Posted on 09/05/2007 7:02:39 AM PDT by pabianice
This is the line that caught me;
“I went to primarily white schools growing up,” Cathy Richmond Robinson says. “I think, ‘I did it, my kids can do it.’”
I didn’t realize the family was black until I clicked on the globe article to see their photo. I guess I don’t get this statement?? Will the middle-class white kids in Boston’s public schools be waiting for their children with knives and clubs?
Maybe I’m naive or maybe I’m on a different planet. I realize that racism still exists to this day, but I live in rural Maryland in an area that is mostly white. While my children go to a private school that is predominantly white, I honestly don’t expect race to even be an issue with my kids. I haven’t taught for them to think differently of skin tone than I have of a person’s height or color of their hair.
Certainly the children in Boston’s public school system have been inculcated with diversity and multiculturalism. Won’t these African American children be welcomed and treated as “more special” according to politically correct standards?
Honest,...I really don’t understand the statement? Are these folks unnecessarily holding onto a race card or is there legitimately a problem in Boston’s schools?
The article goes into some detail about SF. The same thing is happening there.
From last year and none other that the BG...
School crime rises, reflects Hub violence More weapons are confiscated
The same thing has been happening in Cleveland, which was also saddled with forced busing in the 1970s. In the 1950s, Cleveland’s population was 900,000. Now it is is 485,000 and falling. There were 150,000 students in the Cleveland public schools before the desegregation order went into effect. Now there are 58,000 students. People can’t leave Cleveland fast enough. The schools are bad, the neighborhoods are dangerous, and city services are lousy.
Cleveland and Boston are two good examples of the unintended consequences of judicial activism.
I grew up in a rich Boston suburb (25 miles out) in the 1970's and our town had 1 black family (the Robinson's). But kids from the inner city were bused out to us through the METCO program. So, I went to school with a number of black kids. I don't recall any racial incidents at all at school. The kids got a decent education, in a nice environment.
Given a choice between attending some "Martin Luther King HS" in Roxbury, or attending a "white school" in the suburbs, anyone of intelligence would hope that their kid could attend a primarily white school.
People of different races can live together in peace provided they share the same culture. White bourgeois culture and black ghetto culture cannot co-exist; in time, the brutality and anti-intellectualism of black ghetto culture will poison and destroy whatever community hosts it. The same goes for other “trash” cultures (white trash/meth lab, travellers, hispanic borrachos, etc.)
As long as we as a society refuse to face these facts, our racial problems in this country will never be solved.
Thanks. I see then the parents are simply concerned about violence in general. Obviously, a legit concern.
Still that doesn’t jive with the statement about going to school with whites? Previous posts would seem to indicate that the presence of whites in the public school system are a significant minority anyway.
I suspect there are more per capita Caucasians in the Montessori schools that their child has attended than in the public school system. Doesn’t this statement seem obliquely racist?
Yeah - it was all great and nice - except for the part of your parents paying outrageous taxes for this and the part of busing whites into failing schools...
But I am sure it made you feel good
Well, in the woman’s defense, she was probably sent out of the city herself as a kid so she could get a decent education and maybe was hoping that when she had kids of her own, it wouldn’t be necessary. The problem is that Boston doesn’t have much of a middle class black presence.
The latter. Consider that the parents are well-spokem, concerned about their children's education, and benefited from going to a decent school. The real secret is that it isn't the color mix of the school, it is the value the parents place on education. It would be folly to say that the kids won't encounter some racism but once they are engaged in the learning process they will fit in just fine.
Of course it is a matter of demographics. That is what the article is all about. The middle class is leaving the city because they can't afford to live there and because the quality of the public schools is declining. The gap between rich and poor seems to mimic a third world country.
Michael Barone"s article, The Realignment of America: The native-born are leaving "hip" cities for the heartland. goes into some detail on the demographics of what is happening.
"This is something few would have predicted 20 years ago. Americans are now moving out of, not into, coastal California and South Florida, and in very large numbers they're moving out of our largest metro areas. They're fleeing hip Boston and San Francisco, and after eight decades of moving to Washington they're moving out. The domestic outflow from these metro areas is 3.9 million people, 650,000 a year. High housing costs, high taxes, a distaste in some cases for the burgeoning immigrant populations--these are driving many Americans elsewhere."
"The result is that these Coastal Megalopolises are increasingly a two-tiered society, with large affluent populations happily contemplating (at least until recently) their rapidly rising housing values, and a large, mostly immigrant working class working at low wages and struggling to move up the economic ladder. The economic divide in New York and Los Angeles is starting to look like the economic divide in Mexico City and São Paulo."
So, per the article, "I might as well move to Ohio", he meant the non-Cleveland part of Ohio, I guess!
Not if it's being made by a leftist. Libs, by definition, can't be racists.
Snort.
I don't know where you're getting that. I was attempting to give a factual description of what was going on in my town when I was 15 years old. I'm not a supporter of busing.
We had metco kids in my high school, too. I do recall some incidences of violence. The problem with Metco is that it doesn’t fully reimburse the host towns for the per pupil cost. I noticed with most of the kids that were bused to my town didn’t really want to be there.
One of the less-talked-about implications of ‘legalizing’ gay relationships into marriages is to undermine the right of government to give a tax advantage to married couples who are going to have or have a family. By making the deduction available to essentially anybody, i.e., same-sex roommates, it dilutes and undermines the benefit, and sets the stage for its full elimination.
So whereas we see in, for example, Russia providing tax incentives to women to revive its dismal birth rate, in the US the gay agenda is to strip away any meager incentives to families that can and would bear and raise children — who are course essential, from an economic perspective alone, to prop up the Social security pyramid (which is now an inverted pyramid, of course).
The current white population of Boston public schools is 14%. I assume that with the decline of the white middle class in the city, the quality of the schools has gone down. Whatever one's color, I assume this black family whose parents attended primarily white public schools while growing up, found the quality of the schools better than they are now. So they are willing to move to a white area so their children can get a better education. Hence the comment, "“I think, ‘I did it, my kids can do it.’”
No, it isn't at all, and your comments:
That is what the article is all about. The middle class is leaving the city because they can't afford to live there and because the quality of the public schools is declining.
Don't prove your assertion.
The middle class cannot afford to live there not because their income is low (it is quite high), but because state and municipal taxes are shockingly high.
That is a matter of policy, not of demographics.
The public schools are of poor quality because of forced busing (a policy intiative) and enormous waste of taxpayer money on programs run by employees who have no accountability (another policy matter).
The ethnic makeup and the economic makeup of Boston are not the source of the problems: the destructive policies of Boston politicians are the source of the problems.
*************
Exactly. Mumbles Menino can take a big chunk of the blame, for one.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.