Clarence Page, commenting on the Online Newshour:
Enforcement of Brown also brought a backlash over school busing, sometimes violently, even in liberal cities of the north like Boston. School desegregation peaked in the late 1980’S. Courts began to decide that the goals of Brown had largely been achieved. In 1991, the Supreme Court, with little fanfare, allowed a return to neighborhood schools instead of busing, even if the result was more segregation.
So how much progress have we made? A recent study by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University says public schools nationwide are almost as segregated as they were when the Martin Luther King was killed in 1968. Most white students across the country still have little contact with black or Hispanic students, and vice versa. 50 years after Brown, desegregation is turning back into re-segregation. But school enrollment numbers don’t tell the whole story.
Did Brown, which on its face barred school boards from segregating students by race, require school busing to achieve integration, especially in northern cities?
I don’t think so, but the Harvard Civil Rights Project, Clarence Page, and others obviously disagree. But if schools are deemed “segregated,” and hence in violation of Brown, when the “segregation” results from no policy or program but simply reflects housing patters where people tend to live in proximity with others of their race, aren’t those housing patterns themselves similarly unconstitutional, even where they don’t result from discrimination?
John, don’t ask such questions. You will give them ideas!
As you are aware, the housing industry is under intense scrutiny by the Feds. It is illegal to run an ad for selling or renting a house or apartment in which all of the images shown are of white people.
“It is illegal to run an ad for selling or renting a house or apartment in which all of the images shown are of white people.”
Even if all the tenants are white? If you put a black person in the ad for a currently all white apartment, can that be considered false advertising?
Page says, “When you buy your house, you buy your school. School patterns follow housing patterns, which follow income patterns, as well as race.”
We live in the most diverse part of our city. On our street, black and white families alternate almost perfectly. The neighborhood schools are 100% black, or close to it. Virtually all of the white families either homeschool, private school, or like us, have their kids in magnet schools. If bussing hadn’t happened, the neighborhood school probably would be about 50/50, which is the ratio of the magnet school our daughter goes to.
Brown vs the Board was one of the most destructive Supreme Court rulings ever. I lived through that era.
It emptied our cities of their white middle class populations, while doing nothing to improve anybody’s education.
Forced integration seems not to have worked.
Nice going, Supremes.
Isn’t it time we got an apology from someone, maybe Bill Clinton, for the error of forced integration?
Tom Sowell makes a good point about Brown. The problem with Brown was that the Court did not just reverse Plessy and hold that it was unconstitutional to discriminate on the basis of race. Had it done so, many of the problems we see today could have been avoided. The court didn’t take that path because it couldn’t get 9 votes. Instead, the court avoided questioning the reasoning of Plessy, but said that modern sociological research, apparently not available to the Plessy court, showed the segregation hurts blacks and therefore is unconstitutional. In short, once the court identified the problem as segregation and not discrimination, it didn’t matter whether the segregation was voluntary, the result of housing patterns, and it didn’t matter whether or not the government was trying to discriminate. This lead inevitably to the present situation where the absence of black students in elite universities is seen as a problem even though there is not the slightest degree of discrimination against black applicants by elite schools (indeed, just the opposite).
Even if all the tenants are white?
Especially if all of the tenants are white! The purpose of the law is to make sure that minorities are not excluded from renting or buying housing in any location. However, it is not good enough to indicate that you don
That’s why you tend to get soulless pictures of empty rooms and vacant patios. No people are better than accidentally offending the PC police by now having the correct number of people with the proper skin tones.
I guess sunless tanning lotions don’t count, huh?