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Another shot in the segregation war

Arizona Daily Wildcat

Last week, a federal judge in Charlotte, N.C. ordered a stop to the forced busing plan of desegregation in its public schools. What does this mean for America? What does it say about racial relations? How far have schools come in providing children of all ethnicity's with equal access to education? How can children be treated equally when the system that is trying to make their race a non-issue, and then classifies them by race? These are all valid and difficult questions that this issue brings up. None of them have clear or easy answers. However, our society does owe it to our children to think carefully about them, and come up with new solutions for old problems.

Problems of segregated schools came up in the national agenda in 1954, with the Brown vs. Topeka case. The court ruled then that the policy of separate by equal education was in fact not equal. The schools for non-white children simply did not offer the opportunities that other schools did. So, the court ordered that schools be desegregated. If it had only been that simple.

Putting the next plan into action involved desegregating schools, with the least possible violence and to everyone's benefit. This proved extremely difficult and progress in desegregation was slow.

Minority children often tended to attend the same neighborhood schools. The courts could not very well order neighborhoods to desegregate, so they came up with the busing plans. Naturally this enraged many people, most of them white. For years, white children had received the very best of the educational world. They had the right teachers, the right supplies and the right facilities. Their parents did not think it was a very good idea to send Johnny to a primarily black school in the city when he had a nice school in the picket fenced suburb he lived in. It was not any easier to be the token minority child bused in. Those children were met with fear and resentment, making schools sometimes more tense than was usual.

In 1971, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools were forced to face the segregation inherent in their system. It reacted by adopting an aggressive busing plan. The plan including busing an equal amount of black and white students into schools, so that both would share the burden of this task equally. It also included the creation of special magnet schools that were ensured to be racially diverse because their attendance was formed out of a racial lottery. But in 1997, parents of a Hispanic third grader, sued claiming that their daughter was barred from attending a magnet school because she was not of the right race. This law suit effectively put an end to busing in Charlotte, N.C.

Busing never addresses why there are such high concentrations of minorities in poor inner city schools, and what it says about our society. I honestly wish that there was an easy solution to confront the inequalities of our educational system. I can not supply them now, but that does not mean that it is not our obligation to work towards solutions that provide opportunities to all our citizens.

This system was flawed, but it was started with the best of intentions. The good intentions of that system did not, however, outweigh that fact that there were inherent contradictions within it. You cannot equalize a racially unequal situation by prescribing a racial ratio. You can not fix a two hundred year old problem in 30 years. You can not expect things to change if you never dare to look at the real problem.