(continued from yesterday)
Biden’s professed concern for blacks being subject to busing because “black parents were terrified that their children would be targets of violence in suburban schools” was facile. Blacks were clamoring to go to the better schools in the suburbs as shown by Boston’s METCO program that never could satisfy the demands of all the blacks who sought entry into it. So it is given lie to by the case of Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974), a case that did more to destroy the effectiveness of busing than all the Southern segregationists and northern weak kneed politicians. MIlliken decided that federal courts did not have the authority to impose their desegregation plans outside of the city in which the Constitutional violation occurred. In other words, Judge Garrity could not bring in Brookline (which is almost surrounded by Boston), Newton and other suburban school systems to help desegregate the Boston public schools.
I noted earlier that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts having already admitted black students received an inferior education to whites; and that it was already using some suburbs to address the problem; that it could have been argued that it was an exception to Millilken. After all cities and towns are subdivisions of a state whose borders can be altered by the state. Why then couldn’t the borders of school districts likewise be changed.
Justice Thurgood Marshall, the one African-American on the Supreme Court, said of the Millikin decision: “After 20 years of small, often difficult steps toward that great end, the Court today takes a giant step backwards.” He was referring to the Brown v. Board of Education decision that held “that segregation of children in public schools on the basis of race deprives minority group children of equal educational opportunities, and therefore denies them the equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Biden’s allegation the blacks didn’t want to go to the suburbs falls on closed ears in the black community. Biden’s suggestion he is for voluntary busing also makes little sense because the issue is busing that is required or forced. Were Biden concerned about blacks he would have not fought with Senator Brooke or would have listened to Thurgood Marshall and other black leaders who sought busing as the only possible remedy to give their children what the white children were receiving.
The successful METCO buses blacks to the suburbs, no whites are bused into the city. The busing plans confined to a city have failed because of white flight and the inability to add the suburban school districts into the mix. The white voters would never stand for it.
I’ve mentioned before how I was speaking with a law school classmate who knew I was representing the Boston School Committee. He was berating people from South Boston for not being more welcoming to black students. I knew he was from Brookline. I suggested to him that Judge Garrity had indicated that it might be necessary to incorporate the Brookline schools into the plan. He almost had a heart attack as he explained how unfair that would be to the Brookline kids.
Biden’s positions on the busing issue were in support of his white constituents over his black constituents. Does that make him a racist? Kamala Harris said no. I have a hard time seeing him otherwise. Sure he has a great civil rights record and has been in the forefront of many positions that benefit blacks but when it came to advancing their cause in his home state at the peril of losing white voter support and possibly his senate seat he demurred.
Having been there in the beginning there is little doubt that the racial factor was the major reason people opposed busing. Had the city been all white a plan to bus the poor white kids into the rich areas and the rich white kids to the poor there would be hardly a squawk. Whites would not have fled the city. I’m also convince that having decided busing was the way to go other remedies such as magnet schools were neglected. Some suggest the housing patterns were to blame for the segregated schools but then again these occurred because of actions by white in one form or another restricting the movement of blacks.
The niceties imposed on politicians to avoid being blunt (something Trump has never followed) made Harris suggest Biden is not a racist. Few in the black community will agree with her knowing Biden’s opposition to the one thing at the time that they believed would better their race. It would have other than for the Milliken decision. That busing failed did not mean that it had to fail. That busing failed was because of racism.
Here’s what I mean that those who call people racists are usually the racists. The Congresswoman AOC, educated at BU, raised in the suburbs of NYC, says that if white children were immigrants at the border, they’d get much better treatment. She hates white people. She means that white Americans don’t care about children of color. You know those folks who run Harvard Medical School, who operate those five Harvard teaching hospitals in Boston and the suburbs, they never cared about non-white children. You know Albert Schweitzer and Mother Theresa and all those whites in the Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, Peace Corps, all those white doctors and white nurses and white border patrol people, they don’t care about children of color.
Of course, she is ignorant of history and genetics. She doesn’t realize that most border guards at the Mexican border are of Latino descent and they save over 3,000 people a year crossing the border, ex. from drowning in the Rio Grande. She doesn’t realize that most of Latin America is mostly of European descent (Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Ireland, England.) She doesn’t know Che Guevera was part Irish or Muhammed Ali was one quarter Irish or African Americans are 24% European genetically or that Latinos (except from Mexico, Guatemala, e.g.) are 70% European genetically.
She hates White People and thinks White People treat white children differently than children of color. White people are bad in her thinking. They make children drink out of toilets. They don’t provide food, medicine, clothes, shelter to poor illegal immigrants, they put them in “concentration camps” in her mind, her mind that denied a crisis at the border . . . .
It is pathetic.
To educate her and her ilk, I strongly recommend she read Thomas Sowell’s ETHNIC AMERICA.
People of all races, religions and ethnic groups have overcome hurdles in coming to America and building this nation, and contributing to America.
People like her sow hatred, distrust, discontent and disinformation. SHE IS THE TRUE RACIST.
Leftist liberals, like Hillary, love to point the finger of Racism at the hoi polloi, we the people, the masses, because it makes her feel morally superior.
Matt, you have to explain why a father, an ex-Marine, with three small children who walked to the local school (a block away), and who was the godfather of an African-American child, fled Boston for the suburbs. It was because THE STATE told him his three kids had to get on three different buses and go to three different schools miles from their home . . .and THE STATE, THE FEDS, would decide each year what schools they would go to.
Parents were delighted their kids could go the New England Conservatory in the South End, Mass School of Art, Berkley, Boston Conservatory, downtown schools with minority students. RACE had zero to do with it. GOOD TEACHERS, voluntary participation had everything to do with it.
IN SCIENCE, unlike in law, folks look for multifactorial analyses, compounding variables, compounding factors, not simplistic holier than thou slogans like Racism or Sexism or Homophobia, HILLARY’S bag of insults she throws at Les Miserables, the Deplorables, she wants to feel morally superior to.
Here are some CONFOUNDING, COMPOUNDING FACTORS. PARENTS did not want the State, the Feds, to FORCE them to send their children to schools distant from their homes. Parents were concerned about sending their children to schools and communities with high crime rates, high drug rates, high divorce rates, high single parent rates, high rates of parents who weren’t concerned about education. Parents whose children walked to school were concerned about sending their children miles away to schools. Parents who sent their kids to school with neighbors’ children whom they had known for years or for the lifetime, were concerned their children were going to school with children whose parents they never knew.
Now as for housing . . . .yes there was housing segregation . . .it too was a complex situation . . . .many blacks coming to the big cities from the south were poor and settled in the poorest parts of the city and clustered together . . .many lacked educations or skills to advance out of inner city . . .drugs, crime, guns, single-parenthood also exacerbated the conditions . . . .
Remember, too, many black parents worked hard, moved to the suburbs, continued their education, and got their kids into good schools.
The point is THIS: to point the finger of RACISM at a complex problem is TOO SIMPLISTIC, but it is a simplistic answer to complex, multifactorial problems that leftist liberals like HILLARY love to hide behind . . . .it makes them feel morally superior . . . . .I’m not a racist, but all those hoi polloi, those deplorables, Les Miserables, all those who opposed forced busing, all who fled the FEDs forcible transfer of children, all of those people are RACISTS . . . .
Matt I know you are not a racist . . .I know Joe Biden is not . . .I think Karmala Harris and her crew too often falsely play the RACE CARD . . .I don’t really know what the term racist means anymore, it is so abused and misused . . . .As I’ve written before, the worst racists I know are the folks who point the finger of racism at others . . . .they continue to reduce complex social, political, psychological, historical problems to meaningless slogans, such as BOSTON IS A RACIST CITY . . .as one Boston Globe Columnist delights writing because it maker her feel morally superior to the white people in Boston . . . .
the same is true of the racist slogan . . .White Privilege . . . . .Whites from poor or middle class families who made multi-millions by inventing something, like the internet or Amazon, are said to have done so only because of their skin color . . .
We’ll only improve as a society when folks stop throwing these meaningless epithets at others . . . .
FOLKS don’t like BIG GOVERNMENT intruding in their lives . . . .FOLKS don’t like the FEDs, especially the FED POWER ABUSERS (misconstruers of the Constitution, of the laws, power abusers in black robes, power abusers in three piece suits) telling them how to live their lives.
Live free . . .get the government off our backs . . .lower taxes . . .smaller government . . .make peace, not war
usually, leftist liberals can tolerate anything but different opinions
The book WELL by BU dean of Public Health correctly points out that beyond personal preference there are many STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS, historical impediments to good health, like poor housing, poor educational opportunites, too many drugs in Appalachia and inner cities, etc, that need to be addressed.
Cognizance of race, to insure non-discrimination in policies, is good. COGNIZANCE of the multiple factors that contribute to historical moments and historical movements is better. The opposition to forced busing was multi-factorial, but mainly an opposition to the STATE, the FEDS telling Parents what schools their children had to go to.
Total nonsense. Busing failed because it was a bad idea. According to a poll back in the Seventies appearing in the Globe, 90% of the White parents and 70% of the Black parents in Boston opposed busing. Would parents in middle class West Roxbury want their grammar school children attending a pretty good school in their neighborhood to be bussed to an inferior all White Charlestown school miles away in a high crime neighborhood? Probably not. 2.If schools are failing parents should have options. Vouchers private and parochial schools should be available. Competition should be tried. Public school monopolies run by liberal Denocrat politicians haven’t worked.3. America is ranked 30th globally in math and science test scores. Even Viet Nam has surpassed us. Something is broken in our educational system and it isn’t because of funding or racism. Too much government control. Options are needed.