Dancing with Dogs: Fighting School Resegregation

Fighting School Resegregation

Rather than fight school segregation, the Bush Administration has been happy to exploit it. Its briefs in the University of Michigan affirmative action case now in the Supreme Court praise plans in use in Texas, California and Florida that guarantee admission to state universities to students who graduate in the top 4 percent to 20 percent of their class.

Such plans are only partly effective in integrating higher education. They do nothing for graduate schools, and they often shunt minority students to a system's least selective campuses. But to the extent they work at all, it is by harnessing segregation at the high school level.

Relying on segregation in K-12 education to integrate higher education is cynical and wrong. It also creates troubling incentives. By telling minority parents that their children's best chance of attending a good college is to attend a segregated high school, these programs exert pressure on minority communities not to fight for integration in court, or in their school districts.

In their public statements over the Michigan case, members of the Bush administration, including the president, have said they would like to see increased racial diversity in education. If that is indeed their goal, they should begin by coming up with a plan to reverse the current trend, and start integrating the public schools.

So, let me get this straight, this editorial says that blacks and whites tend to attend black-majority and white-majority schools and that is somehow the Bush administration's fault? The U of Michigan kinda discrimination, er, I mean "diversity system helps reintegrate blacks and whites? Do these people ever stop to think before spewing this garbage anymore?

How about the general segregation of neighborhoods being a factor in the segregation of schools? There do tend to be black, white, Hispanic and Asian neighborhoods, that have people of other races in the minority. Since there are restrictions on the public schools that their kids can attend, there is going to be some sort of segregation. How is the U of Michigan system that gives the same benefits to hispanics as it does to blacks going to hep the reintegration of blacks and whites? What grievances do hispanics have? How much slavery did they endure? I guess one of the privileges of writing for a major newspaper is that you can pretend you are beyond the laws of logic. You can build up strawmen that don't have anything to do with the matter at hand and pretend somehow that the whole "diversity" movement is about reintegration.

There cannot be exclusive integration. Any integration must happen on both sides and one side must not always be the accomodator for the others. Even if this force-fed "quota" system is put in place, has the writer ever seen how the dorms usually are? You always have your black floors, white floors and Asian floors i the building. People tend to hang out with those that they are most comfortable with, usually people of their own race. By making people be together, true diversity is not achieved. It is easy to count the number of "colors" on the campus and say, "yay, we are multiculturalist".

True diversity and true integration happen when people start interacting with each other as people not as people belonging to two different colors. Once the basic human bond is established, the cultural differences make the experience all the more richer. Such a thing is hard to foster when there are deep, simmering resentments between the groups. One group is mad that thye are blamed for everything, or might think that the other group gets undeserved help. Another group might feel like a "perpetual victim" and not want to have anything to do with its "oppressors". I personally think that people tend to relate to each other when they meet as equals rather than when they are forced to pretend they are equal.

Posted by shanti at January 27, 2003 1:33 PM