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Banned
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Originally Posted by Xell101
That problem lies not in race, so why address on such terms?
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If it isn't race related, what is it ? Please read this 2003 AJC.com news coverage:
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<a href="http://www.kirwaninstitute.org/news/articles/ajc062203.html">http://www.kirwaninstitute.org/news/articles/ajc062203.html</a>
...........................Gary Orfield, co-director of Harvard's Civil Rights Project and author of several books on race and education, says metro Atlanta's suburban residential segregation is the driving force behind its school resegregation.
Even in urban DeKalb and Fulton, black people tend to live in the south and white people in the north. "When we moved to south Fulton 20 years ago, the school down the street was all white," says Eddie Martin, an African-American parent in south Fulton whose two children rise at 5 a.m. to travel across town to north Fulton schools. "Now, the school is totally black."
Another factor in resegregation is private school enrollment. Between 1960 and 1999, private school enrollment fell everywhere in the United States, with two exceptions: the South and the nation's southwestern border states.
While the city of Atlanta's population is 33 percent white, only 7 percent of its public school students are white. And though Avondale Estates in DeKalb is 88.8 percent white, Avondale High School is just 5 percent white. The numbers reflect the choice by many white parents in Atlanta and Avondale for private education for their children.
"If left up to the communities, we will migrate back to all-black and all-white schools. I think school integration has become a lost cause," says Martin.
The rising resegregation of schools comes at a time when the United States is on the brink of a seismic demographic shift from a predominantly white population to a multiracial one.
"White people who grow up in racially isolated schools, however excellent, are increasingly going to be out of step in the world in which they are going to live," says Jack Boger, deputy director of the University of North Carolina Center for Civil Rights. ................
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And this:
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<a href="http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/artajcnorthsouth.htm
">http://www.ejrc.cau.edu/artajcnorthsouth.htm</a>
Take Philadelphia, for example.
Settlers founded the city along the banks of the Delaware River. Fine homes and businesses flowed west and north; gritty factories and oil refineries headed south. The rolling fields of suburban northwest Philly, like Chestnut Hill, are the places to be; flat and swampy townships like Chester are not.
"People with money like to be on hilltops because of the views and the better air circulation," says professor Abbott of Portland. "And a lot of the key rivers flow north to south, so that means the northern ends tend to be the higher land and southern sites tend to be lower. That also means better drainage (in the north), so you don't find yourself living in a swamp. The upscale people tend to capture the high ground."
Implied, but left unsaid, by Abbott is that the well-off burghers of Philadelphia and dozens of other towns didn't want to draw water which somebody upstream had sullied.
"People generally move upriver so they don't get the garbage and pollution," says Ford of San Diego who wrote "Cities and Buildings: Skyscrapers, Skidrows and Suburbs."
It should come as no surprise that America's migratory patterns so greatly influenced the urban divides of newer U.S. cities throughout the Midwest and West. Trains from the south carried legions of poor blacks and whites to the low-paying blue-collar jobs in south Chicago, south Indianapolis, and beyond. There, families filled the steel-bending and meat-packing communities, which too often lagged behind the wealthier enclaves found north of Chicago, Indianapolis and elsewhere.
Whites from New England and the Mid-Atlantic states settled in north and west Indianapolis; whites and blacks from the Carolinas, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee peopled the south side. Today, I-70 and the east-west train tracks split Indianapolis, much like I-20 and the rails do Atlanta.
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Why the enthusiasm to eliminate affirmative action when there is nothing
of equivalent potential proposed to level the playing field ?
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<a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/08/07/will_bush_truly_renounce_privilege_in_admissions/">Will Bush truly renounce privilege in admissions?</a>
By Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist | August 7, 2004
WASHINGTON -- AS HE STOOD before thousands of journalists of color, President Bush was reminded by columnist Roland Martin that Texas A&M Univeristy recently announced it would end preferential treatment toward applicants whose parents and grandparents were graduates. "If you say it's a matter of merit and not race," Martin asked Bush, "shouldn't colleges also get rid of legacy?" Bush tried to dance for a moment with a light joke saying, "Well, in my case I had to knock on a lot of doors to follow the old man's footsteps." Then he added, "If what you're saying is, is there going to be special treatment for people -- in other words -- we're going to have a special exception for certain people in a system that's supposed to be fair, I agree. I don't think there ought to be."
Martin followed up, "So the colleges should get rid of legacy?"
Bush said, "Well, I think so. Yeah, I think it ought to be based on merit."
One more time, a few moments later, Martin asked, "Just to be clear . . . you believe that colleges should not use legacy."
Bush answered, "I think colleges ought to use merit in order for people to get in."
We don't know yet what Bush thought to himself as he left the Unity conference of African-American, Hispanic, Asian-American, and Native American journalists. But even the world's most famous legacy admission and the world's most glaring example of privilege with his C average at Yale, had to realize the seismic proportions of what he said. This was the same man who had his attorneys file a brief just before the 2003 Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to support the white students bent on destroying affirmative action at the University of Michigan.
That summer, the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action at the Michigan law school, judging that race was only one of many factors in admissions. It struck down the affirmative action plan for the undergraduate school, saying the points awarded for race were too arbitrary. In support of the brief, Bush said, "quota systems that use race to include or exclude people from higher education and the opportunities it offers are divisive, unfair and impossible to square with the Constitution . . . the motivation for such an admissions policy may be very good, but its result is discrimination and that discrimination is wrong."
Bush of course never volunteered during his presidency that legacy admissions are divisive, unfair, and impossible to square with the Constitution and that the result was wrongful discrimination. Nor has he been forced to address the issue by an overwhelmingly white press corps (90 percent according to a new Unity survey done by the University of Maryland journalism school). Nor has he been forced to by other black groups, since he has avoided the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus at every possibility.
But yesterday, speaking before the largest group of journalists of color in his presidency, he ran right into the buzzsaw of his own legacy. He simply had nowhere to go. His answer is sure -- if the 90 percent white Washington press corps was paying attention -- to set off a renewed focus on the most obvious hypocrisy during these years of attacks on affirmative action. While African-American and Latino students became the nation's scapegoats of "preferences," legacies who are overwhelmingly white have a two-to-four times better chance than regular applicants of being admitted to Harvard, Penn, and Princeton.
While Texas A&M says it is eliminating its legacies, and while vice presidential candidate John Edwards has called for their abolition, many elite schools, most notably Harvard, defend them. In a Wall Street Journal interview last month, Harvard President Lawrence Summers said flaty, "Legacy admissions are integral to the kind of community that any private educational institution is." Despite Harvard's recent pledge to relieve lower-income families of tuition costs, Summers was crystal clear that legacy admissions -- read that as "legacy admi$$ion$" -- come before anyone else.
Other schools, such as Duke, are just as blunt, saying legacy is a "plus factor." Read that as "plu$ factor." Summers defends legacies, saying, "the way to increase socioeconomic diversity is to admit and recruit more terrific and diverse students." That does not explain how legacies crowd out those terrific students.
That raises the obvious question. Bush, to his credit, did not duck the question on this day. But tomorrow and the next, as he races to his million-dollar fund-raisers full of men and women who, like him, benefited from the privilege of legacy, it is uncertain if he will bring up the subject on his own. If he brings it up himself again, we will know that the world's most famous legacy admission truly renounced his privilege. If he does not, his most famous legacy in education will be hiding behind it while attempting to destroy it for the scapegoats.
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