Prejudice, integration, equality: On school busing and related matters

Comment published on New York Times blog, in response to article in New York Times by Nikole Hannah-Jones, ”It was never about busing,” July 13, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/opinion/sunday/it-was-never-about-busing.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage#commentsContainer

American society today has formal and informal rules against racial prejudice, but without either racial integration or equality. Sadly, it's not clear the nation wants either.

Equality might, even more than integration, be approached through policies for schools. We could easily have a national policy of equal funding for every public school student in the land.

The sign that we do not have integration is that black America is so very different from the mainstream. Black people know they are different and excluded; other people understand that parts of our cities are dangerous. These worlds are very different, and more so than they might have been. Fears and resentments are among the results, as is crime, the fear of which may motive some racism but is irreducible to prejudice.

The biggest problem in America is class differences. These are disavowed except as race, which partly serves as proxy for them, since almost uniformly Black Americans are poorer, and kept that way. Americans don't usually think about class or capitalism. They think instead about social groups and attitudes. Much thinking about race and inequality seems to be driven by attempts to deal with class while avoiding it. Many are supposed to have equal status, with unequal lives and life chances. In a society where business requires forms of domination, such an Apartheid makes it easy.

But we'd be happier as neighbors who are more similar. You can learn from anyone.

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p.s. Ms. Hannah-Jones asks what other alternative there is besides busing to achieve integration. I know of one: Fund all public schools nationally through federal taxation, instead of local property tax based on residential home values.

Then, the funding being equal, all children would have a similar quality of education. Integration strategies would remain of value to reduce cultural differences.

Ms. Hannah-Jones also ignores that busing, like Affirmative Action, doesn't give everyone equal opportunity, only the Black kids who are selected for the bus.