Was Desegregation Bad for Blacks?

Actually I dont entirely disagree. There were two things that needed to be done.

1. End legally mandated segregation. Brown v. Board basically took care of that. Pre-Brown, you had two sets of schools. And not only were they seperated on racial lines but even distinct in terms of funding and resources.

2. Integrate schools. Really the harder part. Brown also mandated things like new busing routes, inter-district zoning remedies, etc... Most of this stuff never happened as a few years later in the Milliken decision, the courts struck down inter-district remedies. So while integration could still occur, it could only occur within school districts which was pointless since a lot of districts were already drawn based on racial lines.

Integration in this country never really happened. After Brown, everyone saw white flight and the abandonment of urban communities for the suburbs and local courts were powerless to integrate these new schools. And this trend basically continues today. urban schools are predominately minority dominated while having the most corrupt administrations and least amount of funds while the burbs have great schools with great funding and administrations.

The arguments in that video are a set I'm not sure I agree with. Some black professors have argued that segregation in essence codified the black community into a legally recognized establishment which allowed for greater black empowerment. Dont agree with this premise at all but I do believe the whole desegregation process was ****ed up from the start and is responsible for a lot of the failures we still see today.

 

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I doubt the majority of blacks have succumbed to the negative consequences she may have alluded to. And I don't know that desegregation in the "adult" platforms of housing, employment and public facilities would have survived over the long term if we hadn't initially conditioned different races to interact and cooperate in a quasi-egalitarian and meritocratic environment like school.

Maybe it's worse for those of us blacks least likely to succeed, because we don't get the "example" of high-achieving black role models, but no way was desegregation was bad for the Stanley O'Neals, Richard Parsons, Barack & Michelle Obamas or Colin Powells of the world.

 

20 years separate brown and miliken, not "a few". there was a lot of experience in school busing, etc in between.

 

A lot of local courts in the South werent even enforcing Brown after the case went through. They show the clips of Arkansas a lot but integration remedies never really happened in a lot of the country. And Milliken basically killed off the programs that did exist.

 

Desegregation wasn't bad, but not following through on it might've set racial healing back for a couple of generations.

Enforced outreach might be the most expedient way to shatter misconceptions of racial poverty and stereotypes. It's much harder for bored and angsty rich teens to emulate urban culture when they're forced to take in urban culture and witness its realities. If we really live in two Americas, then it would be like visiting another country.

This would change the passiveness political pundits and critics label upon the American people and open an offensive that would help unify the nation.

 

What's bad for blacks is their recent cultural shift in the past 15 years or so. I think it can best be conveyed through music (and also music video) examples, since they impact the youth of the nation's mindset (or Zeitgeist). What ever happened to the happy blacks like the Jackson 5, the Supremes, hell, even Jimi Hendrix to a certain degree??? The past 15 years have shifted to the "gangsta blacks" such as Snoop Dogg, 50 cent, Tupac, etc that have all been in and out of jail at various points in their lives and have propagated this mindset of "acting tough" and hyping up crime and thuggery. If you go to urban high schools today, you see this mindset not only among the blacks, but it's also spread to the other groups. It's now "cool" to act "thoed" or "hard". While this attitude might seem trivial, it's not a supportive attitude that fosters family life, education and positive influences, and those things have a severe negative impact on blacks. It's no accident that many of the high performing blacks in schools are recent immigrants from places like Nigeria or Ethiopia...they didn't grow up in this thugged-out destructive culture that exists here.

 

I've heard this argument before and in some respects desegregation did hurt blacks. Under segregation black communities were more economically self-sufficient as money earned in them largely stayed in them and black owned businesses had no competition from outside. The communities were also more cohesive as black students were educated near home and at the same time black professionals and other successful blacks couldn't leave the communities. THese communities were rightfully ghettos in terms of racial segregation but not interms of relative poverty as in the same community there were poor, middle class and even relatively well off blacks. Desegregation though meant that black businesses were confronted with competition with the wider white economy as now blacks could spend their money anywhere. At the same time better off blacks could move to where ever they wanted and like many of their white counterparts they too also moved out to suburbs and away from the ghettos leaving mostly the poor behind. The busing of school kids also took them away from their community and removing the connection between school children and community.

While all of these were problems that desegregation created at the same time the huge benefits of desegregation can't be ignored. While you could become successul relative to the ghetto that was only as far as you could go. For instance the best black architect in the third ward would still only be limited to the third ward without the chance to gain wider success in society overall. As another poster noted while desegregation might not have led to success to all blacks without almost no blacks would've had the chance at success as the Condileeza Rices, Bob Johnsons and Oprah Winfreys have had.

 

I think white youth went through the same "devolution" in the '60s and '70s with illicit drugs, casual sex, and social rebellion that adversely affected their development on a slightly earlier time trend than blacks. The difference is that we blacks are not the dominant culture in Western society and, understandably, we probably have a much lower "margin of error" with respect to cultural and social advancement. I think.

I would be hesistant to laud that entire cohort, to the derision of domestic black culture, as you seem to do here. You may just be observing the most talented, intelligent, driven, wealthiest or luckiest people from their respective societies: where a Western visa may have the same value social or economically as a full college scholarship might here, and might be as competitive to obtain (it was for my parents when they emigrated here from Cameroon and Haiti via competitive scholarship programs). Secondly, take another good look at some of the countries these individuals come from: mid-to-high double-digit illiteracy and poverty rates, genocidal, corrupt and unstable political processes; AIDS infection rates through the roof (and rising, thank goodness my parents were gone by the late '60s). Are you absolutely certain these are the more "enlightened" of all black cultures?

 

Sorry, but I call major BS on this one. If true, then why hasn't this shift had a severe impact on white America, since white kids but the majority of hip-hop? Why are so many white girls succeeding since Paris Hilton and the like are probably the most popular women of the day? Where was this impact when rock-n-roll was what rap is today (including all the negativity and drugs)? How did our people make so much progress during the blaxplotation era when the main heroes were pimps like Superfly...when you had to be a thug, hooker or athlete to get a break as a black actor, etc? And I'm laughing very hard at your list of happy blacks, with their various drug issues, adulturous ways, crazy family, etc. Are you serious???

I think desegration was bad for blacks in two ways (not bad overall):

A) It removed black children from an environment where their teachers really cared about their success to one where their teachers really didn't give a damn about them/understand them. New school way....Tyrone doesn't seem interested and we aren't really concerned with him so send him to special ed. It's no suprise that the majority of black college graduates are from HBCU's, where the environments are still nurturing to black students.

B) Once folks could "move on up" a lot of the successful blacks (with money) and their businesses left our communities. My mom was in high school in Midland, TX when they desegragated and the thing she remebers most was all the black businesses that catered to black students closed along with those schools. Also, the hood's best and brightest started leaving the local schools to go out of district. I think Ryan has between 20-40% of it's zoned students transfer out via magnet programs.

So, yeah...good overall...but it sucked in some ways too.

 

I never thought about that. It seems that with desegregation among races, the segregation among different income levels become more apparent. And since most blacks were poor at the time of desegregation, this does work to their benefit.

 

how could desegregation cause skyrocketing drop out and teenage pregnancy rates? ...especially when you look and see that schools are still pretty "segregated" today.

 

i agree with what you said except for point a. are you really certain that the teachers don't care and that it is their fault? you don't think the educational issues could be coming from other sources? i don't think the typical white teacher "understands" or "nurtures" a sikh, chinese, or any other academically successful group of immigrants better than american blacks.

 

To me, it's not desegregation that has been bad for black people.

The worst thing that ever happened to black people in America was the assasination of Martin Luther King.

Why?

Because no black leader with his incredible leadership and inspirational skills has stepped up to fill the void since MLK was assasinated. This, to me, has had more of a negative effect on black people in the US than anything.

 

?? What about Quannell X?

 

crack is the worst thing to happen to black neighborhoods in the last thirty years. period.

 

when my parents moved into the neighborhood i grew up in in 1980, it was a nice middle class community. now it is the ghetto, what happened, crack. plain and simple

 

Two points:

- If Blacks are worse off after desegregation, we aren't doing enough to ensure that desegregated schools work.

- I don't have the statistics, but my perception is that public schools as a whole have gone down since the 1960s. It seems that they've gone down more since the 1980s than anything. I don't know that Black education has fallen off any more than White education since the 1960s.

 

And yet the most definable image of American culture - not just black culture over the past fifteen years has been hip hop. It has influenced fashion and dress all over the world, music all over the world, etc.