Quote:
Originally posted by Not Me
I know many people from areas where there aren't many blacks around and their schools are segregated simply because blacks don't live where they live in any large number. Like Maine. But those people aren't racists.
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I don't just
know people from areas like that, I grew up there. In my community, a "minority" was someone who wasn't Swedish, Norwegian or German. I didn't meet a black person until I was in 7th grade. (Incidentally, everyone but the town kids were "bussed" -- our route was an hour long.) In 7th grade, a black family moved into the school district with a daughter in my grade. Someone painted "Jim Crow" and a swastika on the school wall and the family left after a year.
Fear of the different and unknown is a huge part of racial intolerance. I also think the older one is before personally encountering someone of a different race, the harder it is to break the stereotypical image of that race.
Hello and Not Me, since you are so sure that bussing was the wrong thing to do, what do you think should have been done? Let cities continue with separate and unequal schools until they felt like changing things, meanwhile depriving those children of the same education the white kids were getting? Order cities to start pouring money and resources into the all-black schools to raise the quality of education?
While you're at it, what do you do now? You've got No Child Left Behind not fully funded by the federal government, school districts with budget cuts and inner city schools with a disproportionately high number of kids for whom English is not the primary language. You think you know better than the liberals; fix this.
