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Why busing failed

By Tanner Colby

Five years ago, while fervently supporting the candidacy of the man who would become America's first black president, I came to the realization that I didn't actually know any black people.

Most of the people I did know (i.e., other white people) didn't know many black people either. One, maybe two, was the norm. I asked one white guy I knew if he had any black friends, and he replied, "You mean ones that aren't on television?"

I wanted to know why integration — actual, genuine integration — had failed so spectacularly. The result of that curiosity, published a little more than a year ago, was Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America, which traced the history of the color line back through all the places I have lived and chronicled the various efforts to erase it: school busing, affirmative action, fair housing, etc. Recently, I celebrated my one-year anniversary as an official participant in the National Conversation About Race — writing bits, speaking at colleges and sitting on panels moderated by Soledad O'Brien (which is how you really know you've made it).

When I started the book, after eight miserable years of George W. Bush and the euphoria of the Yes We Can crusade, I'd been driven pretty far left on the political spectrum. Taking on the issue of race, you'd think I'd have kept heading in that direction. But the more I read and researched, the more I went out and talked to people, I found that a funny thing was happening: I was becoming more conservative.

Which is not to say I was becoming a Republican. Because how could I? At this point, the GOP's rap sheet of racial offenses is almost too long to recount. Pushing undemocratic voter ID laws, trotting out candidates like Herman Cain, calling Barack Obama the "food stamp president" … if it has to do with race, you can count on Republicans being wrong early and often.

But one of the more subtle consequences of the right's willful incompetence is that there is rarely any thoughtful critique of the left when it comes to race. But here's a fact: A lot of liberals hold on to some really bad ideas about race too. Fifty years after the March on Washington, America's high school cafeterias are as racially divided as ever, income inequality is growing, and mass incarceration has hobbled an entire generation of young black men. Do we really think this is entirely due to Republican obstruction?

With the right being derelict, the left assumes stewardship of our new multiracial America by default. So there is an added responsibility to get it right, to purge outdated orthodoxies, admit past mistakes and find real solutions that work.

Taking the occasion of Black History Month, if you're going to look at where the left went wrong in repairing the sins of Jim Crow, you have to start at the beginning, with the squandering of the greatest liberal victory of all: the 1954 Supreme Court decision meant to put an end to segregated schools, Brown vs. Board of Education.

In 1999, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA published a widely read report titled "Resegregation in American Schools." Analyzing racial-balance percentages from school districts nationwide, the study found that our educational system made steady, significant progress toward a healthy racial composition up until the mid to late 1980s. After that, the trend reversed dramatically. As of the 1996-97 school year, the ratio of black to white students in public schools fell below the level achieved in 1972. In 2006, 73 percent of black children attended schools with at least 50 percent minority enrollment, and 38.5 percent attended schools with at least a 90 percent minority enrollment. Since then, the numbers have kept heading in the same direction.

In the left's narrative, the culprit for this backsliding is always the same: conservative, Republican-appointed justices like William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, who gutted the legal foundation for Brown and rolled back busing and other integration initiatives in order to protect the white, suburban majority. But that's only half true, a fact illustrated by the very word liberal academics have coined to describe the phenomenon: resegregation.

Resegregation is a misleading term because it implies that the left's large-scale integrationist schemes were working, and would have continued to work, if not for the meddling of Republicans. The reality is much more grim, and it starts in the place where Democrats drove the school bus into the ditch: Detroit.

The urban riots that rocked Detroit in 1967 were among the worst in the nation. White flight in the Motor City was well ahead of the curve. By the early '70s the city's public school population was 69.8 percent black and climbing fast, even though the metro area, as a whole, was only 19 percent black. In 1971, in the case of Milliken vs. Bradley, District Judge Stephen J. Roth found that the Detroit school board had employed illegal measures to keep its schools racially segregated, in violation of Brown vs. Board. But because so many whites had already fled the city, there weren't enough white kids left to integrate Detroit's schools. Roth ruled that the only way to create a meaningful racial balance in Detroit's public schools was to include all of the surrounding suburban school districts in the proposed remedy; he mandated that the state of Michigan create a busing plan that would take thousands of black kids out into fortress suburbia and haul thousands of white kids back downtown.


Once in office, Nixon appointed anti-integration staffers to the federal agency charged with enforcing integration. And when the departure of Justice Abe Fortas left a vacancy on the Supreme Court, the president told his attorney general that the replacement should be "a conservative Southerner" who was "against busing, and against forced housing integration. Beyond that he can do what he pleases."

After Nixon's first two appointees for Fortas' spot were rejected for upholding Jim Crow laws and/or espousing white supremacist ideologies, the president managed to find Harry Blackmun, a Midwestern conservative palatable enough to win confirmation. Unfortunately, thanks to death and retirement, Nixon was given the opportunity to appoint a total of four justices in under four years, packing the court with anti-integrationists.

When Milliken made it to the Supreme Court on appeal in 1974, the justices reversed the lower court's decision by a 5-4 margin — with all of Nixon's men in the affirmative — saying that the adjacent municipalities of a metropolitan area could not be compelled to cross city or county lines in a cooperative desegregation program. Suburban whites who paid suburban property taxes could not be made to send their kids to the city for school. Detroit could only bus students inside Detroit, which by that point meant it could only integrate black kids with other black kids.


Nixon's Supreme Court shut down Detroit's busing plan on nakedly political grounds. Metropolitan areas are interdependent ecosystems. They share highways, electrical grids, sewerage systems — just not schools. But here's the thing: Just because the plan was shut down for racist reasons doesn't change the fact that the plan needed to be shut down. It was a ludicrous idea.


In the South, where busing originated, most people lived in small towns and cities. Even the biggest metro areas, Atlanta and Birmingham, Ala., weren't really that big at the time. Though thoroughly segregated, blacks and whites lived in relative proximity in the South, and moving a couple hundred kids this way or that wasn't a huge logistical obstacle.


Even though segregation in the North was a different disease than segregation in the Deep South, Democrats prescribed the same course of treatment. Busing advocates had fallen victim to a common human fallacy: If it's not working, do it more. It's a mistake we all make when we really believe in something. And a lot of hard-core liberals ardently believed in integration. How did they fail so badly in their efforts to achieve it?

The left's first blunder on integration: Not actually knowing what integration was.

For the decade after Brown, white schools in the South evaded and resisted integration. Then, under Lyndon Johnson, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare finally stepped in and took a strong hand, demanding that schools move beyond token integration by showing "statistical proof of significant progress."

Emboldened by the victories of the New Deal, Washington's best and brightest had learned to dream big, to put their faith in top-down, technocratic solutions to society's ills. That's how they approached public housing and urban renewal; that's how they approached Vietnam. School busing was no different. They fired up the buses and sent X percent of black kids over here and Y percent of white kids over there. If America refused to integrate, the government would redraw the map and do it by administrative fiat.

While this probably seemed — and, in some ways, was — an unavoidable response to white stonewalling, it created a new problem: There's no such thing as "statistical proof" of integration. Integration, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it, is "true intergroup, interpersonal living … the positive acceptance of desegregation and the welcomed participation of Negroes into the total range of human activities." Integration is the forming of relationships based on mutual trust and respect. Schools could be forced to desegregate — that is, to accept black students — but genuine integration, as King said, was an "unenforceable" demand. The government can put us in the same room, but they can't make us get along.


The left's second blunder on integration: Busing wasn't actually what black America was asking for.

Because Brown vs. Board was such a landmark decision, the idea of integration and the larger civil rights movement became somewhat synonymous, wrongly so. Black America wasn't fighting for integration, per se. They were fighting for agency, the right to exercise control over their lives and, hopefully, to enjoy the full protection of the government while doing so.




The left's third blunder on integration: Sending white kids to black schools.

After Brown, white parents fought for 15 years, doing everything in their power to keep black students out of white schools. But when the courts started mandating that white students bus into black schools, white parents didn't fight for much longer. They just left.


Were those parents being petulant, entitled and racist? Yes. They also weren't wrong. Because integration is two different things. It is "intergroup, interpersonal living," learning to empathize with one another through shared cultural experience. But integration is also about access to wealth and power. Integration is the means through which marginalized groups gain entrance to the benefits already enjoyed by the majority. "I cannot see," King said, "how the Negro will be totally liberated from the crushing weight of poor education, squalid housing and economic strangulation until he is integrated, with power, into every level of American life."


Sending a couple dozen white kids to a majority-black school may be a rewarding cultural experience, but it is not integration. A black school may offer a perfectly good education, academically speaking, but the one thing it does not offer — not in America, anyway — is greater access to the social networks and cultural norms that govern the allocation of wealth and power. For integration to be taking place, you have to have a critical mass of middle-class, upwardly mobile people into which the marginalized group can then be integrated.

Middle-class white kids were never going to get on buses and go and "integrate" black schools because middle-class white people are already integrated, in the middle class. Their immigrant parents or grandparents likely started the process of assimilation for them, overcoming social and cultural barriers to give their kids the tools to move further up the ladder.




Far less documented is the fact that black families with the leverage to get out often did the same. In Birmingham, where I grew up, middle-class blacks pulled whatever strings they could to get their kids into Ramsey, the top magnet program in the city. Failing that, they coughed up the tuition to send their kids to John Carroll, the relatively integrated Catholic school. Those parents hadn't marched on Montgomery just to have their kids bused off to marginal county schools full of C-average white kids in order to satisfy some arbitrary metric of racial balance in the greater metropolitan area. They'd marched to gain control over their children's education.


Busing proceeded without incident and stayed in place at our school for nearly four decades. Today, the school is almost 10 percent black and — more important — you'll find most of those kids sitting all over the cafeteria. And this is in a suburb of Birmingham, at a school whose official school flag used to be the Confederate Battle Flag. In suburbs like Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Mount Airy, Pa., comprehensive fair housing programs were weighted ahead of overwrought busing plans, and are often held up as the best examples of integration America's got. None of these places are postracial utopias, by any means, but they are places where integration proceeded in accordance with a few clearly understood principles and took into account the interests, and political tolerance, of both white and black parents. Because of that, some progress was made.


Today, America's schools are more racially homogenous than they were 25 years ago. But to say that those schools are "resegregating" is to misstate the facts. They can't resegregate. They never integrated. We moved a lot of kids around for the sake of making things look good on a spreadsheet, but our communities and social networks remained largely unchanged. The racial balance created by busing was a fiction, and in the absence of those programs we're just seeing the country for what it has been all along, what it never stopped being: separate and unequal.

So what do we do about it now? Not much — not in terms of education policy, anyway. Nobody seems to have a solution that works, but a good start would be an honest assessment of what went wrong the first time and why. It would also be useful to go back to Brown and recall what the Supreme Court actually instructed schools to do. Its directive was clear: eliminate the last vestiges of state-sponsored segregation "root and branch."

In that formulation, segregated schools are really just the branches, growing out of racially homogenous neighborhoods and towns. If we want any kind of long-term solution to this problem, we have to look at housing, zoning, mass transit, property taxes. That's where the roots of our racially balkanized and economically stratified cities lie.

We can hack away at the branches all day long, but if we don't deal with the root of the problem, we can't expect anything different to grow back in their place. We have to give black families the agency and the opportunity and the leverage to decide where on the map they want to be. "True integration," King said, "will be achieved by true neighbors who are willingly obedient to unenforceable obligations." That may sound like a lofty mountain to climb, but if we set our sights on anything less, we're not attacking the right problem.

Tanner Colby is the author of "Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America."

© 2014 Slate

Why busing failed 02/07/14 [Last modified: Friday, February 7, 2014 5:55pm]
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