Impressive work but I think she gets wrong, like the Supreme Court got wrong, the idea that the goal is integration. In my opinion, the goal isn't integration but rather to improve the education and opportunity for black kids and to give them the freedom to go to white schools in pursuit of that goal. Brown got a lot right, but I can't abide with the notion that "separate schools, even if they had similar resources, were “inherently” — by their nature — unequal, causing profound damage to the children who attended them and hobbling their ability to live as full citizens of their country. "

I do not believe "Segregated, racially homogeneous schools damage the personality of minority-group children. These schools decrease their motivation and thus impair their ability to learn. White children are also damaged."

And don't get me wrong, I am not one of these fools walking around talking about things were better for black people during segregation. I say this as someone who went to mostly black K-12 and saw the benefits of being surrounded by black classmates and teachers and I saw when I went to college and grad school how black kids can be damaged by going to PWI in those formative years. Also, HBCUs have been proving disproving the idea that black kids are somehow damaged by being in racially homogeneous schools.

I think NHJ uses race and class almost interchangeably in her article, almost equating black with poor and white with middle class and wealthy. Other than that, I don't think she takes into account class in her analysis.

I think its important that poor kids are integrated in schools with middle class and wealthy kids (and manly because class is the best shorthand we have for parental involvement which is the real best indicator for a kid and schools success) but that doesn't necessarily require forced racial integration.

In fact, as detailed in her story of 307 and Chana Joffe-Walt story of IS 293, black students and black schools can be harmed by efforts to integrate when they take promising kids from black schools and send them to white schools (and draining talent from their black school).

In short me and ole girl got into when I expressed my doubt about how successful busing as a strategy is.


Malcolm Gladwell, I know, talks about it and how harmful forced integration was to black teachers in a dope podcast on the subject.

https://blog.simonsays.ai/miss-buchanans-period-of-adjustment-revisionist-history-podcast-transcript-b4c65731f73c





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"Everyone has a plan until you punch them in the face. Then they don't have a plan anymore." (c) Mike Tyson

"what's a leader if he isn't reluctant"