Want to know how I can tell Kamala scored big?

it's bullshit

And there's no question that he did, indeed, oppose busing.

and not her busing.

Yours is a distinction without a difference. "Voluntary busing" was meaningless in segregationist states unless it was mandatory, instead.

Busing was one means to achieve it. Some districts were willing to use it, and Berkeley was one of them. Biden's legislation did not concern Berkeley.

Among other things, it prohibited the use of any federal funds to bus students beyond the school nearest their homes even if the busing plan was purely voluntary and also prohibited busing to "pair" or "cluster" schools, voluntarily or otherwise.

Berkeley's program was not federally mandated, and continued until it was scrapped in the 90s. Biden's legislation did not concern Berkeley.

These funds didn't differentiate between transportation costs for voluntary busing and court-ordered busing. Biden's legislation eliminated all federal funding for school busing costs, even if it was voluntary, which would have cut the assistance Berkeley and other school districts received for their transportation costs.

Please do some research this legislation
(did you even bother to read it?) and how federal education funding works before throwing out any more baseless assumptions couched as facts.

I can't read your NYT link as I don't have a subscription and ran out of freebies, so feel free to post excerpts, but it appears that his amendments to end transportation subsidies failed, and his other legislation only affected federally ordered busing. Which, as has been pointed out, the Berkeley program was not.


https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/28/18965923/joe-biden-school-desegregation-busing-democratic-primary

Last edited Sun Jun 30, 2019, 12:54 PM - Edit history (2)

Biden himself said it didn't cut off funding for court-ordered busing - probably because he recognized that a school couldn't be required to perform an unfunded mandate. Instead, it eliminated funding for and placed other restrictions on busing programs that were created at the local level voluntarily by local governments - exactly the kinds of program that Harris participated in and that he says he supported.

And Politifact found Biden's claim that ""I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education" to be Mostly False.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/jun/28/joe-biden/joe-biden-oversimplifies-his-record-school-busing-/

VOX doesn't say what you claim - nowhere in the piece you linked does it say that Biden"s funding legislation was limited to court-ordered busing. Probably because it wasn't. But it is a very interesting and informative article and I suggest you read the whole thing:

participated in.

But if Biden had gotten his way, voluntary busing programs like Harris's would have been defunded and would have been rendered virtually impossible, despite his claims now that he fully supported voluntary busing.

from federally mandated busing, which he had opposed, when it was locally mandated busing, which he did not oppose, which gave her access to a quality education in an integrated school.

She told a good story, but should have used another little girl to make the point.

for the Democratic nominee (even if it's Harris, whom he now considers just slightly better than Williamson though Harris had been a favorite of his before the debate), would disagree with you about whether Biden was being called a racist:

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Sorry I have been out of the loop lately.

She accused Biden of opposing a voluntary busing program she'd participated in while living in Berkeley. He didn't.

where does she go with this? She'll probably lose in CA and get nothing in the next admin. How could she accept it? The whole thing was ill advised.

as has been documented countless times

completely debunked


It also uses the old tried and true states rights claptrap and once again spins up the de facto versus de jure angle that non-southern cities always tossed out to try and keep up segregation (and not just on education)

CNN fact checked your claims

and found them very wanting indeed

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1144461457624403974.html


Daniel Dale
@ddale8
Reporter for CNN, fact-checking politicians.
6 tweets, 1 min read

you still haven't figured out that busing is spelled with one s?

correct for me

UK raised and schooled

Are you writing from there?

Southern California, for the near future at least (once we return in the fall).

I was born in Los Angles, but my parents moved back to London when I was a toddler.

I came back a couple years ago for one of my uni degrees as my parents divorced and my father moved back to SoCal (before I did, I was still in uni in the EU.)

We (my wife and I) live with him atm (nothing beats a free letting, lol). Ted Lieu is my my congressman.

I always have the urge to correct (for me) the spelling of articles I cut and paste from US sources, but that is pretty much swings and roundabouts, as it is too much work and also I feel it is not being honest with the integrity of the posting.

That explains the UK spelling which I believe is permitted!

Would be the proper spelling, too! USA!

a racist.. right before she "threw a plate of Spaghetti at him".

Yes, BS was against busing.. but Biden was the only one she attacked. Wonder how BS was feeling at that moment in time?

Also, notice he was pro gay rights and pro choice while other people were claiming Roe “went too far” and a woman “shouldn’t have complete control of her body”

between them! OMG..

The old marks for making any conceivable issue about Bernie Sanders were hard to beat on DU. Congrats!

There are probably a few others of that generation who held similar views.

I am sure that a similar reaction would occur from many.

And did someone say Joe Biden was a racist? I missed that part.

other “to get the job done.”
He never, ever said he was proud to work with Eastland.

I'm not going to re-look up his quotation, but here's my rewording of my own statement: If Bernie Sanders mentioned interactions with James Eastland to exemplify "the civility of people with opposing views...", to use your phrasing, he'd be subject to criticism and rightly so.

And while I support other candidates in the primaries, if Biden wins, I really really really want him to win in the GE. So I would love to see some cleanup for future speaking on this issue.

Did you ask the OP to alter the implication that Biden was called a racist? That would be an even-handed approach to accuracy.

Biden said that Eastland called him son and never called him boy, in the context of reflecting about the need to build consensus within a caucus, across disagreements. In a 2020 Democratic primary. You are right that it's hard to assess what emotion Biden attached to this recollection - but if Eastland called him son and not boy, that implies fondness for Biden on Eastland's part, and Biden must have thought Eastland's fondness helped prove a point for a 2020 audience.

The statement strikes me, at best, as a nonsequiter and a poor example of collaboration for a Democratic audience during a competitive primary. Of course I would say the same thing about Sanders for a gaffe, as has occurred before. I'm pretty confident that Sanders would not reference James Eastland in this way, though. And I am confident that the Biden campaign will recognize the need for cleanup, much more so than most of the DU Biden supporters.

anyone would want it to be swept under the rug.

much better than any of the all white suburban schools that I had attended before or after. Diversity is great! A multicultural school is stronger for its many cultures.

and the subject of busing did not come up during the Clinton or the Obama years. I'm glad that your experience was a positive one, but it caused white flight from the cities, and is greatly responsible for the sorry state that most US cities are in.

Left the cities struggling. Was one of the main reasons for the explosion of the Suburbs.

and coupled with the finishing of the Interstate Highway System, it became economically feasible to work in a city, and live comfortably and safely within its suburbs.

"it caused white flight from the cities..."

Not a cause, merely an excuse. There's a difference 'tween the two words.

I don't know how old you are, but if you're under the age of fifty-five, then you have no living memory of the urban riots of the 1965-68 time frame, where even after passage of the Civil Rights Acts, the inner cities would blow up into fiery infernos every summer, and the problems spread to more and more cities.

During the busing period, these "race wars" as they were sometimes called, were displayed on TV as often as was the carnage from Vietnam. When white people were told that their kids would be transported to inner city neighborhoods for school every day, they were alarmed. Even if they had raised their kids as best as possible to minimize racism, they knew that would not protect their children from physical violence. So, they moved out of the school district, and just commuted to the jobs in the city, where the adults felt that they would be better able to deal with any violence that occurred.

I know that the Sixties are often depicted as times when people were into peace, love, rock-and-roll, and pot, but they were incredibly intense times for the people who lived in them. In 1968, even with George Wallace being on the ballot in all fifty states, bleeding off the votes of the most racist whites, and even snagging the electoral votes of several Southern states, Nixon managed to win the election with his dog whistle slogans of "Law and Order" and "This time, vote like your whole world depended on it" to lure the votes of frightened white people.

With middle class working people deserting the cities in droves, they deteriorated. Then, they were targeted by the Giuliani types who were into crackdown mode, and the drug laws that put away thousands of people for minor amounts of substances that had been sold legally earlier in the century.

Calling white flight an excuse ignores the history that white people of various European ethnicites and people of color had living with each other in urban areas, even if sometimes it was less than ideal. My adoptive grandfather came from Poland, and he had about as much tolerance for a racial joke as he did for a "Polack" joke. He was a union representative in the steel mills of Northwestern Indiana, and always fought hard to make sure African-Americans were treated fairly by the mills and by the union.

Most of the busing that occurred during that period was part of voluntary desegregation plans developed at the local level by local governments without federal mandates.

The huge controversy around busing didn't begin until the 1970s after the cities that refused to desegregate voluntarily were taken to court and ordered to develop desegregation plans that reassigned students to different schools. That's when the shit hit the fan.

So any white flight you're blaming on desegregation in the mid- to late-60s was not caused by busing. It was provoked primarily by white people who did not want their children to attend integrated schools.

And for some reason, the riots and violence stopped after 1968. Maybe it was seeing that they were counterproductive, both in terms of changing anything for the better in the cities, or politically because they led to the election of Nixon.

But the memories of that time were seared in the minds of many people, who had different reactions to them. Nobody knew if the riots would start up again. White flight started in the 1960's, but it continued through the 1970's, and I contend that busing was one of the reasons why. I also contend that the reason white people did not want their children in integrated schools was because of fear of violence.

Before we heard, "Drill, baby, drill!" from Sarah Palin, we heard "Burn, baby, burn" from people cheering on the 1965 Watts riots. It's tough to imagine sending your kids into that environment. If we can understand why Guatemalans would make a long trek on foot with their children to avoid drug gangs, we should be able to understand why white people would move their families to the suburbs during that time.

It didn't help America get any better.

It might be refreshing to read after all of these years. Are you referring to any specific points in the report?

It is interesting reading, and going through it, I was reminded of things I read before, but have since forgotten. Also, thanks for that website in general, it looks like it could be educational in a number of topics of American History. I'd use Wikipedia as the "Cliffs Notes", then dive into the course on HistoryMatters.

Clearly, white flight was going on in the 1960's, I'm not completely correct about thinking that school busing started it. But, I think the case can be made that it exacerbated the problem. Also, the Kerner Report seems to be very optimistic that the US could reverse course, had Humphrey been elected, that might well have happened. Certainly with Nixon winning, and all the voters willing to go with George Wallace, it was an aspiration that was not achievable.

While white flight in the '70s is often attributed to "busing," the real cause was desegregation, just as it was in the 60s.

The only difference is that more of the desegregation was court ordered - after so many cities refused to voluntarily comply with the law, black parents sued to enforce compliance. There was a spate of cases in the late 1960s and 1970s, mostly in the north, in which plaintiffs proved rampant and often intentional segregation. The defendants either entered into consent decrees or the courts ordered them to reassign students in order to overcome the segregation they had imposed directly and intentionally or arose from segregated housing that local and federal government were complicit in creating. Busing was the tool used to get children to their new schools, but the problem was the desegregation, not the transportation.

These parents were part of communities that fought desegregation tooth and nail, managing to stave it off for years through defiance of the law. But when the courts for involved and began ordering the school districts to comply with the law, they pulled up stakes and left.

It was the desegregation, not the bus rides.

the chief tool of desegregation? It's not like people were living in integrated neighborhoods, with white children going to school in one end of town, while black children were going to school in the other end.

But the real issue was the segregated schools and neighborhoods. The segregation was so entrenched that the courts eventually had to reassign the students to other schools in order to overcome the segregation. Sometimes the schools weren't far away and in walking distance. Sometimes they were farther away and the school provided transportation.

But school bus transportation was very common - kids had been bused all the time for decades and only a small percentage of school busing was for integration. In fact busing was often used to keep schools segregated with black children riding for miles common often passed one or more white schools.

That said, how else other than school reassignments do you propose schools could have been desegregated - especially in communities in which the neighborhoods had been strictly segregated for years and the school boards had consistently refused in the 15 r 20 years after Brown to make any effort to integrate?

in northwestern Indiana to go by. In Gary, there was a black side of town, and a white side of town (Glen Park) with a highway dividing them. Black kids went to school on their side, white kids on their side, and I went to Catholic school. It was not because of any sort of reason other than my parents' wanting to provide me with a religious-based education.

In 1964, we moved to a suburb, Merrillville, and I went to public school. We were caught up in the white flight of the time, most all the neighbor kids had learned a lot of racism from their parents. If any of it came home with me, I was quickly corrected.

In 1969, we moved to a suburb of Portland, Oregon, and while there were not many African-American families in our town, they were integrated into junior high and high school with me, although they were a tiny minority.

I was unaware of the use of buses to deliberately segregate schools.

schools or busing. He believed how schools were integrated should be up to state and local
authority.
In Harris’s case, her local school board voted to integrate schools. She was not bused under a
Federally mandated law.
I am glad you had a good experience.

exactly why racist shithead Eastland was all in with Biden on banning federal mandated busing.

however, in my comment. I am only pointing out a lack of transparency in Harris using herself as an example to suggest Biden’s position could have denied her, personally, an opportunity to access
quality, integrated education.

from serious efforts to desegregate our schools because of the political cost. We gave up. We settled for affirmative action to rebalance the inequity, and then we retreated on that too.

Frankly I think it needs to happen a lot more, at the point of a bayonet if needs be

How Trumpian that sounds.

Lived through it, watched it happen. Still does not fit with the hate we are witnessing today.