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[post_date] => 2019-08-08 20:59:43
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[post_content] => “I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.” — Joe Biden to Kamala Harris at the June 27 Democratic primary debate
Responding to Biden's comment, investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, explains in the New York Times why busing succeeded in some parts of the country and failed in others — and also why the term "busing" is inaccurate for what was, in fact, "court-ordered school desegregation."
[The fact that] Americans of all stripes believe that the brief period in which we actually tried to desegregate our schools was a failure, speaks to one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the last half century.
If there was a problem with busing, Hannah-Jones continues, it was that it was too successful, too good at desegregating schools in segregated cities and towns. Between 1964 and 1972, the proportion of black children attending white schools in the South rose from just two percent to nearly half. "The South," observes Hannah-Jones, "Had gone from the most segregated region of the country for black children to the most integrated, which it remains 40-some years later.”
In the northern states, however, wealthy white urban parents organized against enforced busing so effectively that the policy eventually failed. Today, most school districts in cities like New York and Chicago are de facto segregated.
Brown v. Education was not a court case about a child’s right to a better school on the other side of town, Hannah-Jones points out, but one about a child’s right to attend the school in her own neighborhood. The issue that Biden and others opposed was always integration, not busing.
Now, three years into the Trump presidency, we are seeing the consequences of segregated neighborhoods and schools.
“De facto segregation of public schools continues to thrust aside the critical democratic experience of learning and conversing with racial Others during the formative years of human and citizen development,” MIT professor J. Phillip Thompson wrote in 2017, not long after Donald Trump took office. Segregation, he explains, means that people "are less likely to recognize commonalities in their values – concern for family, respect for hard work, willingness to help others." In the absence of mutually acknowledged humanity, it's a short step to "scapegoating and divisive politics."
Segregation affects individuals and society in a variety of ways. One study by Boston University showed that black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods are policed differently, which accounts for the racial disparity in police shootings.
“A common refrain in the age of Trump is: ‘This is not who we are,’” David Smith writes in The Guardian. “A common riposte is to point to America’s long history of slavery, segregation and violence and say: ‘This is exactly who we are.’”
Most alarming about the racism exacerbated by segregation is that it has led to domestic terrorism, with mass shootings that target visible minorities.
Segregated online spaces are fostering racist vitriol. “He truly believed wild conspiracy theories he read on the internet, many of which vilified Democrats and spread rumors that Trump supporters were in danger because of them,” wrote the defense lawyers for Cesar Sayoc Jr., who sent bombs to Democrats and journalists who had publicly taken on Trump.
The hope and inspiration during these dark times lie with people and groups working to desegregate our society in different ways. In Houston, a city program called Build Up Houston seeks to empower and hire black business owners. Black and white ministers are working together to bridge the racial divide in churches and other faith-based spaces. Latinx activists, sometimes excluded from the black/white dichotomy, are establishing social and political movements that are founded on neither “American exceptionalism [nor] American aversion.”
In 2017, Thompson identified "morally-based organizing" across races as an essential endeavor to combat white supremacism. "How to convene the public when the majority (including a majority of blacks and Latinos) is dispersed in segregated suburbs is a pressing practical issue," he wrote. If we want to save democracy, we'll have to figure out the means of traversing the physical and the racial divides.
[post_title] => Why Joe Biden's former position on school busing is anti-democratic
[post_excerpt] => Between 1964 and 1972, court-enforced busing successfully desegregated public schools in the American South. But in the north, white parents in urban centers organized to oppose the policy — which eventually failed. Today, southern public schools remain integrated while northern public schools are de facto segregated.
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[post_modified] => 2024-08-28 21:11:30
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Quite a few of these men tried to fast track a comeback, circumventing both apology and expressions of contrition. Charlie Rose approached feminist editor Tina Brown with the idea that she produce a program with him interviewing prominent men who had been toppled by #MeToo (she declined). Louis CK received a standing ovation when he appeared unannounced to do a stand up set at New York’s famous Comedy Cellar, only a few months after he acknowledged that he had on several occasions stripped naked and masturbated in front of female comedians whose nascent careers were predicated on his goodwill. And last October The New York Review of Books published a 3,000-word, first person essay by Jian Ghomeshi, the disgraced Canadian former radio show host. The CBC fired Ghomeshi in 2014 after learning that the Toronto Star was about to publish an investigative report detailing credible accusations that he had for years battered women during sexual encounters, and had abused women who worked for him. Titled “Reflections from a Hashtag,” the essay is redolent of narcissism and self-pity. It begins:
Reaction to the essay was swift and negative, rising to a crescendo of outrage after Ian Buruma, then editor of the NYRB, made some egregiously tone deaf remarks in a follow-up 
Devin Faraci (screencap)[/caption]
While Salbi’s separate interviews with Caroline and Faraci are short and somewhat superficial, they do provide insight into the impact of sexual assault and the power of a sincere apology. A victim who receives an acknowledgement of wrongdoing and a heartfelt expression of contrition from the perpetrator can experience a powerful physical and emotional response. In the interview, Contillo tells Salbi that while the assault itself was terrible, a “larger psychological pain had lodged itself” in her body.
Caroline Contillo highlights one of the less understood effects of trauma — that it invades the body and stays there, long after the physical act. Ensler says the same thing to Maron: that when a victim receives an apology that carries empathetic recognition by the perpetrator, it causes a physical reaction. Contillo said that Faraci’s apology provided relief not only because she could let go of the pain, but because she now felt that she was “living in a culture that suddenly seemed to care about” women who had been sexually assaulted or preyed upon.
Faraci offered his 
