Posted on 07/04/2019 1:47:11 PM PDT by Kaslin
The polls published since the conclusion of the first Democratic debates are unanimous: they show that the chief beneficiary was California Senator Kamala Harris. She delivered a body blow to former Vice-President Joe Biden, who previously had been riding high as the obvious frontrunner.
Harris' most direct and successful attack on Biden was related to the issue of busing. Much as Harris wished to convey the impression that only a racist, or someone soft on racism, would take issue with busing, the truth is far more complicated.
Starting in 1971, the Supreme Court authorized court-ordered desegregation programs involving the transportation of students to outlying schools to achieve greater racial balance. The public reaction was intensely hostile from the start. The concept of the “neighborhood school” was jeopardized by forced busing, and many parents resented the fact that their children had to endure long bus rides, often to schools of lesser quality, to satisfy a judge's or a bureaucrat's idea of racial justice. In 1972, Republican President Richard Nixon won reelection — and every single state in the South, formerly a Democratic bastion — based in part on his strong opposition to busing.
In 1974, the Supreme Court began a long retreat from busing, ruling first that only under the most restrictive circumstances could busing be ordered between school districts, rather than within them. This had the effect of encouraging “white flight” from the inner cities to the suburbs, where busing was less common. Further Supreme Court decisions up to the 2000s watered down the federal mandate for busing and increasingly left it up to school districts to achieve racial equity in their own ways.
Busing's success in improving educational access and outcomes for minority students was very limited. By weakening neighborhood ties among students, moreover, busing may have contributed to a massive rise in school discipline problems.
Much more alarmingly, though, busing provoked major political and racial animosities — sometimes even violent public unrest. It became so unpopular that even moderate Democrats like Delaware Senator Joe Biden opposed it. Biden referred to busing as a “liberal train wreck,” which was close to the truth. Even many proponents of the policy, like Senators Ted Kennedy and George McGovern, sent their own children to private schools — further undercutting the rationale for busing.
Arguably, Senator Harris is seeking to revive a debate over busing that, by and large, liberals conceded defeat on decades ago. By 1999, according to Gallup, 82 percent of Americans opposed busing, including a plurality of blacks.
Today's efforts to achieve greater racial equity in education seldom involve transporting students long distances. In fact, where geographical and demographic realities make it impractical for each school to be racially mixed, modern school districts tend to accept this and make the best of it.
Kamala Harris would like to go back to the bad old days when judges and education bureaucrats believed that race ought to be the primary factor determining where a child should go to school. She prefers, in other words, to try to socially engineer a racial utopia, rather than to allow local school boards and parents to decide what is best for their children.
What is worse, Harris is not just endorsing the failed and discredited policy of forced busing. She is trying to intimidate anyone and everyone who opposes it by suggesting that they are making common cause with racists and segregationists. The reality, of course, is that, in Joe Biden and in many other principled opponents of busing, Kamala Harris ought to see allies in the battle for racial equality, not enemies. After all, busing is anything but race-blind. It is, in fact, arguably racist in itself.
Joe Biden, whatever his faults may be (and there are many), is no bigot. Our country's first black president would not have chosen Joe Biden as his running mate had he viewed the Delaware Senator as a closet segregationist.
Kamala Harris is surging in the polls, thanks in large part to her direct and pointed attacks on Joe Biden. Kudos to her for her boldness
The truth, though, is that Harris's attacks on Biden were deceptive and unfair. That ought to count for something as Democrats weigh whether she is qualified to be the party's nominee.
I think she rose in the polls, based on the “optics” of her confronting Biden, and the praise the media heaped on her for her “courage”. I think it was based more on the optics than on approval of the issue of busing.
And it warmed some Democrat hearts, that she segwayed(sp?) into the “I was that little girl” campaign, with shirts for sale with her stern facial expression as a little girl.
It cannot be denied that they,the storm troopers of the Rat Party,are the real movers and shakers.
Perception is everything. So far as I can determine, Oakland, California, would not have been under a court-ordered “diversity” busing order, unlike schools in many of the racially divided South and urban centers like Chicago that had high friction between the racial divisions exacerbated by schools of vastly differing academic standing.
If the young Kamala Harris was “forced” into busing to school, it was to a school within the district in which her parents were then dwelling, and NOT to achieve “racial diversity”.
She is a whole “racial diversity” all by herself. Devil spawn and snarling wolf child.
So, was Berkley segregated? I understand it was not.
A Happy FReepin' Fourth of July to all!
Leni/MinuteGal
Joe Biden should simply say, I was of the generation that ended discrimination in America and I helped elect the first black president in history. You’re welcome.
She is a corrupt phony. Actually, he is a corrupt phony times ten, but he shouldn’t back down from her.
She is a corrupt phony.........A real PRO ‘flatbacking’ pro tho !
Forced cross-town busing of children to achieve “integration” was one of the greatest curses of the 20th century. I’m so happy democrats want to run on it.
In Richmond, which was typical, the school system shrank from 40,000 students to 20,000. The city population shrank from 245,000 to 189,000. Only now is it back to 220,000. The murder rate went from 40 a year to 160 a year. The city was almost killed off, but don’t forget the families that were destroyed and the careers and lives that were destroyed.
The result was taking a city with a desegregated school system and replacing it with one that was all black.
Congratulations, democrats! Let’s do it again!
Happy Fourth! Also, I talked to mcmuffin last week. He is still with us in Fla.
“...thanks in large part to her direct and pointed attacks on Joe Biden. Kudos to her for her boldness”
This guy writes like a Freshman in High School. You don’t give someone Kudo’s for a blatant, inane, mindless attack that is totally erroneous regardless of how forceful it was presented.
Correction: forceful = forcefully. Got to learn to proofread myself.
I recall Richmond was the center of a major desegregation court case, in which a court decided that cross town busing in Richmond wasn’t enough. The next court order was to order a merger of the school districts of Richmond with suburban Henrico and Chesterfield counties.
As I recall, the Supreme Court overturned the order for the city and suburban school systems to merge so that busing across district lines could happen. As I recall a similar case in Detroit, which sought to merge Detroit schools with suburbs, was also overturned by the Supreme Court.
If the Democrats want to run on unpopular failed policies from the 1970s, go for it.
Sorry, but busing was in effect here in the SF Bay Area. In 1971, when busing orders went out, my family went to meetings at our local school in San Francisco where residents were outspoken against the coming busing of students. My younger sister was 8 years old and was pegged to be bused across town to a black neighborhood, away from her school three blocks from our home. I had been bused around 1962 away from that same school three blocks away to a black neighborhood school (same school area where O.J. Simpson lived), and hated it. Wasted time in the morning waiting for the bus, and wasted time in the afternoon being bused back home. My local school was cosmopolitan with many races, but I got bused to an all black area. Anyway, my mom pulled my sister out of school and we moved to the suburbs so she could go to a white school, and sister was happier. This same scenario played out in Oakland (where they have white-concentrated neighborhoods in the hills, and black neighborhoods in the flatland areas).
She drips with lust for power over the evil Americans, of whom she is not one.
Born here to non-immigrant aliens on student passports?
Went to primary and secondary school in Montreal?
Comes back to go to an avowedly segregated, racist "university" like Howard?
What's "American" about her? What American cares what she says or thinks? She's just a vengeful alien, bent on saying ANYTHING to get power.
Biden should have told the truth. Busing was stupid and ridiculous. But of course he couldn’t say that in front of a leftard audience, cause they would yell waycism at him, cause everything is waycism to those fascist idiots.
It sounds here like @KamalaHarris is now taking something more like the @JoeBiden position on school busing. So what was that whole thing at the debate all about?https://t.co/bRDGzp7nvy— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) July 4, 2019
There are a lot of expensive houses up in the Berkeley hills--a lot of them owned by UC professors, I think, and a lot of ordinary houses down in the flatlands near Oakland or towards the bay. Near the university there are a lot of students and young non-students. I don't know if there were any neighborhoods ca. 1970 which would have mostly black. There may have been areas which seemed mostly black because if you drove around the black residents would be more likely to be outdoors.
I was a student there in the 1970s but spent most of my time near the university and didn't have much occasion to go into the other areas.
Anyway I don't know where Kamala lived. Her comments at the debate did not really make much sense other than to score points against Biden--was she saying she benefited by being bused? That all black kids got better educations if they were bused? I don't anyone who has studied the question objectively thinks that racial busing helped anyone.
Someone needs to hammer back on this question of busing. School choice is the answer, not upending the lives of random kids, stripping them from their neighborhood friends and sending them on bus rides an hour from their home 5 days a week.
Each kid has unique needs and unique talents. Schools need to serve the interests of individuals, not force a reversion to the mean. The system doesn’t serve either of those interests it just protects those who live off it with virtually no parental or student input.
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