Separate but equal redux

by | Apr 11, 2018 | Editor's Blog, Education, North Carolina | 7 comments

North Carolina is back in the news for GOP attempts to reverse the progress that the state has made over the past 50 years. This time, a Bloomberg article highlights attempts to re-segregate our public schools. The GOP is considering ways to breakup county-wide school districts that successfully integrated schools into smaller districts.

I can’t tell if Republicans are ignorant of our history or contemptuous of it. I suspect it’s some of both. On the one hand, the influx of people from outside the region don’t remember or haven’t heard about the struggles we went through breaking down the barriers of Jim Crow. But on the other hand, the modern GOP in North Carolina was built on a foundation of segregationists who opposed integration or ending Jim Crow. The rise of Donald Trump has exposed how many are still around and how little they’ve evolved.

The policies Republicans are proposing look remarkably like the policies conservative Democrats used to oppose Brown v. The Board of Educationin the 1950s and sixties. The so-called school choice policies closely resemble the Pearsall Plan that would offer white families vouchers if they wanted to attend private schools to avoid having their children attend integrated schools. Setting up multiple school districts within counties will divide them along geographical lines that will almost certainly split them racially, too.

The language Republicans use is even similar to what the segregationists used in the middle of the 20thcentury. To avoid integration, North Carolina had what they called freedom of choice plans which allowed families to choose which school to attend. Today the GOP calls its voucher and charter programs “school choice.” I wonder if Republicans will claim the new school districts are separate but equal?

Republicans will claim their plans offer more flexibility to families and reflect the progress we’ve made in race relations. They’re fooling themselves. We’ve certainly made progress, but not nearly enough to believe, as Chief Justice John Roberts apparently does, that we’ve achieved anything near a color-blind society. Reversing the policies that have made progress threatens to reverse the progress itself.

Desegregation of schools has worked in North Carolina. It’s attracted industry to the state, built our reputation as a welcoming place and helped right the wrongs of our past. But its work is not done here. Re-segregation will continue to damage our reputation just like Amendment One, HB2, extreme gerrymandering, and voter suppression.

7 Comments

  1. George Greene

    Clueless carpetbaggers really are part of the problem. In many of the places that our new voters came from, school districts were normally smaller. They simply don’t understand why it’s wrong. The unaffiliated or Democratic newcomers, anyway. The Republican ones understand all too well and just want to make it like it was — was, where they came from, geographically. The fact that that would also make it like it was, where WE came from, historically,– well, that’s just a bonus.
    Otherwise well-meaning people can grow the ugliest sort of neighborhood pride around this issue — “we worked hard, we’ve
    got a good tax base, we deserve to have better schools” — no, idiot, you don’t. Public schools are provided by state law and the constitution does have an equal protection clause, requiring all states to provide to all persons under their jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. In the case of poor children of color this means an equally protected right not to grow up ignorant.

  2. JC hONEYCUTT

    Looks to me as if the Republicans are trying to achieve a “color-blind society” by working toward schools with only one color–“out of sight, out of mind”, y’all? Count me out–and not just because I learned years after my school days that I’m bi-racial. Wonder what the Repugs would do about folks like me?

  3. Rick Gunter

    This is not fake news, brother. Thomas Mills wrote a solid column that is spot on,

    All the old fights, particularly racism, have to be refought periodically. Our society appears to take a step forward and two backward.
    Charter schools are often nothing more than those private academies established in my present home county of Prince Edward County, Virginia, where the public schools were closed for five long years in the late 195s0s and 1960s rather than obey the law of the land and desegregate. The schools were only reopened after local officials faced prison time.

    Black youngsters largely lost out on their crucial school years while white kids attended private and very segregated schools. I am not sure much has changed in some quarters all these years later.

  4. EBRUN

    More FAKE NEWS from the left.—school choice is designed to achieve racially segregated schools. What a fraudulent claim! For instance, the low-income scholarship program has been primarily used to provide minority families with the financial means to enroll their children in private schools, many of which were heretofore predominately white. As such, the program promotes racial integration, not segregation.

    And with regard to achieving a “color-blind society”, that will continue to be a elusive goal as long as the Democrats continue to resort to identify politics as their primary political strategy.

    • UKNOW IMRIGHT

      Mmmmmmmmm, not so much Ebrun. The low income scholarship program you referenced, without substantiating your bogus claim, is not true. According to the NC Department of Public Instruction, the vouchers are often drawn from a random lottery system. The vouchers were awarded to whites in 2016 at 64.6 percent, which the last time I checked would be a majority.

      Now, you may presume that minority families are the primary recipients of the “scholarships” because that’s what your racial biased brain wants to believe, but you are WRONG.

      BTW, this is an opinion piece you chump, not news. Find something else to do with your sorry life.

      • Ebrun

        Personal insults tell us a lot about your character, unkow. I won’t respond in kind, but will instead interpret the numbers you cite.

        The last time I checked, the vast majority of hispanics living in the U.S. are classified as ‘white.” So your 64 percent number doesn’t really reveal how many of the scholarships were awarded to ethnic and racial minorities.

        But if you’re still obsessed with racial identify politics, the percentage of non-white NC citizens is much lower than the 35.4 percent you cite as receiving the scholarships. So your data indicate that non white NC families receive a disproportionally larger share of the scholarships. I would contend that this was one of the goals of the program. Your name calling can’t change that fact.

        Oh, and BTW, there is no prohibition on opinion pieces citing FAKE NEWS.

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