorial.

The editorial does make a common argument, however, that deserves comment:

Poorer, high-minority schools lose out. Their students are less likely to finish high school and do worse on the MCAS. According to the Harvard study, 96 percent of students in low-poverty, low-minority schools passed the English portion of the 10th-grade MCAS tests. Only 61 percent pass in high-poverty, high-minority schools.

The good news is that Boston’s metropolitan area has the raw material to increase integration. One Boston solution is Metco, a program that sends minority students to suburban schools, increasing diversity for white students and opening up academic opportunities for minorities. But Metco is limited by its small size and funding. It can and should be expanded. But ultimately it’s a one-way solution that doesn’t help city schools.

Boston should also beef up fair housing practices and work with the real estate industry to show clients an array of neighborhoods.

The assumption here is that the problem is with the schools. I am not a school expert, but I doubt that this is true. That is, if the school populations were somehow reversed, with the poor, black students attending the currently “intensely segregated” white suburban schools and vice versa, I suspect the test results would be reversed as well. The editorial does not say whether the Orfield study says how the “diverse” Cambridge and Lynn schools score on the state tests. My hunch would be that if you looked closely at the results you’d find that the white students probably performed in a manner similar to the students in the “intensely segregated” suburban schools, and the black students, if they come from the inner city, probably perform like the other inner city blacks. This result would probably be modified by the degree to which the black students are the sons and daughters of Harvard faculty.

The temptation to which contemporary liberals continually succumb is to assume that the demon to be excised is current, ongoing discrimination. One does not have to believe that there is no current discrimination in order to believe that even draconian fair housing laws, vigorously enforced, would have little effect on what this editorial laments.

To believe otherwise is to continue looking for what the civil rights movement lost where the light is good rather than where it lost it.

UPDATE [4/22]

Dave Huber has much more to say on this and a similar editorial in Wilmington.

Say What? (7)

  1. Stephen April 21, 2004 at 3:38 pm | | Reply

    Boston is not losing its desegregation battle. It is losing its battle against black gang violence. Why not place the blame where it really belongs? Non-blacks did not, and are not fleeing the inner cities out of racial prejudice. They fled and are fleeing black gang violence. This is the unspeakable truth. The refusal to speak this truth leads me to believe that white liberals don’t really want to resolve this problem.

    When will white liberals demand the end of black gang domination of inner cities in the same way that they demanded an end to Klan violence? The reason they will not do this is simple: they’re afraid of blacks.

    People have a right to live among their own kind. I don’t choose that way of life, but others do. People also have the right to live free of gang violence.

    The same white liberals consistently refuse to endorse stringent enforcment of the law in black communities.

    Nobody is really interested in resolving this problem. It’s all farcical moral grandstanding. The only real purpose of this sick game is to enable white liberals to call others bigots. And those same white liberals won’t go near the sort of black community engulfed in gang violence.

  2. joel April 21, 2004 at 9:11 pm | | Reply

    I remember what killed the Boston city schools.

    Forced racial integration.

    Some judge took over the school system, integrated the schools by fiat (and by forced busing), and when he relinquished control a decade or more later, the school system in Boston was mainly black. When interviewed, he was proud of what he had done.

    That’s the truth.

    The whites weren’t afraid of black gangs. In fact, the black gang violence thing hadn’t really revved up. It was just black violence. Black schools were bad schools because the students were bad. Still are. They just understood the reality of black schools, and left. This happens almost everytime a school gets about 20%-30% black. The whites just leave.

    It’s called parental choice. Despite the Supreme Court’s view that white children are harmed by being in an all white school [How detached from reality can these people be?], most white parents don’t want their children in a school with many blacks.

    What is puzzling is that blacks still want to go to school with whites. Why don’t blacks just do their own thing? Educate their children and instill values? It isn’t hard. Everybody else does it.

    Ain’t freedom a nuisance?

  3. Laura April 21, 2004 at 11:00 pm | | Reply

    I’ll agree about forced bussing destroying the school systems, and changing up a lot of other things too. My spouse and I were speculating today whether our city would be more than 34% white if white flight hadn’t occurred due to bussing.

    But I think white people are willing to accept more than 20-30% black kids in the schools. It’s between 40 and 50% in my daughter’s school. There are some discipline problems, but I suspect these are mainly due to the fact that there are about 2000 kids in that school. With that many, you’re bound to have some rowdy ones, and of course they encourage each other.

  4. nobody important April 22, 2004 at 9:11 am | | Reply

    I completely disagree that whites fled the BPS because of black gangs. During busing most of the violence was caused by low class whites in South Boston and Charlestown. Read Common Ground by Lucas for a good view into white attitudes and behaviors at the time. They didn’t want to go to school with any blacks. And just as important, they didn’t want to be told what to do by ‘outsiders’.

    That said, black social pathology is a definite barrier to success in school and life. Violence, drug abuse, illigitimacy, anti-intellectualism all block advancement for blacks. It is also interesting to note that these same social pathologies are endemic in the white ghettoes like Old Colony and McCormmack housing projects in Southie and in Charlestown as well. Read “All Souls” by MacDonald for a view into this reality.

    I know this because I am a low class white from Boston and have seen these pathologies up close and personal.

  5. Claire April 22, 2004 at 1:40 pm | | Reply

    Poor, ignorant, and violent. And they’ll fight you to the death to remain that way.

  6. cell phone batteries April 9, 2005 at 2:27 am | | Reply

    awesome weblog – massive post

  7. quadonna December 15, 2005 at 5:27 pm | | Reply

    you white people are all ignorant and you are teaching your children to be just as ignorant as yall. i pray to God that your children open their eyes and see just how racist and segregated this world still is.

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