Democratic Primaries
In reply to the discussion: The busing issue is based on one unavoidable fact. [View all]Kind of Blue
(8,709 posts)So is guillaumeb's statement false or half true? "racism is so endemic to the system that it affects everything. And Harris' experience as a non-white female is qualitatively different from that of a white male."
Her parents were/are educated people but she was raised by her single mom in the flatlands, redlined African-American community in the areas South and West Berkeley. Even if her mom and dad earned upper middle class income in the early '70s, we know that to this day, because of redlining, black people who make that much do not live in upper middle-class neighborhoods.
She lived close to the dividing line, said Scott Saul, a professor of English at UC Berkeley and editor of The Berkeley Revolution, a digital history project. It is a harbinger of how she has crossed those boundaries throughout her life.
So I'm not sure how you relate systemic racism affecting everything to Harris not lacking in diversity, intellectual and cultural riches. My childhood in such neighborhoods had all of those riches. So are you saying the voluntary busing at that time was unnecessary, just because they wanted to? "statistics come from a 1963 report called De Facto Segregation in Berkeley Public Schools, which highlighted how segregated BUSD schools were in terms of enrollment and a number of other factors, including teacher composition and curriculum.
Along with passionate advocacy by the NAACP and UC Berkeleys Congress of Racial Equality, the force of new star superintendent Sullivan, and School Board members who spoke as strongly in favor of desegregation, that research helped pave the way for various integration pilots, including the tumultuous integration of the junior high schools in 1964, and ultimately the busing plan in 1968."
I'm not so sure of your statement, "Berkley, by the way, has been more integrated than almost anywhere else in America, certainly as far back as when she was growing up."
As far as I know "In the early 1960s, Berkeley was also at the forefront of the battle over fair housing. In Jan. 1963, the Berkeley City Council passed an anti-segregation law that included criminal penalties for those guilty of housing discrimination one of the first efforts of its kind. However, the opposition was tremendous...one supporter of the referendum said that it was A plot to Congo-lize our city.
Read more here about Berkeley, "more integrated than almost anywhere else in America," and the lasting affects of segregation. https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/09/20/redlining-the-history-of-berkeleys-segregated-neighborhoods
https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Kamala-Harris-rode-the-buses-that-integrated-14060240.php#photo-17774443
https://www.berkeleyside.com/2018/10/16/a-radical-decision-an-unfinished-legacy
http://revolution.berkeley.edu/projects/public-schools/
primary today, I would vote for: Undecided