The Busing Conversation We Should Be Having
So apparently, thanks to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, we're all going to talk about busing some more. That's a conversation many Americans been having, sort of, for a long time.
When Joe Biden was a freshman congressman, I was a high school junior. In my rural and small town and mostly white high school, we were aware of racial and racist strife as something that happened somewhere else. Probably some place Southern, we assumed. But when my senior year started in the fall of 1974, we were amazed to see a huge blow-up over forced busing--in Boston. Because that was in the news, one of my classes was assigned an essay about busing, or as it was more commonly called at the time, "forced busing." I can remember the broad strokes of what I wrote--something about how if black and white students sat in classes and grew up together then racial strife, like the riots that we remembered from our childhood days, would be a thing of the past. I was, like many white kids of my generation, a poster child for extreme ignorance about the history of segregation and racism in this country. Heck, in my own small town. It would be decades before I learned about a petition circulated in the sixties to keep black home buyers out of certain neighborhoods. At the time, I thought that if children of all races just grew up together, we'd all treat each other with respect and kindness and the world would be a better place. It seemed so simple; but then, most things seem simple if one is ignorant of the weight of history.
I was a college freshman when Joe Biden was denouncing forced CONTINUE READING: The Busing Conversation We Should Be Having