School resegregation

I don't think it is a stretch to assume that the vast majority of parents feel that their children should be allowed to attend close, safe, healthy, successful, neighborhood schools. They don't think about any federally-imposed busing or desegregation orders.

Even if parents don't think about issues of desegregation, school districts must. In most cities, inner city growth patterns and NCLB are forcing school districts to take a careful look at what it will take to bring equality to education.

NAACP Says North Carolina School District Shows Return To Jim Crow
Post by Associated Press in Nation on Dec 3, 2010 at 5:58 pm
RALEIGH, N.C. – The country’s most prominent civil rights group has come to Raleigh to draw attention to what it calls a growing erosion of the gains made since a 1954 Supreme Court decision made segregated schools illegal.

Using Wake County’s ongoing debate over school diversity as a backdrop, the NAACP is holding a national conference on education in Raleigh to argue that schools around the country are, in essence, returning to Jim Crow-era patterns of segregation.

“Resegregation is on the rise,” said the Rev. William Barber, chairman of the state NAACP chapter. “The rates now are worse than in the 1970s.”

Wake County has been the scene of acrimonious dispute since the school board voted to scrap a decade-old policy that used busing to achieve socio-economic balance in public schools. The NAACP and other groups have staged protests and marches and filed a federal civil rights complaint. Barber is among several who have been arrested in demonstrations against the end of the policy.

“School boards across this country are rolling back the clock to the time before Brown vs. Board of Education,” NAACP national president Benjamin Todd Jealous said in a statement. Jealous was scheduled to address to the conference Friday.

But that sentiment is out of touch with both the reality of public education and recent Supreme Court rulings, according to Roger Clegg, president of the Falls Church, Va.-based Center for Equal Opportunity.

A 2007 decision by the court found that school districts can’t pursue integration policies by using students’ race as a basis, which Clegg argues is what busing for diversity amounts to.

“Even if you think there’s something desirable about having a politically correct racial and ethnic mix, it doesn’t justify the enormous costs of engaging in racial discrimination,” he said.

Clegg also challenges the claim that schools are becoming more segregated, arguing that falling percentages of white students matches the declining number of whites in the population overall.

The term “segregation” doesn’t refer to demographic change, but to legal policies explicitly designed to keep people of different races separated from each other, Clegg said.

“If you use that definition, not only is there no resegregation in the United States, there is not a single segregated school in the United States,” he said. Source

Related articles:
Racial Tensions Roil NC School Board; 19 Arrests
New School Board Has N.C. Worried About “Resegregation”

Frankly Scarlett, I don't give a damn

When I read the invite for this event, I could not help but notice the irony:

The 2nd annual Classic Movie Night event

featuring "Gone with the Wind"

Enjoy the finest in southern hospitality right here in Central Illinois.

Please join Captain Butler and Miss Scarlet for a sumptuous buffet of all the foods and beverages for which the South is famous. The entertainment and lavish decorations make this an evening you don't want to miss. Guests are encouraged to come in period costume.

This fundraising event is being put on by the Boys and Girls Club of Peoria.

As we know, Gone with the Wind takes place during the Civil War and tells the story of Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner. Scarlett eventually inherits Tara (a plantation located in Atlanta) and at one point wonders if after the War her plantation will still be standing, or it will it “also be gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia”. The prologue of the movie refers to the old way of life in the South as "gone with the wind."

What was the way of life in the South at that time? Well, there was this thing called slavery and the subsequent enactment of Jim Crow laws, which set up the disenfranchisement of blacks, who, by the way, had no voting rights. That same disenfranchisement is still resonating in the majority of black families today - generations later.

The vast majority of the clients that the Boys and Girls Club serve are currently dealing with the social ills that go along with being disenfranchised. Although I am sure intentions are good, throwing a fundraising event with the theme of Gone with the Wind for the Boys and Girls Club is somewhat insensitive.

The invite encourages folks to wear period costume. Who do you think will show up in a costume calling herself Scarlett? Who do you think Rhett (Captin Butler) will be? If I were to go, hmmm…. what could my period costume be? How about a little something like this:

... or this:

Let’s not even speculate about what the entertainment for this period event could be.