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How can you prevent segregation and why would you do it?
I was spurred to ask this question by this article and especially this paragraph where author builds logical sequence connecting segregation with various social ills:
"These segregated schools ruined children's educational and economic opportunities. They achieved much less academically. Because of this segregation, many more dropped out. Many fewer went to colleges. Those that did were disproportionately likely to enroll in less rigorous institutions, like for-profit community colleges. Because of this segregation, they earned lower incomes as adults. They were more likely to end up in jail. Their health was worse. In the end, these 100,000 are much more likely than their peers to emerge as the most economically disadvantaged members of society — whereupon the cycle will likely repeat with their own children."
Author doesn't spell out what is the main cause here but we can guess. It can't be money related issues, because they could be solved without integration with a different tax scheme. It can't be some institutional racism cause he does provide examples of black charter and views them as failures. No, in my understanding the single most useful benefit that black children lose out here is diversity in itself. Obviously there is a question of white and asian kids faring pretty fine without it and also the counterargument along the lines of DR slogan "you don't have right to a white people", but let's accept their premise as true. There are after all many instrumental benefits to your populace not being concentrated into the ethnic enclaves, assimilation is useful and if Romans could do it with the Gauls why Americans can't. What you can do to integrate schools once and for all?
The solution preferred by author - the repeat of the policies of forced integration doesn't work in the context of liberal democracy with freedom of movement and widespread desire to avoid "bad" schools i.e. schools with poor black people in them. 60s policies just kicked the can down the road and led to the white flight. Modern one that tries to do the same will end up similarly, maybe with much stark division in the end.
Successful desegregation should make resegregation not illegal but not desirable or simple. In the search of the solution, I think it's wise to try to emulate post-soviet conditions, because despite large immigration from much poorer countries generally Russian cities were resistant to segregation, the most ethnic districts in Moscow range from 20 to 50 percent of immigrants and not for the lack of them. What causes this? Multi floor apartments/soviet block housing allows for diverse quality and quantity of housing at the same place. Poor migrants often rent or buy small one bedroom flat to retrofit it into something more fitting for the Hong Kong, working class citizen or a student will live in similar one if alone or slightly bigger when married and/or with kids, middle class can afford to have good amount of square meters per person and each child will always have their own room, upper class will have can easily have double the space of a middle one and has option of uniting several flats into one. And all of them can live in the one building, use the same parking space and their children will go into the same school(private schools that cater to rich people exist but not everybody cares enough to opt for them).
Then we have widespread public transport that by existing devalues personal car infrastructure and makes getting into the city from some suburb much harder even in the smaller towns. And what maybe considered the most important part by people here is the law enforcement that while far from perfect for example both in Poland and in Russia(still much worse in the latter) does work at keeping streets safe, public transit clean and gangs non-existent(apart from the ones that get in with the government but that's a different story). I think democratic politicians can achieve this kind of integration and they have reason to do it, YIMBY i.e. urbanist faction becomes more powerful by the day in the local elections and I can see some of the people affiliated with it succeeding in the desegregation maybe without even make it a goal. But ideological solutions from people who do make it a goal can sink it all again.
The author doesn't build any connections, he just asserts them. To that extent there is no reason to make any assumptions based on what he writes as being true. It could all just as well fall under the umbrella of baseline brown inferiority and white supremacy when it comes to the gaps between the groups.
More to your question: There is no world in which parents accept placing their children into worse education facilities than they have to. The only way 'desegregation' is done is through direct or indirect coercion. It has long been the case that the poorest and worst off whites have to suffer living with the browns. Nothing about this will change. It's only now, as is evident in the comment section of the article, that the white middle class is feeling the heat it once left the white lower class to sweat in.
There is certainly justice involved in the disintegration of the white middle class in America. But it's not to anyone's benefit. Schools will still have to segregate the bad browns from the good. And for every brown that might be uplifted by white excellence, there might just as well be a white child dragged down by brown inferiority.
On a final note, something about this topic always strikes me as disturbing. Maybe it's a personal problem but I find it hard to tease out some cosmic righteousness through the suffering of children. If the fine folks in favor of these policies want to volunteer theirs to make things right, so be it. But if they want to volunteer other peoples children for this sort of endeavor I would find it more right those same people be thrown off a cliff. Because there is an inevitable increase in suffering coming the way of children that would otherwise be free of it, if not saddled with browns. I don't feel like anyone owes society their children in an effort to facilitate some devils bargain to differently distribute suffering amongst children. But considering the support for desegregation across the board, I'm not surprised the discussion crops up from time to time. People accept the suffering in the name of social justice.
Counterpoint: I have been thinking about the parable of the polygons recently which is a math-backed claim (dunno if it breaks down for more than bipolar groupings) that to avoid natural-process segregation from those who are okay being a minority as long as the minority is not excessively small in a given area, actually all we need to do is add in a parallel insistence that too much homogeneity is equally unacceptable. In other words, a manipulation of priorities can result in gradual re-integration without extreme policy interventions. That feels a lot more achievable than what many antisegregation people sometimes throw around, which as you correctly note, is often a hard pill to swallow.
In the context of education, that means even if parents are hyper-focused on getting the "best" for their kid, as long as you 1) extoll and encourage minimum levels of diversity 2) at least somewhat smooth out imbalances in different schools and 3) probably one other thing that escapes me for now; everything can still turn out relatively okay.
So yeah, I think a fundamental part of this is a deliberate cultivation of the values of diversity (which are real, if sometimes overstated or sliced too finely!) It's sadly not quite what modern liberals are doing, which have very self-evidently gotten lost in the trees, but at least the general thrust is praiseworthy, IMO.
Counterpoint: Your neighbors child(A smiley square) got its head stomped on repeatedly by schoolmates(smiley triangles). Its head bounced off the pavement again and again and now its braindead in a hospital bed. Are you happy with your child(a smiley square) attending that school knowing the persons responsible are going to attend it again in a year?
To make my point clear: I am not against social interventions. I don't understand why you would think that. I am against putting innocent children in harms way for the sake of some ethno-sadomasochistic ideology. The squares and the triangles are not equal in the real world. We can abstract the real world to a point where we don't see the relevant details. But basing our arguments on those abstractions is no different from lying.
To further elaborate, maybe if this particular act of triangle on square violence was an isolated abnormality, we could excuse it as such. But it's not. It just so happens that smiley triangles, despite being 13 percent of the population, commit over half of all violent crime. It just so happens that smiley triangles are more likely to engage in bullying. More worryingly, smiley triangles are more likely to view bullying activities as high status, unlike smiley squares.
So yeah, we can pretend that our extreme child-sacrifice based interventions are not actually that by using smiley faces. But I am not going to pretend with you. I will, as politely as I can, point out that you are intentionally throwing children into a chain of causality that has many more bad outcomes than they otherwise would have had. This is evil and you should be punished for it.
Well I'm glad that you acknowledge that your entire argument is predicated on the belief that child-on-child, permanent-consequence outright violence is inevitable (or at least highly likely) to occur in deliberate group-mixing.
I take strong exception to that. I think your belief that somehow placing your presumably-white kid in with your thinly-veiled majority Black school has a significant chance of landing them in the hospital or something is unsupported and warped by media perceptions and fearmongering. Sure, we can go and agree that many Black communities have a violence problem. I think there's a high amount of overlap with poverty, of course, but sure. But this doesn't happen on every level. I would concede, of course, that changing school administration away from a "forgive everything" paradigm might be needed to make this work of course.
I am aware and acknowledge your concern about how using kids to break a negative, self-reinforcing cycle feels a bit bad. But seriously, what else can we do? It's very well established that exposing kids to people different than them is by and large very effective at helping them understand that different is not necessarily bad. And it's not even all about race. Kids can very, very easily fall into bubbles far more easily than adults. My younger sister, for example, went through a phase in middle school where she was upset that our family vacations were only in-country because "everyone" was going to France or Hawaii or the Carribean or such. Which blew my mind because (at the time parents were upper-middle class and still are) at least part of my upbringing was in lower-middle class areas where I was quite aware that many families don't actually take family vacations hardly at all! That's just a small and trivial example. There are far more serious ones. Kids are sponges and need deliberate exposure to other ways of being and living while young.
So I'd challenge this whole paradigm that parents are being somehow brainwashed by SJW-stuff into putting their kids in danger for no real return. Rather, I would like parents to acknowledge the time-lag danger of accidentally raising an intolerant, ignorant, or sheltered child. And yes, that means that once in a while, a parent should go "I don't think my child has enough perspective and will be a more kind, well-rounded person if I break them out of their bubble a bit". This goes for many aspects of parenting. What you're proposing is exactly the same worldview as helicopter/lawnmower/bulldozer parenting and shares the exact same issues! Kids need to confront some sucky parts of life at some point, you can't coddle them forever! Learning interventions are best done young, just like how we now tell kids up-front they were adopted and that's fine rather than try and hide it until some future teenage moment.
Again, in case I lost some focus: the whole point of my post is to point out that otherwise-benign and rational actions like the self-sorting only when in strongly minority situations can have severe, negative consequences for society at large. Think of it like a game theory problem. All we need is to tweak the rules slightly and we can fix the game! In this case, acknowledging that there are negative consequences of growing up in excessive homogeneity.
Wouldn't you love a world where we don't have this 13% for half the violence stuff? We can get that world. America's violence problem is an aberration world-wide, which should be a clue that it's fixable. We aren't somehow doomed or powerless to simply attempt to live our lives in fear of radical violence. We are the architects of our own fate.
It's not like we've spent forever trying and failing. Brown v Board was in 1954 and rollout took a really long time -- major wide-scale efforts didn't start until over 10 to 15 years later and took over a decade to truly kick in. And remember, the starting point was that Black schools were deliberately designed, funded, and often forcibly maintained as worse quality. The schools themselves, not the people! That's a lot of ground to make up. Most data seems to suggest that desegregation efforts stalled out in the late 70s and ratios flatlined until about the 90s when (arguably organic) re-segregation started happening (though the timing causes one to wonder if this was a negative side effect of War on Drugs-related stuff that started about the same time!!!)
So basically, the data suggests that for one decade, we tried to desegregate schools exactly ONCE. This is a far cry from "pie in the sky intervention 8742". And I really can't square what you mean about the scale including "continents and generations" without concluding it's a racial dogwhistle -- could you please expand on what exactly you mean by this?
Brown v. Board of Ed SPECIFICALLY said otherwise about the case in question
Most historians have found that although separate but equal does indeed sound like a workable (though ultimately unconstitutional) fair-ish principle, it was rarely true. Especially in the South, where most Blacks lived (and still do). Like, just to use a trivial example, a separate but equal bus scheme would be like, left vs right side -- not front vs back. You'd go to church, and the white people would get better seats near the front and get Communion first. You'd go to a public water fountain, and one would be broken and one would be working fine. If you went and applied to medical school, you'd be denied because no "separate but equal" faculty group existed, therefore could not be accommodated. All of these are real examples. I could go on. In education, already unequal facilities were made even more unequal by geographic school funding on top of already unequal treatement.
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