It is now well known that court-ordered busing to promote racial balance in the schools was a major impetus to “white flight” from the affected cities to the suburbs. “Back in 1975,” Time reported in 1978 (“Education: Forced Busing and White Flight”),
Chicago Sociologist James Coleman, having looked at the early figures, felt called upon to report what most Americans thought they knew already: court-ordered busing to achieve racial balance in large U.S. cities and to ensure that more blacks and whites go to school together was causing a great deal of … white flight from city schools.
Among many others, Douglas Reed confirmed Coleman’s findings in his 2001 study, On Equal Terms: The Constitutional Politics of Educational Opportunity:
In major metropolitan areas, white flight to the suburbs … accelerated with court-ordered busing in the North in the early 1970s. With the rise of “chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs,” racial homogeneity of urban school districts increased. In his 1978 book on busing [Must We Bus?: Segregation and National Policy], Gary Orfield wrote that our nation’s pattern of fragmented metropolitan areas, combined with continuing residential segregation, made desegregation a difficult task: “The rapid departure of young white middle class families from the central cities, together with the plummeting birth-rate, means that an increasing number of cities and some inner suburbs are left with few whites to integrate” (Orfield 1978, 55).
“White flight” has always referred to whites fleeing to the suburbs, but now, reports the San Francisco Chronicle, for the first time it has become a state-wide phenomenon. And the state, of course, is California.
California’s white population has declined since 2000 at an unprecedented rate, hastening the day when Hispanics will be the state’s largest population group, according to newly released state figures.
There were half a million fewer whites in California in 2008 than in 2000, a period when the state’s overall population grew by 4 million to 38.1 million, according to a study released Thursday by the state Department of Finance.
By 2008, whites made up 40 percent of Californians, down from 47 percent at the turn of the century. In 2000, Hispanics comprised 32 percent of the population; that number grew to 37 percent in 2008.
Back in the 1970s Gary Orfield and like-minded busing advocates worried about too few whites “to integrate.” I suppose their new worry, at least in California, will be too few whites to diversify.
Wait a minute! I have an idea for a compromise that would rival the famous (or infamous) Compromises of 1820 and 1850 produced by the conflict over the expansion of slavery: Liberals have been reluctant to build a wall to keep illegal immigrants out, but maybe they could be persuaded to drop their opposition in return for conservatives agreeing not to oppose efforts California might take to build a wall to keep whites in.
Such a “wall,” of course, need not be limited to a physical structure. Perhaps, for example, California could impose a draconian “exit tax” on whites leaving the state. A wall to keep whites in could be supplemented by other state policies designed to attract more white immigrants, such as promising whites who move to California lower taxes than their new Hispanic, Asian, and black neighbors. After all, treating races differently in the tax code should raise no more pesky principle problems than treating them differently everywhere else. (In Draft ’Em!: Release 3.0, I have discussed many similar measures that could be taken to promote “diversity.”)
I have frequently — and persuasively, if I do say so myself — objected to the term “reverse discrimination” to describe discrimination against whites meant to help blacks. There’s nothing “reverse” about it, I always insist; discrimination on the basis of race is discrimination on the basis of race. But those who insist on using that term may also want to think about starting to regard what will be increasingly necessary (from their point of view) efforts to require or induce whites to provide “diversity” to the growing Hispanic population as “reverse diversity.”
