Posted on 07/02/2019 6:33:39 AM PDT by gattaca
Kamala Harris's emotional response to Joe Biden's busing record has less to do with segregation and more to do with virtue signaling.
Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris was the talk of the debate last week following her supposed smackdown of former vice president Joe Biden. In the exchange, Harris told Biden that it was “hurtful” to hear him speak positively about working with segregationists to “get things done” in the Senate.
She then pivoted to Biden’s past opposition to desegregation busing, describing a “little girl” who, in the 1970s, was part of the second class in her California grade school to be bused for the sake of integrating the school. “That little girl was me,” Harris said.
Biden, on the defensive, countered by saying he didn’t oppose busing, just federally mandated busing, a response that played right into Harris’s hands as she retorted that he had just made her point that sometimes the federal government has to step in and do what local and state governments won’t.
It was a stunning moment, highlighting once again not only the rough road Biden has ahead but the extreme leftward tilt of the current Democratic field. Busing is one of those issues that offer Democrats an opportunity to seem reasonable and moderate by reflecting the mood of the nation. Its implementation in the United States was a case study in NIMBYism: even those who supported it in principle as a way to work toward school integration didn’t want it in their own back yards. To see Democrats arguing over who championed it more is truly head-scratching.
Like Harris, I was a little girl growing up in the 1970s. Unlike her, I wasn’t the daughter of highly educated immigrants who came to the United States to pursue advanced degrees in science and economics. Instead, my parents were high school educated, working-class Democrats who struggled to pay the bills and who voted for Jimmy Carter. Yet when the Austin, Texas, Independent School District introduced a plan to bus all sixth-graders from their neighborhood schools to one of several “sixth-grade centers” as part of its ongoing desegregation plan, my parents balked.
Their objection was not based on concerns about integration. The Austin neighborhood in which we lived was already integrated. Some of my best friends were black and Hispanic. The elementary school I had attended since kindergarten, a mere block from my house, was also integrated—not because of busing, but because it reflected the local population.
My parents simply saw nothing to be gained from me riding a bus across town each day to serve some master plan of people who couldn’t care less about me as an individual. They decided to move us 60 miles outside of town to avoid the machinations of the fixers. It wasn’t “white flight.” The modest home they purchased was in an integrated rural school district, and I continued through both middle school and high school, as I had in elementary school, forging many friendships with people of all different races.
The busing movement in the United States traces its beginning to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which declared public school segregation unconstitutional. In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education that federal courts could require busing as a means of desegregation.
But forced busing immediately found opposition among both blacks and whites. As outlined by Jelani Cobb in The New Yorker, “Critics like Zora Neale Hurston howled at the implication that black learning could be insured only by proximity to white children. Elijah Muhammad warned, ominously, that ‘only a fool allows his enemies to educate his children.’”
Paula Bolyard of PJ Media points out the negative effects of busing on families, regardless of color:
Children faced long bus rides to and from school—in some cases over an hour—while parents missed out on opportunities to be involved in the education of their children. Instead of being right down the block, their schools were now far from home.
In the end, the policy failed to achieve its goals, barely moving the needle on the number of children attending integrated schools—from 1972 to 1980 the percentage of black students attending mostly-black schools dropped almost imperceptibly, from 63.6 percent to 63.3 percent.
That Democrats are now vying for pro-busing bragging rights is yet another indication of just how far out of touch they are with the American public. Thoughtful liberals acknowledge that to object to busing does not make one a segregationist or racist. Only the far left and the elite are going to be impressed by a devotion to the ill-conceived practice, which ultimately died a well-deserved death.
But it’s primary season, so, of course, the truth doesn’t matter, nor does appealing to the country’s middle. What does seem to matter to the current Democratic field of candidates is pandering to the various far-left factions that drive the party’s agenda.
That’s why, in addition to fighting over who loves busing more, the Democratic presidential hopefuls are stepping all over each other to voice support for killing babies; taking more of your hard-earned money; opening the borders; and granting taxpayer-funded health care to illegal immigrants. The New York Times has more on the field’s extreme leftward tilt.
The Biden-Harris busing flap will soon fade. The issue of busing is not likely to play a significant role in determining which Democrat gets his or her party’s presidential nomination.
More important than this brief episode is what it represents. A minimal amount of research reveals that desegregation busing was a colossal failure, unpopular with most Americans of all races. Nevertheless, a presidential candidate can successfully invoke it as a societal good and a sign of her wokeness, with the result that any challenge to her argument opens one to charges of racism.
It’s yet another indication of the left’s success in using academia and pop culture to brainwash the last couple of generations with a skewed, politically correct version of history. Those of us who know better must not rest in our efforts to set the record straight.
Interesting. I was born a few generations later, but can see that the legacy of busing seemed to make racial dynamics of certain cities surrounding Los Angeles WORSE...Pasadena comes to mind.
Yet of course from the purview of history, I am all for desegregation and support the “Little Rock 9” and the verdict of Brown v. Board...
I can’t see how busing would become an issue in the general election, but it would be tailor-made for Trump to make the point that Liberal “solutions” have failed.
They were not popular in the 70s. They would not be popular today. They didn’t help anyone. But the Left (Kamala Harris) still pushes the idea and uses it as a stick to beat an opponent and to demonstrate her own self-righteousness. Just try that sort of tactic in front of President Trump. Just try it.
Harris is a Brown Supremacist.
She’s all about forcing Whitey to knuckle under to the coming Brown Majority. Just ask her, she ain’t bashful about admitting it.
Busing is the most unpopular thing the government of a supposedly free people can do short of concentration camps. So let the alien b***h run her game on this. She’ll drive millions to the Right, just like it did in the ‘70s.
A perfect example of unconstitutional judicial courts overstepping their bounds and legislating from the bench. They should have been tarred and feathered...
And 60 years later, we're still performing like a bunch of circus clowns.
The photo of that liberal cracker broad on her knees in Memphis begging the black dude's forgiveness comes to mind. I'll bet he and the bruthas had a good laugh over their Colt 45 malt liquor.
Harris may have doomed the democrats in 2020 by making school busing an issue.
IMO, there were two boneheaded things our country did that top the list - and both corrected (in most areas):
1. Prohibition.
2. School busing.
I was bused. Starting in 1976. We lived 3 blocks from the neighborhood junior high. I was sent across the city to the low-income, predominately Indian neighborhood.
I was one of the top students in the city. The school I was sent to was one of the worst in the nation. I went from all A+ to running for my life every day. I was beaten, spit on, gum in the hair, and burned with cigarettes. Pushed down steps. Threatened with knives. I finally just stopped going to school in eighth grade.
When my mom found I had not been to school in months she dragged me away to a Catholic school. Something my family could not afford. My dad moved us to a far suburb. Again something we could not afford. We loved our neighborhood but had to abandon our home and our friends
Busing fundamentally changed my life. For the worse.
“It’s yet another indication of the left’s success in using academia and pop culture to brainwash the last couple of generations with a skewed, politically correct version of history. Those of us who know better must not rest in our efforts to set the record straight.”
The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.” George Orwell, 1984
“Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished?”
1984 by George Orwell
Home Literature 1984 Characters Winston Smith
“Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, and every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day-by-day and minute-by-minute. History has stopped.
Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories.
Just in that one instance, in my whole life, I did possess actual concrete evidence after the event – years after it.” (2.5.14, Winston to Julia)
https://www.shmoop.com/1984/winston-smith-quotes-2.html
There is still “school busing” in Louisville. About a year or so agao, one of my office mates was sending her kids to Catholic school, but decided it was time to hit the public schools. However, their neighborhood had school busing.
They sold their house and moved to a suburb that was not part of it.
Yep. 2018 and we still had white flight due to school busing.
I’m glad they’re talking about important issues like busing, climate change, late term abortion, healthcare for illegals, socialism, gun confiscation, open borders, higher taxes.
Trump is talking about great economy, world peace through strategic negotiations, balancing the unfair trade issues, bringing manufacturing back to the USA, lower energy prices due to high production, lowering illegal immigrations, low unemployment, right to try drug law, 2nd amendment protections, adding conservatives to SCOTUS and other vacancies, being a proud American, ensuring a strong military, healthcare reforms, etc.
What a difference.
Some friends of mine who are loud and proud open borders communists are planning on home schooling their first grader next year. They are very vague on their reasons, if you drill down really hard their child has been having the privilege beat out of him by the dreamers and is in constant fear of them. Guess its ok for other kids though
There are lots of things to dislike and ridicule Joe Biden about.
I don’t think that who he worked with in the Senate in the 70’s should be on that list.
I don’t guess you can criticize anything more recent without at least indirectly criticizing Obama.
For every black kid that was bussed to a school, a white child from that school was forced bussed to the black school in order to create the space at the white school...
the white students were chosen at random and the parents had no say...
that happened to my own white American son at age 11, middle school, in South Carolina...our local school was just a few blocks away but he was bussed passed that one to another school district and to a school that was 89% black, 11% white...and several miles away...
The academic classes were terrible so I taught him at home at night so that he could keep up with the good schools...
However the school did spend a lot of money on their music programs...the band always had new uniforms and the best instruments and equipment...the marching band was so good that they were chosen as the only middle school from the whole state to go to the 1st MLK parade in Atlanta...with 2 white members my son and another boy...
but their Math and English scores still sucked at the bottom of the county etc...
My son was there for 2 years until we moved to TN and there was nothing we could do to move him to our local school...it was the law...
so yes its great for the black students from other school districts but consider the cost to the white kids who actually live in that district and are forced to go to a different school...(just to make it fair)
I remember in 1966 when they bused in black kids to our school in Las Vegas.They immediately started beating up on some kids. My mom moved us to Kingman Arizona the following month. I had some great friends and hated to leave them. It’s not fair to subject children to socialist engineering.
I’m thankful I grew up in a rural area.
In my home town and county, there were two school sytems before integration: the “city” schools (black) and the “county” schools (predominantly white though a couple of black families had placed their children in the county schools).
After integration, we just had one school system. One elementary, one junior high, one high school.
I don’t recall any white families pulling their kids out and sending them to private schools (which would have had to have been in another county anyway).
No busing, no race riots, after a while life just went on as usual.
This was in the South.
The 1970s busing mandates proved despot judges thought themselves demi-gods superior to the Constitution and we the people as lab rats! #Arrogance.
They had no consideration for the impact or the “collateral damage” their “fatwas” would cause. The more the (misnamed) “progressives” try the “heal” race relations, the worse they get. You’d almost think it’s intentional... if we didn’t know better. ;)
Harris has learned nothing from history.
I used to have relatives living in the Pittsburgh suburb of Forest Hills. Back in the 1970’s it and the neighboring borough of Churchill were nice, very comfortable middle-to-upper-middle class communities.
Then a judge, in an unchecked abuse of raw judicial power, ordered their school districts to merge with neighboring Braddock (a collapsing craphole of a milltown). Faced with the prospect of busing their kids to Braddock an vice-versa there was a virtual real estate fire sale of people fleeing.
Today the area is distressed. Virtually nobody want to live in that school district. The former country club closed and is likely to become the site of low income housing.
It was a way of making good schools and bad schools equally bad. Next case.
I was lucky. When they decided to start busing people here they applied it to the incoming students and left you alone if you had already had 1 year of high school. They bussed kids next door to me all the way across town to the brown neighborhoods. They had to catch the bus 2 hours earlier than me. My bus ran at 7:20, theirs ran at 5:20 in the morning.
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