John Kifner’s riff in the New York Times on how much Boston has changed since the bad old days when anti-busing whites raged against blacks is encouraging but at the same tme sadly empty.
Even when it is not done so explicitly, busing is usually presented as something of a morality play, with noble, integrationist whites (with a supporting cast of loyal [to the Democrats] blacks) struggling against racist whites to promote integration. The resulting “white flight” — in Boston “[t]here were 45,000 white students in the public schools in 1974; today the figure is 8,431, or 14 per cent of the total” — thus is usually seen as whites fleeing not only from blacks but from their own decent but abandoned principles.
Kifner doesn’t go into any of that here, which is why his short piece comes across as empty. It is entitled “Before Gay Marriage, There Was Busing,” but better, much better, would have been “Before Racial Preferences There Was Busing,” for busing, i.e., assigning students to school by race to promote integration, was the first major instance where liberals abandoned color-blindness in favor of “taking race into account.” The arguments that were crafted in the busing controversy to justify racial assignments were later used, with little modification beyong chaning “integration” to “diversity,” to justify hiring, promoting, and admitting by race.
Busing, like quota, came to be reviled as a code word, but it is difficult to see how anyone who favors racial preferences could have any principled objection to it.
Well, a supporter of racial preferences could object on principal to transferring little kids to schools across town, that their parents didn’t choose for them and know nothing about, and that are very inconvenient for the parents to get to to pick up said kids when they’re sick or need them for some other reason, and that require long, long bus rides to and from school every single day. By the same token, not all white flight was caused solely by parents not wanting their kids to go to school with black kids – some was caused by objections they had to the above. Some black parents objected too.
that’s “principle”
While there can be no doubt that prejudice against blacks motivated the white resistance to busing, an equally important factor was refusal to be ordered around by upper-class whites. Most of the resistance was based in the working class and poor white community who felt “oppressed” by the lawyers, judges, and academics who were telling them how awful they were as humans and how they should live their lives. In the end, the only thing they had the power to do was remove their kids from the government schools or move to the ‘burbs.