Biden is clearly running for Obama’s third term, not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.
doublemansays
Kamala’s retort to Biden on immigration and the Obama administration was great.
Biden ain’t ready for this issue at all.
jconwaysays
Didn’t work last time
Christophersays
It did by 2.8 million votes, plus now we’ve seen the alternative.
jconwaysays
And following that path will enable Joe Biden to win by 2.8 million votes and lose the same states to Trump that Hillary did. Democrats have to recognize, as most of them did last night, that the Obama-Biden years were home to some big failures as well as big wins. Even Michael Bennet called out Biden for letting McConnell roll all over them.
Obamacare isn’t good enough. We deserve single payer. Obama’s deportations didn’t lead to immigration compromise, only standing up for the undocumented will. Letting corporations outsource and downsize at will isn’t a Democratic value anymore. Standing on the sidelines while right to work turns MI, PA, and WI red is no longer an option. We need a fighter, not a compromiser. Biden fatally misreads the moment. Progressives don’t want to come together, we want to win.
Christophersays
But Biden may be exactly the person to flip just enough votes in the right states to get the EC victory as well. Last I checked Obama is pretty popular.
jconwaysays
Obama was also popular in 2016 and that did not translate to electoral success for Hillary. I would also argue the counties that so starkly flipped from Obama to Trump were also rejecting Obama and economic policies that led them behind.
Unlike Hillary, Biden came out for the TPP. He also attached his names to a lot of bills that hurt consumers during his advocacy for the credit cards in his state. I worked for 3 years at the largest bankruptcy firm in the Midwest, let me tell you, ordinary people do not like the credit card and payday loan companies Biden shilled for.
He was low energy and defensive throughout the debate. He’s got an even longer paper trail than Hillary. If you’re a swing voter who took a chance on Trump to drain the swamp, why would you pick the biggest swamp creature in the Democratic field?
I get that Biden is a white Irish Catholic and culturally he speaks the language of the white working class more fluently than anyone on that stage other than Bernie. It’s why I think he would’ve been a stronger candidate than Hillary in 2016. But he’s also four years older and seems to have learned nothing about the ideological shift in his party and the broader country since 2016.
Obama-Trump swing voters are economic populists and cultural conservatives. Biden is the exact opposite of that. A centrist by greenroom and think tank standards, but nowhere near the actual center of the American electorate. They are far closer to Bernie and Warren on economic issues than Joe Biden.
Christophersays
You’re getting into unserious territory calling Biden the biggest swamp creature, plus last I checked polls show Biden beating Trump by the widest margins. I’m not arguing that others can’t also win, but all evidence is contrary to your suggestion that Biden can’t. Obama’s popularity I think is more salient now that voters have seen the exact opposite in terms of temperament. Why do you so often claim to speak for other voters as defined as a certain segment of the population with no data to back it up?
SomervilleTomsays
Elizabeth Warren correctly nailed Joe Biden years ago before she was even elected because of his aggressive promotion of the 2005 BAPCPA rewrite of consumer bankruptcy laws that devastated working-class and middle-class families struggling to keep up with skyrocketing credit card health insurance bills. Those changes were requested by and directly benefited the huge Delaware finance firms that were profiting by plundering those suffering people.
Ms. Warren cites that specific issue and conflict as the catalyst turning her into the political figure she is today.
That legislation was a direct assault on the 99%. It was a direct gift to the credit card companies that bankrolled Joe Biden as the Senator from Delaware. You might not remember that, but I certainly do.
That incident alone is pretty swampy, and it’s joined by a long list of others.
I frankly don’t care about any poll today. I am all too aware of similar polls in late June of 2015 showing Hillary Clinton a clear winner (emphasis mine):
…
According to the poll, 92% of likely Democratic voters said they could see themselves supporting Clinton.
The poll asked 1,000 likely voters about their opinions on potential presidential candidates, both Republican and Democrat.
It showed Clinton polling at 48% to 40% against her closest Republican contender, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the brother of former president George W Bush and son of former president George HW Bush.
Against the Florida senator Marco Rubio, Clinton polled 50% against 40%. And against Wisconsin governor Scott Walker she polled 51% to 37%. …
Republican pollster Bill McInturff told the Wall Street Journal that Clinton had “the strongest and most advantageous” standing among Democrats he had seen in 35 years of campaign polling. “She starts with advantages among very important groups,” he said. McInturff conducted the poll with Democrat Fred Yang. …
How meaningful did ANY of these landslide polling numbers for Ms. Clinton turn out to be?
The evidence against Joe Biden has been public for years:
– Opposition to busing
– Support for the 1% against the 99%
– Support for the 2003 Iraq war
– Support for the Hyde Amendment
etc etc etc.
Joe Biden is at or near the very bottom of my list of candidates. Why on EARTH would we pick him when there are so many other better candidates?
Christophersays
Well, to the four points near the end:
Opposed to busing – so am I
Support for 1% – I understand representing DE
Support for Iraq War – forgivable given context; so did many other mainstream Dems; execution was the WH responsibility
Support for Hyde Amendment – I’m OK with that, though he has switched recently.
I know polls can change, but until I see numbers don’t assume the ones we have so far are wrong.
SomervilleTomsays
It appears that the difference between us is why we have primaries. Presumably Mr. Biden will get your primary vote, and Ms. Warren will get mine.
jconwaysays
I’m personally offended by that charge.
Here’s a whole thread I made a month ago doing exactly that.
here’s the frequently cited Lee Drutman study showing that the electorate is center left on economics and divided on culture with the fiscal conservative/social liberal slice Biden represents being a small and insignificant sliver.
Here’s some fresh polls showing Biden losing a lot of ground to Harris from Morning Consult
Here’s the Stanley Greenberg Polling piece I previously posted about and linked to talking about why relying on an anti-Trump strategy is not the right way to win back economically stagnating voters.
So actually let me ask you to produce data to back up the unfounded assertions that Biden is more electable than others who are now beating Trump by similar margins and why his above the fray anti-Trump strategy will work where Hillary’s did not.
doublemansays
Kamala is very good. Her answer on insurance companies and deductibles was perfect. As was her answer on immigration.
Hickenlooper, Bennett, Swalwell, and Yang should get out. Williamson had an oddly great answer on health care and a truth of politics that people don’t win on laying out policies.
doublemansays
Harris absolutely drew blood on Biden with a discussion of race and Biden’s record.
I thought it was beautiful.
Kamala could (and should) get a huge bounce.
Bernie did not expand his base.
Biden did poorly and this could (and should) hurt.
Buttigieg didn’t do enough.
Everyone else on the stage was forgettable.
Christophersays
I can respect that Mayor Pete came right out and said he didn’t get it done regarding police and race.
SomervilleTomsays
incorrectly nested comment removed
SomervilleTomsays
I found tonight’s debate empty of substance, especially in comparison to last night.
I wonder if perhaps tonight’s cohort of candidates adjusted their answers based on what happened yesterday. I wonder if the moderators similarly changed their questioning tactics. I found tonight’s questions aimed at provoking fights rather than helping understand the similarities and differences between the candidates.
I thought Joe Biden was the strongest of the candidates tonight. His deep experience was apparent. I think that Ms. Harris walked into a trap and made a fool of herself by injecting her own experience into the debate. I just checked the history, and Mr. Biden is exactly correct. Last year, The city of Berkeley California celebrated the 50th anniversary of their locally originated busing plan for school integration. Mr. Biden’s stance on forced busing has always been that it should not ordered by the federal government. He has always supported locally-originated busing plans like the one that put Ms. Harris on a bus as a child.
Ms. Harris either did not bother to research or didn’t care that she has egregiously mischaracterized Mr. Biden’s position. I expect more from a legitimate candidate — Kamala Harris lost my vote tonight with that exchange.
Bernie Sanders was showing reruns tonight. I’ve seen them so many times that, like each of the original Star Trek episodes, I can speak all the dialog. I am just SO weary of his shtick.
The others were all forgettable, with a few good one-liners here and there.
Now that I’ve seen all twenty, it’s down to two candidates for me: Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker.
I understand the support for Joe Biden, I just don’t join it. Since I’ll almost certainly be voting in Massachusetts in 2020 (if there is actually a 2020 election), I’ll probably write in either Ms. Warren or Mr. Booker if Mr. Biden is the nominee.
jconwaysays
Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but my college friends and I have been group chatting each debate and we all found Harris to be the strongest of this group. We all thought Biden had a bad night, but people 40 and over on Facebook and here seem to think he handled himself well, so maybe it’s a draw?
Pete had some good moments but overall didn’t wow me like he did in person. He’s like Obama in that speeches and pontificating are strong suits and partying in sound bites is not. I can’t help but think he’d be doing better if he were a Governor and if Obama hadn’t run this wonky post partisan playbook already.
Leaving this round I’m also getting tired of Bernie. It seems less and less likely he’ll be the nominee the longer this goes on and his base continues to stay the same instead of expand. Obviously the next round should be the top 7 or something. I think Warren, Castro, and Booker earned a spot from last nights and Pete, Biden, Harris, and Bernie from this one.
doublemansays
Same here. Universal agreement among friends that Harris was the strongest and that exchange with Biden was brutal for Biden.
SomervilleTomsays
To you it was brutal for Mr. Biden. To me, it was an embarrassment for Ms. Harris.
I find her apparent eagerness to essentially lie about him to be an absolute deal-breaker. She claimed he opposed the program that she remembers from her childhood. In fact, Mr. Biden strongly supported that program.
She’s lying.
doublemansays
She’s not. He was an opponent to the idea of busing.
These are not technical arguments about the education department’s role in things, although that was the defensive mechanism employed by Biden to defeat it. They are arguments about the idea of busing—exactly like Harris claimed.
Looking at news results, this is absolutely the biggest story of the night. Most stories I’ve seen so far are not favorable for Biden on it.
SomervilleTomsays
You’re going to have to do better than a MotherJones piece if you want to persuade people who disagree with you.
Had Ms. Harris cited the experience of Boston or pretty much ANY other city where children were bused against the will of local government in court-ordered busing, her argument would have been sound.
She instead pandered to emotions by citing her own personal experience — and trying to ignore the fundamental difference that separated Berkeley CA from Boston MA.
The busing Ms. Harris remembers from her childhood was initiated by the city council of Berkeley CA. It was cited by Martin Luther King as an example of what America should be doing. Joe Biden supported that program.
The busing in Boston MA that Mr. Biden opposed was ordered by Judge Garrity and forcibly imposed on the city. It was fought bitterly and hard then and remains contentious today.
Mr. Biden was dead wrong to oppose that forced busing. Ms. Harris could have and should have used Boston MA (or any similar forced busing site) as her example.
Facts are facts, whether being contemplated by a 20-something or a 60-something. The fact is that Joe Biden supported the busing program that Kamala Harris remembers.
Biden supported a measure sponsored by Senator Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), a former Klansman who had held the floor for more than 14 hours in a filibuster against the 1964 civil rights bill, that prohibited the use of federal funds to transport students beyond the school closest to their homes and that passed into law in 1976. And in 1977, Biden co-sponsored a measure that further restricted the federal government from desegregating city and suburban schools with redistricting measures like school clustering and pairing.
“I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race,'” Biden added in the1975 interview. “I don’t buy that.”
I think you’ll have to show some evidence that he was actively in favor of one kind of busing but not another.
SomervilleTomsays
Will you at least concede that her argument would have been stronger if she had cited Boston instead of Berkeley?
jconwaysays
No since personal stories resonate far more with voters than citing a historical episode (sadly) unknown to most Bostonians let alone most Americans.
I also think it is absolutely fair. He was a consistent opponent of busing to integrate schools and teamed up with segregationists to kill it. That is his literal record. There is no record of him ever championing controlled choice or voluntary busing as an alternative.
SomervilleTomsays
I also think the burden of proof is on you and Ms. Harris to show evidence of his opposition to the Berkeley busing — Mr. Biden did not make the accusation.
I want to remind us that I am most emphatically NOT a supporter of Joe Biden, and I am as appalled by his opposition to forced busing as you.
It is the use of what to me are dishonest attacks that I oppose.
SomervilleTomsays
Elsewhere on BMG, you’ve self-identified as a millennial.
I feel compelled to remind you that I remember the civil rights era. I grew up just outside Washington DC. I was there in 1965. I watched the columns of smoke rising from the city in the “long hot summer” of 1968.
I do not need reminders of the emptiness and hypocrisy of state’s rights arguments about civil rights.
I was here in Boston when Joe Biden was a freshman Senator.
The controversy about forced busing is not something I extract from Google searches — I lived it.
The Berkeley CA decision to integrate their schools WAS revolutionary. You seem to completely discount it.
Of all the examples to cite tonight, Ms. Harris chose the single most celebrated example of a city CHOOSING to use busing to integrate its schools.
Do you think that choice was coincidental?
jconwaysays
She choose the school system she grew up with to point out that a leader fights the race based fears of his constituents instead of giving into them. Her parents were brave. Brave to get married in the 60’s and brave to send her to those schools. Biden was not brave.
The issue is not whether Biden specifically opposed voluntary busing in Berkeley-it’s that he gave into the fears of his white constituents in Delaware and prioritized them over the white and black voters who wanted integration. He didn’t volunteer to send his own kids to integrated schools like her parents did. They integrationists may have been a minority at that time, but so were abolitionists and civil rights supporters at different times in history. I trust the girl raised in an interracial household in multiracial schools over the adult Senator who couldn’t look his constituents in the eye and tell them they’re wrong.
SomervilleTomsays
@I trust the girl …:
As I recall, you joined the criticism of Ms. Warren for using her own life story. It seems to me that you are judging Ms. Harris by a standard different from the one you applied to Ms. Warren.
I trust the woman who bases her judgement on fact, and who chooses arguments based in fact that most clearly show the behavior she criticizes.
I trust Elizabeth Warren. I want nothing more to do with Kamala Harris.
jconwaysays
Your ignoring that various facts that Doubleman and I are bringing up that bolster Harris’ arguments. CNN agrees with us. Your issue seems to be with Harris herself and not what she brought up.
I am not sure what your referencing in regards to Warren’s personal story. If it’s the DNA test she eventually followed my advice and apologized to the Native American community for using a test they find insulting and illegitimate. I’ve had no issues with that since then and consider the matter closed.
Warren is the first candidate I became a recurring donor to the other day so it ultimately did not affect my support for her. There are a lot of areas where Harris deserves criticism, her valid and righteous attack on Joe Biden is not one of them.
jconwaysays
I was here in Boston when Joe Biden was a freshman Senator.
And while you and my father, who actually had rocks thrown against the group home school bus he drove through Southie and Dorchester, were appalled by this city-Biden stood with the likes of Louise Day Hicks hiding behind the fig leaf of neighborhood schools while Joseph Rakes would’ve attacked Kamala and her classmates if given the chance. Is Biden a racist like Rakes? No, but neither was Louise Day Hicks. Both “only wanted” “neighborhood” schools. It’s Kamala and her parents who took a real courageous stance.
SomervilleTomsays
@Louise Day Hicks:
Indeed, that is my point. Mr. Biden was egregiously wrong on busing. It is totally appropriate to call out his racism, and I am certainly not defending it.
Ms. Harris could have used Boston and Louise Day Hicks, and her argument would have been much stronger. Mr. Biden DID side with racist bigots like Louise Day Hicks.
The decisions a president must make should be based on fact, rationality, and logic. The apparent willingness of Ms. Harris to parade her identity rather than cite actual cases of actual racism that Mr. Biden supported disqualifies her.
jconwaysays
I listened to the clip on Boston Public Radio. Jim and Shirley Leung agree that Harris was the standout and Biden lost for what it’s worth so did most of the callers. So you’re in the minority here quibbling over a minor detail.
She said his opposition to federal busing made it harder for voluntary busing at the local level. That is neither inaccurate nor dishonest. The other pieces I linked to below show how the climate of ending federal desegregation directly impacted voluntary desegregation in places like Berkeley. It made it that much harder for those communities and those students.
SomervilleTomsays
@ I’m in the minority:
I get that. It’s not the first time I’ve been out of step with mainstream “liberal” orthodoxy.
My bottom line is that Kamala Harris has joined Joe Biden near the bottom of my list of favored candidates.
The coveted Toms-worst-place-candidate slot is owned by Tim Ryan after his embarrassing night in the first round.
jconwaysays
I give Ryan mixed results. I agree he has no business running for President. He’d make a great Senate candidate against free trader Rob Portman.
Christophersays
What I think I know about Hicks is that she actively opposed the very concept of integration which went beyond neighborhood schools.
Christophersays
Every example you give seems to be playing games rather than fixing the problem with schools.
doublemansays
I agree with your top 7. Too many others are wasting time.
I think Williamson might see the biggest bump among the low single digit candidates. Her answers were odd but in some ways wise and will stand out as more appealing than many others.
SomervilleTomsays
I’m really troubled by these “generational” arguments.
A misquote is a misquote, whether the audience is 30 or 60.
Are you saying that people under 40 don’t care about intellectual integrity?
I was part of a generation that famously said, as teenagers, “Don’t trust anyone over 30”. That same generation was fully capable of enthusiastically supporting Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, or for that matter Robert Kennedy — each of whom was well beyond 30.
If you are correct, so that those under 40 truly ARE unable or unwilling to demand intellectual integrity, rationality, and objective debate, then we truly are lost.
We are talking about leaving behind the foundations of the Enlightenment and returning to the Dark Ages.
jconwaysays
I like the McCarthy/Kennedy analogy.
Biden is 68’ Humphrey. Establishment backed and saddled with unpopular policy positions. Bernie is McCarthy. His run moved the debate in the right direction and paved the way for Warren to get in the race but you can’t quite picture him in the White House or his movement leading him there. Warren is RFK. Idealistic but also a ballsy behind the scenes operator who knows how to wield power and get things done.
SomervilleTomsays
Heh. And just to extend the analogy, Kamala Harris is Shirley Chisholm.
I hope there is no Sirhan Sirhan in today’s picture.
jconwaysays
Shirley Chisholm was awesome. I had her poster in my classroom last year.
Christophersays
See, even though I disagree with busing as we’ve discussed, I thought Harris’s personal testimony on this matter was the most powerful moment of the night.
SomervilleTomsays
Am I the only one offended by her dishonesty?
Her “personal testimony” was premised on the lie that Joe Biden opposed the program that she remembers. In fact he strongly SUPPORTED that program.
jconwaysays
Am I the only one offended by her dishonesty?
Yes? Even the right leaning pundits thought it was powerful, as did the commentators on Morning Edition where I heard the exchange.
I also don’t think it’s dishonest at all. Forced busing was a term first employed by the Roger Ailes led communications team on the Nixon campaign. The phrase is not an objective one, but a dog whistle to indicate opposition to school integration.
The fact that Biden so willingly worked with outright opponents of integration to scuttle it is all the proof I need he was wrong and Harris is right.
The bigger issue is that when Republicans exploited white fears of miscegenation to roll back school integration that Biden’s instinct was to compromise with those forces instead of fight them. Forces that were opposed to Harris even existing as a mixed race person let alone going to a mixed school. He never should have compromised with them and his actions definitely made it harder on families and communities pursuing voluntary integration by giving in to the climate of fear.
Ted Kennedy may have also taken drinks with Eastland but he also took a lot of heat for leading on integration while Biden followed the racist fears of his constituents.
SomervilleTomsays
I agree that her attack was powerful, that’s what I don’t like about it and that’s why I compare it to the infamous Willie Horton ad. It was devastatingly effective and powerful (as was the followup revolving-door ad).
One more time — I oppose Joe Biden and I agree that his position on forced busing was wrong — just as I agree that his position on the Iraq war was wrong and his position on the Hyde Amendment was wrong.
I would join the chorus of kudos for Ms. Harris had she chosen Boston instead Berkeley as her cudgel.
jconwaysays
Her “personal testimony” was premised on the lie that Joe Biden opposed the program that she remembers.
That’s not what she said Tom. She made it clear he opposed federal desegregation efforts which made voluntary ones like hers harder. As she said, having the power of the federal government on the side of integration would have helped her program. I can’t find the transcript but she’s not wrong that “local control” and “states rights” are and were code words. The study I cited shows how the programs her and I grew up with lost all their federal funding in the Reagan years thanks in part to the climate of fear Biden perpetuated instead of fight. That’s her argument. Nowhere does she say he opposed Berkeley’s busing program, he didn’t. Just like he didn’t oppose abortion rights when he refused to fund it. But cutting the funding makes it so much harder for these plans to work. Our schools are more segregated now thanks to Joe Biden.
SomervilleTomsays
I quoted the transcript elsewhere last night. It most certainly IS what she said.
SomervilleTomsays
Here is the exact quote where she talked about busing:
You also worked with them to oppose busing. There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me. So I will tell you that on this subject, it cannot be an intellectual debate among Democrats. We have to take it seriously. We have to act swiftly.
I’m sorry, but this is just dishonest. She says “You also worked with them to oppose busing.” Then she offers her own experience. Mr. Biden did NOT oppose the busing program that she remembers. In fact, as he pointed out, he instead strongly supported it.
She is turning facts on their ear.
I agree with Ms. Harris that we have to take it seriously. I disagree strongly with her implication that an “intellectual debate” isn’t serious.
I emphatically reject her intellectual dishonesty in this clearly rehearsed attack.
This is as bad as the Willy Horton attacks on Mike Dukakis and the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry.
doublemansays
She’s right. He did work with them to oppose busing.
He opposed using the federal government and wanted to leave it to local control. You may think that is support of local busing programs, but his other quotes at the time don’t back up the idea that he was a proponent of busing of any kind. And we know how local control or “states rights” have worked on civil rights issues throughout this country’s history.
SomervilleTomsays
He opposed forced busing.
An intellectually honest argument would have used an example that he actually opposed.
When people make an argument against “states rights” in the context of a civil rights issue, they don’t cite the states that voted to ban segregation before the federal mandate.
jconwaysays
Louise Day Hicks also went to great pains to separate herself from southern segregationists and say she opposed Jim Crow. This does not change the fact that her efforts, aided by Senator Biden, actually made life worse for black people in the North.
Hicks opposed George Wallace of Alabama, who ran for U.S. President on four occasions: “He’s a segregationist. I don’t want to be connected to him.”[16] Hicks continued, “While a large part of my vote probably does come from bigoted people. … I know I’m not bigoted. To me the word means all the dreadful southern segregationist, Jim Crow business that’s always shocked and revolted me.”[1
Biden said similar things then and now. He even claims he got into politics inspired by the civil rights movement. Yet he made a choice to side with bigoted voters over the NAACP of his own state and the black voters of Wilmington who wanted integrated schools. Families that might have been similar to Harris’ with the misfortune of living in a community that was not as outwardly progressive as Berkeley.
Public meetings regularly drew impassioned and angry crowds and lasted even later than the marathon sessions do these days. Among the parents who lashed out at each other in those settings were many white residents who threatened to sell their homes if the district went through with integration, Sullivan wrote in his book.
“Busing was a bad word in Berkeley,” he said, though he noted that 2,000 students already traveled out of their neighborhoods to private schools. Cost was never a barrier to integration, as the first year of the plan was estimated to require just 3% of the district’s operating budget. Plus, the district received half a million dollars from the federal government specifically for the first year of the program. (President Ronald Reagan later eliminated federal funding for desegregation efforts.)
So in this full context I think it is appropriate to say that Biden joined Reagan in opposing this funding and through his actions on behalf of scared white parents he hurt Kamala and her classmates in Berkeley.
SomervilleTomsays
You very effectively make my argument for me.
Kamala Harris could have and should have cited Boston. The comparison between Joe Biden and Louise Day Hicks is accurate and devastating.
fredrichlaricciasays
A Biden/Harris ticket thought came into my mind as I watched the debate.
SomervilleTomsays
Heh. I’ve been similarly wondering about Warren/Booker ticket.
jconwaysays
If Democrats acted as ballsy as Republicans we would have Warren/Harris.
The assumption is always that you balance the ticket to win, yet in my lifetime the GOP always doubles down on authoritarian conservatism (in different flavors) instead of appealing to moderates. Why should the Democrats be different?
Tim Kaine was embarrassed by Mike Pence on the debate stage. Harris would eat him for lunch. The racist and sexist voters turned off by this ticket are already wearing Trumps hat. I don’t see the risks really. I’m tired of always seeing my side water itself down while the other side doubles down on the Kool Aid and bile.
SomervilleTomsays
I find Cory Booker far more persuasive than Kamala Harris.
Perhaps we’ll see them on the same stage, I think that will be an interesting contrast-and-compare.
jconwaysays
Actually Tom education policy experts believe that opposition to forced busing has also weakened the legal and political foundation for voluntary busing. From the Berkeley Ed school blog:
It was when northern Whites began to actively oppose desegregation orders in their own areas that political support for desegregation in the political parties began to collapse and its legal status come under sustained attack.
Milliken v. Bradley, the crucial 1974 precedent that Kirp cites as the fatal wound against effective school desegregation (by removing the possibility of metropolitan area wide desegregation strategies) involved a northern school district, metro Detroit.
By making it impossible for desegregation planners to reach White students whose parents had moved to the suburbs, Milliken guaranteed that White flight to the suburbs would make desegregation an empty gesture, and the basic promise of forcing equal effort to educate Black and White children impossible to achieve.
Harris is arguing that by opposing forced busing, and “busing” is the short hand then and now for forced busing, that Biden also hurt students like Harris in communities trying to voluntarily integrate. Not to mention the overall issue that he sided with the likes of Louise Day Hicks and made the same arguments she did and valued those bigoted voters over the education of black kids like Kamala Harris.
The education of all children suffers because of persistent school segregation which is worse today than it was under Brown. Liberal white politicians like Joe Biden retreating from the fight in the 1970’s hurt instead of help. We could hardly construe his position as one of support, if anyone lied on that stage about busing it was Biden about his own record.
Short of being a victim of a Willie Horton dog whistle, Biden’s Senate tenured
is a career long exercise in running away from confrontation on behalf of women and minorities. Harris was right to call it out.
SomervilleTomsays
I agree that Ms. Harris was right to call out Mr. Biden’s long opposition to forced busing, that is not my beef with Ms. Harris.
I very specifically and narrowly reject her conscious choice to use her own life story instead of, for example, Boston and Louise Day Hicks.
Mr. Biden was offensively wrong about forced busing, just as he was offensively wrong about the Hyde Amendment. One of the reasons why Robert Byrd was never a presidential contender (and, according to the cited piece, not nominated to the Supreme Court) was his early embrace of racism and the KKK. Mr. Byrd also supported the Vietnam war. Mr. Byrd saw the light later in his Senate career, but he never had the audacity to run for President.
I oppose Mr. Biden’s candidacy. I believe his long history of poor judgement on crucial issues makes him unsuitable for the office he seeks.
I support the argument and criticism that Ms. Harris made against him, and I applaud her decision to make that argument last night.
I think she betrayed and disqualified herself by choosing her own ambiguous personal history rather than citing Boston, Louise Day Hicks (among a shamefully long list of Boston political figures) and Mr. Biden’s support for their racist bigotry.
jconwaysays
Her personal history was directly impacted by his support of these racist policies. I think she was quite clear in saying that the issue isn’t that he opposed her program directly but that he also didn’t have her programs back or support federal funding for it. That’s a huge thing.
Your Hyde analogy is spot on. He compromised with the antichoicers to craft a “neutral” policy that actually had the real world effect of limiting the reproductive choices of poor women and women of color. Harris is also saying that while he voiced support for voluntary integration his opposition to federal desegregation and compromises with segregationists actually undermined those programs. The data show that we are no better off today than we were before Brown. That’s directly the result of liberals like Biden dropping the ball. It’s a sharp and valid argument.
SomervilleTomsays
We very much agree on our opposition to Joe Biden.
drikeosays
I was one of the kids in DE Biden was trying to stop from getting bused. Got shipped from my suburb into one of the roughest sections of Wilmington in 1978. Kids in other grades who got shipped the other way faced protests. Formative experience and quite literally the best school I ever went to. Learned things about race and privilege that stick with me to this day. Joe Biden was wrong as hell and I’m glad they knocked me out of the white flight cocoon in which I was being raised.
Christophersays
I suspect you’re in the minority to be glad. If it really was a good school, great, but I thought the root cause of all this was that schools in minority neighborhoods, or to which minority kids were deliberately bused for the purpose of maintaining segregation, were generally not as good as the white schools or those in white neighborhoods.
SomervilleTomsays
There are many ways to measure “good”.
My youngest son chose to move in with us in the fall of his junior year in high school. He left a north shore public school that consistently scores higher than Somerville on pretty much every metric (I don’t know about spending per pupil).
The school he left had better theater equipment, better athletic equipment, new hallways, better test scores, etc., etc., etc. It was also lily-white. There were essentially no people of color and not even many Jews. English was the only language spoken by nearly the entire school (I don’t know about the faculty). The entire student body was from essentially the same middle-class economic segment.
He loved and thrived at Somerville High School. At the first school concert a few weeks after he transferred, we all loved that the music was as diverse as the young men and women performing it. Blacks, Latinos, Haitians, Portuguese, Russian — on and on and on. The program literally spanned the world. It was true that the sets, lighting, and audio gear at Somerville was much less elaborate than at the school he left behind. He has said many times that whatever challenges that brought about were dwarfed by the benefits of being among so many different languages, cultures, and viewpoints.
I think that children born into white privilege able to obtain what they need and want even when immersed for a few years in schools that do not score as high in metrics created by whites for whites. I think the lessons they learn about life, people, and diversity are far more valuable than whatever limits their time in urban schools impose on them.
Christophersays
I definitely would use the metrics described in your third paragraph to determine a good school, though it would certainly be fine for the population to be more diverse. I guess for me the primary mission of a school is academic so if I’m sitting in a fourth grade math class trying to master long division, that endeavor is not going to be impacted one way or the other by the skin color of the kid sitting next to me.
SomervilleTomsays
@ the skin color of the kid sitting next to me:
Which is why white children are not harmed by being bused to black schools.
Christophersays
Way to twist my arguments! I have NEVER suggested that the problem with busing is the integrated result. The problem is being forced into a lower quality school just to make the color balanced, and that there is something to be said for going to school close to home.
SomervilleTomsays
I don’t think I’m twisting anything. You wrote “if I’m sitting in a fourth grade math class trying to master long division, that endeavor is not going to be impacted one way or the other by the skin color of the kid sitting next to me.”
I expressed my agreement with that.
I think you’re correctly describing the stark differences that separate white from black schools, and using those differences to argue against forced busing, because your claim is that it harms the white students so affected. I think your argument assumes its own outcome.
Whether we like it or not, a lesson we learned in the draft is that white voters are more eager to solve problems that primarily impact minorities when those white voters are more exposed to those issues.
During the early years of the Vietnam war, young black men were far more likely to be drafted — and therefore killed and wounded — than their white counterparts. That dynamic changed when the draft lottery was imposed in 1969, so that young white men were as likely to be drafted as young blacks men.
It is not surprising that public sentiment rapidly shifted against the war as more and more white sons came home in caskets and wheel chairs.
I’m not claiming that forced busing solves the problem of substandard urban schools. I argue instead that your argument perpetuates and reinforces that problem.
A government official who refuses to ride the T is less likely to prioritize fixing the T than an official who depends on the T to get wherever they need to go. White voters whose children are attend excellent well-funded schools are less likely to prioritize fixing urban schools then voters whose children are forced to attend the schools they refuse to fund.
Christophersays
Yeah, I’ve always been reluctant to enact policy for the sake of penalizing life choices, proving a point, or manipulating support/opposition. Since you bring up the draft I’ll use that as another example. If we must have it then it should be applied fairly, but I emphatically disagree with those who say let’s have a draft when it is wholly unnecessary from a numbers or existential threat standpoint just to spread pain around for its own sake. For the record, IMO the most recent time a draft was actually justified was probably WWII.
SomervilleTomsays
@ reluctance:
What you call “manipulating support/opposition” others call “effectively governing”.
The point is that the draft lottery worked. Whether justified or not, shifting the draft to the more race-neutral draft lottery caused voter support for the Vietnam war to collapse. Since you presumably find the Vietnam era draft unjustified because of your opposition to the war (as do I), the fact remains that while the unjustified draft affected mostly black (and poor white) men, that same draft was enthusiastically supported by mainstream white America. It was only when white America was affected by the draft that white America turned against the war that motivated the draft.
While we’re on the subject, it is no accident that the next step taken by white America was to replace the draft with the present mercenary military system. Under the new system, mainstream white America pays black and poor white men and women to be killed on their behalf. Since the blood price of the thirst for war is again paid by somebody else, white America again clamors for war in various places.
In any case, I view forced busing as a necessary but not sufficient component of any successful effort to create a fully integrated public education system.
The benefits to minority children and the first-hand exposure to inner city schools for white children and their parents both more than compensate for whatever costs are imposed.
The benefits of full immersion in a diverse cultural social group are, in my opinion, among the most powerful ways that forced busing helps white children break the cycle of racism that otherwise traps all of us.
Christophersays
We obviously completely disagree as to the goals of public education then. For me its to get everyone well-versed in academic material. At the K-12 level I do not see integration as an end unto itself. As for the military I do not believe a free country should force someone to put their lives at risk unless there really is no other way. We need to expand opportunities to be sure, but nobody is forced these days to join the military, and that is as it should be. However, if you do choose that path you accept the risk knowingly and willingly that you might engage in combat.
SomervilleTomsays
Surely an overriding purpose of public education is to prepare every person to be full contributor to and participant in American society. Public education began with the revolutionary realization that a successful representative democracy requires a literate and well-educated electorate.
The celebration of diversity is surely a key aspect of what makes America great.
jconwaysays
You’re missing the forest for the trees. Why are the “lower quality” schools always in poorer and browner neighborhoods? The data show busing white kids there actually makes them better and gets them more resources. Busing black kids in the other direction also gives those kids a better opportunity to excel.
What’s easier than busing in theory is giving housing vouchers to everyone so that more people of color can move into our 98% white communities. And upcoming to build more affordable housing and increase the 41b allotment and not allow towns to get away with dumping their 41b stock into senior housing to keep it “in the neighborhood”.
I got bused to a diverse academically gifted program in middle school and has a much better time than if I had stayed where I was. Busing didn’t negatively affect my education in the slightest. Under controlled choice parents still have a say and school quality improves across the board.
Christophersays
OK, I suspect the reason you did better in the school you were bused to was that it was an academically gifted program, but ideally such programs would be in every school.
jconwaysays
That’s an awfully narrow way to define education. I’m grateful for my public education in an intentionally diverse school system not unlikely Kamala Harris’ or Somerville High where Tom sent his son or drikeos experience in the systems Biden tried to prevent. I felt better equipped to deal with the real world, which should be the number one thing we produce. An active and informed citizen capable of thinking for his or herself. Not a better test taker able to build a better widget or design – a better app. Those qualities are ancillary to preserving our country.
I was the only white kid in a U Chicago seminar to bring up the fact that blacks weren’t at the table at the Founding. The sole black student in that setting appreciated the hell out of me for that. The only one in the dining hall who had read James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston. The Andover kids and Westchester County kids had no idea who these black authors were.
My brother and I always realize that we gravitate toward the diverse tables at school and now in our workplaces. That we actually seek out diverse friends,. This is such an important commodity that even corporations are starting to value it.
Neighborhood schools have little educational value in a globalized world. Most kids these days don’t stay in the neighborhoods they grew up in and we shouldn’t want them too. I know leaving the Cambridge bubble for the stark segregation of Chicago better prepared me to teach kids in Roxbury living under same conditions. One of our Revere math teachers who was born and raised in rural Ohio is grateful she finally met black and Hispanic kids in college. Ditto the Revere counselor from Newton North who remembered helping out METCO friends. It made them become better public school teachers equipped to deal with the real world.
My Cambridge public school education has been far more valuable than my U Chicago education when it comes to empathizing with my students and checking my privilege. My siblings and I all have formed interracial families, I am not sure if we would’ve had we stayed in our formerly white Irish Catholic bubble in North Cambridge. My friends from my neighborhood who stayed in the neighborhood and went to Matignon or Arlington Catholic instead of Rindge are all Trump voters now.
If we want to break the endless cycle of racism and racially polarized politics we need to expose kids early to kids from other races. It’s the only way we can move forward as a country to be the colorblind city on a hill you want. The authors of Brown recognized that segregated schools will always harm non white students and MLK articulated how it will harm white students.
There’s a reason college educated whites are more comfortable with diversity and this is because our elite colleges value creating artificially diverse environments. If test scores were all that mattered Harvard wouldn’t consider diversity in its applications. If the elite get exposed to diversity so should the working class and suburbanite white kids. We should want the police officers of tomorrow of all races to have black and brown friends today. It becomes much harder to be prejudiced when you have formed cross racial friendships and those are likeliest to happen in integrated schools.
By the way minority test scores consistently go up in integrated schools. They do not in segregated schools. So even if all you care about is tests and data the data show these schools work better.
drikeosays
You’ve hit directly on one of the lessons about privilege that I learned. The better test scores, that was a function of me and my classmates, not our schools. Anyone can teach comfortable, middle class kids. We were obedient and didn’t have a host of other issues to contend with in our daily lives.
So, when the teachers from the inner city got a hold of us, they were used to pushing kids and fighting to keep their attention. We were used to reading the textbook and working on some ditto paper assignment in class. What we got was teachers who were switched on every class, every day. We read whole new things. We had class discussions. We got introduced to the notion that maybe there’s to history than what’s in the textbook. We heard whole new things (music teacher played the Bar-Kays “Holy Ghost” and the germinal form of what we now call rap music, in addition to some of the rock music we were used to – and some NYC punk stuff we weren’t). I was in 6th grade and we blew through our math before the year ended, so our math teacher taught us algebra. We spent the next two years bored out of our skulls in math class, waiting for them to catch up.
The teachers were outstanding. I’m sure the test scores would have insisted otherwise before and after us, but that’s because the kids who lived there were dealing with a life way harder than the one we were living. I repeat, Joe Biden was wrong as hell. We actually learned a few things about life that year.
Christophersays
OK, but I have experience to show that what you are describing and what I am describing need not be mutually exclusive. As is often the case the issues that might hinder someone’s education is really about class rather than race.
drikeosays
Sure, though segregation has conflated race and class in many places. So I got to learn about both.
At the end of the day, the opposition to busing was about wanting to reinforce white flight. For instance, framing it as a local issue is absurd. Needham and Roxbury are two separate districts. So are Mattapan and Hingham. Those walls are constructed at the local level, and not even for nefarious purposes. Cross-municipality busing can only be done if organized above the local level.
The effort to shut it down was a sop to white suburbanites who were trying to wall themselves off from race and class issues. As a society, we’re only now coming around to the realization that was not a positive thing. Multiculturalism and the quest for new New Deals are an overdue reaction. I don’t think the takeaway is that Biden’s a secret racist, just that he’s the wrong person to lead us away from a paradigm he helped build.
SomervilleTomsays
At least during most of the second half of the 20th century, few officials or even voters were “secret racists”, in the sense that they privately harbored hostility towards minorities that they kept away from the public. If racism was that easy, America would have solved it generations ago.
There are multitudes of white voters and officials who feel uncomfortable walking through black neighborhoods. There are multitudes of whites who reach out to friends and colleagues to help their kids enter the workforce — those friends and colleagues are nearly always white. So the white networks of privileged whites welcome the white progeny of those privileged whites into the white network. The spots are always filled by the time Black kids hear about them.
As the game of musical chairs accelerates, fewer and fewer privileged whites have spots to offer even to their own friends because so much wealth is being vacuumed by the uber wealthy at the very top. The resulting barriers to Black kids grow higher and higher.
The evil that Joe Biden represents is systemic racism. No one individual is ever racist, no law or regulation ever explicitly names race as a criteria. Yet the result is that blacks are excluded. Blacks acquire none of the newly-generated wealth. The workforce remains white. The alumni networks remain white.
The 2005 rewrite of the bankruptcy laws greatly increased the suffering of those already in economic pain, and directly benefited those who were already wealthy. It was obvious at the time that those who suffered were disproportionately black and that those who gained were pretty much exclusively white.
The boardrooms of large Delaware financial firms were largely white in 2005.
Joe Biden could have, should have, and probably did know that the bankruptcy law changes he was spearheading would be devastating to the black community.
He didn’t care. That was Elizabeth Warren’s beef with him in 2005, the beef that launched her political career.
Christophersays
I get that there was plenty of opposition to busing so as to reinforce white flight, but I assure you that has nothing to do with MY reluctance to support that tactics.
SomervilleTomsays
@ nothing to do with [your] reluctance:
It has the same outcome, though.
The effect of opposing busing is to perpetuate racial disparity.
Christophersays
Not if we do other things right, like actually level the playing field among schools with our resources.
SomervilleTomsays
@ actually level the playing field:
Oh, you mean separate but equal?
Christophersays
Equal certainly. I only get upset about separate if it were deliberately caused. We all know that deliberately separate schools were also very deliberately unequal. I finally found an op-ed that expresses my views pretty well, and the headline in particular is spot on. (Paywall alert: I had to switch browsers to get around it.)
SomervilleTomsays
I saw the Kevin Cullen piece and thought of you.
Mr. Cullen is dead wrong. I was here, I remember — I didn’t read about it in Google hits. For example, Mr. Cullen writes:
But the majority of people who opposed busing, not just in Southie but in other neighborhoods, were furious not at black kids, but at politicians and government officials who cavalierly foisted busing on them while life in their lily-white suburbs wnt on undisturbed.
A lot of Bostonians resented not black kids so much as hypocritical whites sitting in their segregated suburbs and in smug judgment of them while avoiding the tumult of busing.
That’s not my recollection of what happened. That’s not what was argued in court. The “hypocritical whites” in their “segregated suburbs” did not elect the school committees that segregated the schools. They did not vote on the property taxes and they did not vote individual schools up or down.
Massachusetts allows local control of schools, and that local control in the affected neighborhoods resulted in illegally segregated schools. The communities in question had been flagrantly corrupt and racist for years. Boston had plenty of opportunity to remedy the situation before Judge Garrity’s 1974 order, and chose to flout the law.
There is nothing hypocritical about demanding that a city or town obey federal law.
The fundamental animus was against desegregation. The same anger would have been directed at ANY other policy that forced the same result.
The anger was and is racist. The city was in denial of its racism in 1974 and some — like Mr. Cullen — remain in denial today.
Mr. Cullen himself admits the truth near the end of his piece:
[In 1976], after busing upended the city and people’s lives, many people in Southie cheered another, far different George: George Wallace, the Alabama segregationist.
Claiming that those who cheered George Wallace were not racist is like claiming that those who cheered Adolf Hitler were not antisemitic. The claim is utter nonsense and epitomizes denial in the original sense of “Holocaust Denier”.
In the final paragraph of his editorial, Mr. Cullen makes the equally specious claim that accurately characterizing those who oppose busing in Boston as “racist” works to Mr. Trump’s benefit.
So Mr. Cullen would have us believe that someone who:
1. Illegally segregated public schools in 1974
2. Loudly opposed, often violently, court-ordered busing in 1974
3. Supported George Wallace in 1976
4. Is willing to support Donald Trump in 2020
is not racist.
Sorry, but that’s absurd. What we’re talking about is classic racism, even if unconscious. It is no different from whites in Alabama and Mississippi during the Jim Crow era who professed to have nothing against “colored”, they just “weren’t ready” for integration.
jconwaysays
My only addendum to that is that it is hypocritical to call out the white working class parents in Boston for resisting busing while letting the white suburbanites off the hook. METCO doesn’t absolve them for walling off their resources.
SomervilleTomsays
@white suburbanites:
I think that’s a different topic.
White suburbanites didn’t violate the law. If there are no blacks in a given community, then it isn’t illegal for that community to have no blacks in its schools. It’s offensive (it’s why my son prefers Somerville to the north shore suburb that he left), but it isn’t illegal.
The difference is that these Boston parents (not just working-class, by the way) consciously and illegally segregated their public schools. This segregation wasn’t the only illegal thing happening — the investigation preceding Judge Garrity’s 1974 ruling found widespread corruption. For example, the going price for being a principal of an elementary school was $3,000 and a principal of a high school $6,000. The Boston public high school system of the early 1970s was a sorry corrupt cesspool.
I don’t think being working-class lets parents and the government they elect off the hook. They intentionally separated students into white schools and black schools. The remedy ordered by Judge Garrity was extreme because the problem it addressed was extreme.
I’d like to see the state impose a much higher graduated income tax, perhaps allow local surcharges on that income tax, and shift the funding for schools, fire and police from towns to the state. I’d like to see the property tax burden be reduced to near zero in no small part because it is among the most regressive of the taxes we collect.
Once that shift has happened, I’d like to see school spending per pupil decrease in towns like Dover, Carlisle, and Brookline and increase in cities like Boston, Lawrence, Pittsfield, and Springfield.
jconwaysays
To be crystal clear I was not letting the white parents in Boston off the hook. If anything I am am saying that I dislike it when the Newton’s and Dover’s of the world pat themselves on the back for METCO, when it’s been shown those kids also face racism and isolation when they attend those schools. Not to mention upper crust white patents who use coded language who routinely try and cut METCO in their districts.
There is this mentality in the state and I’ve seen it in other parts of the country that people should avoid moving to “x place” because “x place” has ‘bad schools’. Even within a district. Two districts I’m organizing in this summer have had very contentious issues with redistricting “neighborhood” schools within the district. It’s very tied into race, class, xenophobia and a fear that their kids will lose out while kids from “that bad part of town” will “ruin” their kids education. Even doors I’ve knocked with Priuses in the yard and “Hate has no home here” signs.
We didn’t integrate Massachusetts public schools in the 20 years between the 1954 Brown decision and the 1974 ruling by Judge Garrity. We haven’t integrated Massachusetts public schools in the 45 years since the 1974 busing decision.
What phrase, besides “systemic racism”, better describes that absolute denial of the law of the land?
Christophersays
Well, there ARE objective ways to measure how good schools are: extracurriculars offered, student-teacher ratio, facilities. In my town I was fortunate to be within the turf of the newest elementary school, but one year we were threatened with a redraw into the neighboring school which did not have the same facilities and resources. It wasn’t a matter of “those” kids since the demographics were very similar (plus we’d all be together in junior high anyway), and I know some who may have been redrawn into the newer school did not want to lose the neighborhood school feel.
Christophersays
Can you explain how Boston deliberately segregated? Did they bus kids across the city to specifically black and white schools (the very practice in Topeka that prompted the Brown case)? Did they somehow gerrymander the districts served by the various schools to pack white areas into one school district and black areas in another? Did they unequally fund schools based on in which neighborhoods in which they were located?
drikeosays
That’s the very fight we’re having in 2019 over school funding. The dirtiest secret about the legacy of busing is the very worst aspects of white flight were allowed to calcify.
Christophersays
I was glad that Cullen acknowledged that much of the opposition was in fact racist, which makes him more credible. However, it does match much else of what I have read regarding this episode. I can tell I am very much in the minority on BMG, but I think I have a lot more company with the wider public. I’ve even seen both polling and anecdotal evidence that busing was not universally in the African American community. I actually dispute based on how I read this particular op-ed that Cullen believes that your numbered points equal non-racist.
jconwaysays
Lol read up on housing history. The ghetto is by design and not by accident. There is no such thing as a naturally occurring all white or all minority neighborhood. Government built that and has a responsibility to fix that.
Christophersays
I fully understand the ghetto is by design, and obviously oppose housing discrimination. Why can’t those neighborhoods also have excellent schools?
jconwaysays
Cause Cambridge kids get 28k per pupil and BPS gets 5k per pupil. It’s also been discovered that the BPS exam schools have a higher per pupil spend than the high schools in the poorer and browner parts of town.
Now you could argue those kids are
more deserving and it’s a meritocracy since they passed a test. The same test used by the area prep schools. I was laid $50 an hour in Chicago to help rich kids pass that test. You think the kids in Mattapan are getting that test? Assuming their schools and teachers even bothered to tell them about the exams. So meritocracy in a lot of ways is a smokescreen for racial exclusion. It doesn’t work until all our kids have access to the same quality of education.
So we are still living in the pre-Garritty era when some schools even within a district get more money than others.
Not to mention those areas with “poorer” schools tend to be most vulnerable to charters and they lose even more money to charters. You don’t see charters sprouting up in Lynnfield.
It almost always correlates to race and class.
I would put all the money into the same pot and let DESE give every Bay State kid the same amount of money regardless of district. If we did that you would see a rebellion far worse than the busing crisis. “We paid 700k to get into this district!” And instead of hard hats in Southie it’ll be the Prius and Volvo drivers in Brookline, Arlington, and Concord. The old Phil Ochs Line “ten degrees to the left of center in good times, five degrees to the left of center if it affects them personally”.
SomervilleTomsays
In America, issues of class are indistinguishable from issues of race.
It is literally impossible to address one without addressing the other.
The task is made immeasurably more difficult by a definition of “racism” that limits it to conscious feelings and explicit acts.
Christophersays
See and I think that is the crux of our disagreement based on our experiences. We’ve been round and round on your last line of course, but I prefer to solve what the actual problem is. If it really is racism, like all too often when there is a confrontation between a black civilian and white cop, then absolutely address that. If the problem can be solved by resources then I see that as primarily a class issue even if there is strong racial correlation. I think a key difference between you and me is you see a black person and assume s/he has been left behind and is struggling socio-economically, whereas the black people I usually encounter or interact are otherwise like me. They grew up in my town, my neighborhood; went to my school, pursue similar interests or careers. Doesn’t mean they’ve never encountered racism, of course, but they aren’t all from the stereotypical ghetto.
SomervilleTomsays
I categorically reject your “key difference”.
I look at data, not individual men and women. The handful of black people you usually encounter or interact with are the fortunate few who are able to occasionally penetrate the bubble of white privilege that surrounds you.
Most black people can’t afford to live in most white towns in Massachusetts. Most aren’t able to get into the same schools you get into because of the same white privilege.
You stubbornly refuse to consider the mountain of actual data about the actual effects of systemic racism. The causal connection between the “class issue” you cling to and the actual systemic racism that creates and perpetuates it is similarly well-documented.
In this specific issue, I find your attachment to your beliefs to be strikingly similar to the attachment of climate change deniers to their resolute denial of the equally compelling science of climate change.
Systemic racism remains a fact, whether or not you call it a hoax.
Christophersays
Climate change is hard science whereas we’re discussing the social sciences, so I reject that comparison. I get there is a strong correlation, but I say directly attack the class issue rather than use race as a proxy.
SomervilleTomsays
The analysis of the data showing the causal relationship between class differences and race is just as hard as climate science data.
Blacks suffer economically because our economy systematically discriminates against blacks.
That is a cold hard fact that your resolutely deny.
Christophersays
It would only be a cold hard fact in the hard science sense if it applied to absolutely everyone without exception (ie every white person in the country were better off than every black person). In hard science we know without question or exception what will happen when say certain chemicals mix or an object is dropped within the earth’s atmosphere.
jconwaysays
Would you trade places with a black male in this country? Moreover have you met or known a black or brown person who has never experienced racism at some point in their life? I don’t know of any. Even in the C Suite blacks have to work harder to get the same level of pay and respect as their white peers.
Have you read Michelle Obama’s autobiography? Her day to day life in white spaces from Princeton to Harvard Law to Sidley Austin was a non stop exercise in withholding her anger when confronted with daily micro-aggressions. She never felt fully comfortable to be fully herself, and that’s the reality we are talking about for the folks able to get in these spaces. A far higher percentage will never even see the opportunity. If you think we live in a color blind meritocracy you are living in denial my friend.
Christophersays
No, and I believe I acknowledged that they have all likely experienced racism, and I never said we have a completely color blind meritocracy. I said the correlation between race and quality of life is not absolute.
SomervilleTomsays
@absolutely everyone without exception:
Nonsense. Smoking cigarettes causes cancer. That’s a cold hard fact. The outcome is well documented. The difference in cancer rates between smokers and non-smokers is well documented. The pathway that connects the damage caused by cigarettes to the cell changes that we call “cancer” is well documented. Not everyone who smokes gets cancer. It is not possible to connect a single cigarette or even pack of cigarettes to a given case of cancer.
While tobacco companies have evaded liability judgments for decades by sophistry such as demanding proof that a given cigarette or brand of cigarettes cause cancer, everyone except tobacco company executives and defenders knows that such demands fly in the face of hard science.
Cigarettes cause cancer.
Pretty much every physical phenomenon is probabilistic at some scale of observation. We know without question what pressure is exerted on the walls of given container of a given volume of gas at a given temperature. That pressure is the result of gas molecules hitting the walls of the container. At higher temperatures, each molecule hits with higher energy. The trajectory of any one molecule is random and therefore unpredictable. It is not possible to enumerate the specific molecules of gas that will hit the container in the next time period. Yet the pressure is VERY predictable.
The data that shows that class issues disproportionately impact minorities is similarly hard. Your claim of “hard science” is unsupportable.
Systemic racism is a fact.
Christophersays
Again, hard science, backed up by the scientific method of going from hypothesis to theory. Smoking causing cancer is demonstrated by more than just a statistical correlation between those who smoke and those who get cancer.
SomervilleTomsays
It is clear that you aren’t familiar with the literature connecting economic distress to race.
Christophersays
I know much of it is linked to race, though obviously not all of it since there are poor whites and middle and upper class blacks.
jconwaysays
Wheres your data Christopher? Seems you are relying on black and white outliers to disprove the men’s. What’s the percentage of upper and middle income blacks compared to whites and poor whites compared to poor whites?
The mean wealth of white families is nine times higher than African American families. That data is from the Economist.. Now you can alleviate this in a race neutral way-Cory Bookers baby bonds and Elizabeth Warren’s housing policies would close this gap in a way that benefits poor whites. But the fact that an income based metric will help blacks more than whites on average is more proof that the income disparity is real.
…
Differences in ability also do not explain the patterns of intergenerational mobility we document. Third, the black-white gap persists even among boys who grow up in the same neighborhood. Controlling for parental income, black boys have lower incomes in adulthood than white boys in 99% of Census tracts. Both black and white boys have better outcomes in low-poverty areas, but black-white gaps are larger on average for boys who grow up in such neighborhoods. … Indeed, a black child born to parents in the top quintile is roughly as likely to fall to the bottom family income quintile as he or she is to remain in the top quintile; in contrast, white children are nearly five times as likely to remain in the top quintile as they are to fall to the bottom quintile. …
Your argument is starkly inconsistent with virtually ALL published research about the impact of our economy on blacks (and especially black men).
Christophersays
OK, but studying people will never be completely a hard science. As a political scientist with some statistical background this is a little closer to my area than the hard sciences, so I have some idea of what to control for and how to interpret the data.
jconwaysays
You consistently cite your personal experience whenever we bring up data though. Again, I strongly encourage you to talk to people of color about this. The same five white guys arguing on the internet is clearly not going to change your mind, maybe expose yourself to other points of view and see what people of color are writing and saying about this topic. Ask the ones in your life about their experiences. They will welcome the opportunity.
Christophersays
Well, I do in fact talk with people of color from time to time, but I have never tried to claim that their experiences aren’t true or don’t count. One person’s experience cannot translate into a universal claim, but that IS all it takes to negate someone else’s universal claim if that experience is contradictory.
jconwaysays
Data show that white poverty and black and brown poverty are very different problems with different solutions. There is no way to achieve racial justice in a race neutral way. We have subjugated black and brown to white for centuries, we may have to give up some privileges to level the playing field. That’s ok.
jconwaysays
You don’t have to be from the “ghetto” to experience systematic racism. I strongly encourage to ask them about their experiences and whether they align with your color blind view of the world.
Christophersays
You consistently twist my meaning! I KNOW the rest of the world is not color blind. However, if we are to ever get to true equality. We need to insist to ourselves, each other, and the rest of the world that such is ideal and practice it ourselves.
SomervilleTomsays
It sounds as though you demand that we steadfastly deny and reject hard data in favor of your essentially religious belief.
It seems to me that we need to insist to ourselves, each other, and the rest of the world that we examine what is actually happening, compare that to our ideal, and identify the source of the differences.
You are presuming a “solution” and demanding that we remain attached to it no matter how far it diverges from actual experienced and measured reality.
Christophersays
What I’m suggesting is insist on the result and work to make it happen. The ideal result is that we are all judged not by the color of our skin, but the content of our character, so let’s stop playing games and just do that!
jconwaysays
And we do that by redistributing wealth to close the black white gap. We get that by integrating schools. It’s hard to achieve the utopian result you desire when you reject all the remedies that would actually solve the problem and achieve the result.
couvessays
I know people around here are sick of Bernie’s message. But he really should stick with what got him here. His basic message speaks to the politics of the moment and comes across as genuine. (Any time he starts wading too much into identity politics, he just sounds ridiculous.) I also think his analysis is spot on. Big change requires a movement.
Having said that, Warren was solid, so she may be the beneficiary here. The polls will be interesting to watch.
SomervilleTomsays
I very much prefer Ms. Warren’s pitch.
I think she is plowing the same ground and doing so far more effectively.
jconwaysays
I made a much longer post on the differences today, but Bernie is leading a movement while Warren is leading a campaign. Bernie’s performance this time around is convincing me that he does best as a Senator inspiring a mass movement from the outside looking in while Warren can be the president on the inside looking out.
If you reverse the roles it just doesn’t make sense. Bernie is too uncomfortable with political institutions to lead one while Warren is too much of a wonk to lead a movement. It makes far more sense for her to lead the executive branch while Bernie pressures her and her opponents on the outside.
jconwaysays
Does he need to win the White House to lead that movement and can he lead that movement from the White House? I think the answer to both questions is no.
Warren is running to do specific things for a specific role. I think that makes her a far more effective potential president.
drikeosays
Bernie yelling all the time cannot play well. I agree with him about a lot of stuff, though I’m not shopping for a group identity (and that’s increasingly becoming his focus). Yet I’ve got to believe his act wears thin on too many people. I thought he had an awful night from that perspective.
Trickle upsays
We are still on track for a race between Elizabeth Warren (or maybe Bernie Sanders) and the Uplifting Centrist.
For that second slot, Biden is toast and Harris did well, but a long bumpy ride awaits.
Darned if i did not momentarily see Buttigieg as a running mate for the right candidate.
jconwaysays
Pete did well last night, but his policing problem is not going away. Even before this tragedy you could hardly read an article on Pete that did not mention his difficulty connecting to black voters or his black constituents in South Bend. I hope he changes his approach, unlike Biden, he was crystal clear on owning and atoning for his failures and blind spots.
Trickle upsays
He’s not a contender.
SomervilleTomsays
Agreed. After the debates, I feel the same about Mr. O’Rourke. I think his fleeting moment of fame is past.
Christophersays
He’s doing what he legally can while an investigation is ongoing. Swalwell challenged him to just fire the chief, but that seems awfully kneejerk.
jconwaysays
It was also knee jerk when he fired the black chief over a taping scandal. It seems the black chief got caught illegally taping his subordinates to see if they were saying racist stuff about him (which they were). So I get Pete may have had to fire him, but what did he do about all those racist insubordinate cops? I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but black voters in South Bend aren’t, and this is the kind of issue that will continue to dog him.
Christophersays
Well, it sounds like that the chief himself is culpable in the incident you mention, whereas for all I know the current chief was harping on his officers daily to make sure the body cams were on and this cop in question didn’t.
jconwaysays
We can always rely on you to jump to the cops defense
Christophersays
OK, you can lose the attitude. I always give benefit of the doubt until I have more information. Besides, didn’t I just say it sounds like the previous chief WAS himself culpable? There should be investigations before consequences – what’s the problem with that idea?
Christopher says
Kamala Harris seems to be the strongest tonight.
Christopher says
Biden is clearly running for Obama’s third term, not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that.
doubleman says
Kamala’s retort to Biden on immigration and the Obama administration was great.
Biden ain’t ready for this issue at all.
jconway says
Didn’t work last time
Christopher says
It did by 2.8 million votes, plus now we’ve seen the alternative.
jconway says
And following that path will enable Joe Biden to win by 2.8 million votes and lose the same states to Trump that Hillary did. Democrats have to recognize, as most of them did last night, that the Obama-Biden years were home to some big failures as well as big wins. Even Michael Bennet called out Biden for letting McConnell roll all over them.
Obamacare isn’t good enough. We deserve single payer. Obama’s deportations didn’t lead to immigration compromise, only standing up for the undocumented will. Letting corporations outsource and downsize at will isn’t a Democratic value anymore. Standing on the sidelines while right to work turns MI, PA, and WI red is no longer an option. We need a fighter, not a compromiser. Biden fatally misreads the moment. Progressives don’t want to come together, we want to win.
Christopher says
But Biden may be exactly the person to flip just enough votes in the right states to get the EC victory as well. Last I checked Obama is pretty popular.
jconway says
Obama was also popular in 2016 and that did not translate to electoral success for Hillary. I would also argue the counties that so starkly flipped from Obama to Trump were also rejecting Obama and economic policies that led them behind.
Unlike Hillary, Biden came out for the TPP. He also attached his names to a lot of bills that hurt consumers during his advocacy for the credit cards in his state. I worked for 3 years at the largest bankruptcy firm in the Midwest, let me tell you, ordinary people do not like the credit card and payday loan companies Biden shilled for.
He was low energy and defensive throughout the debate. He’s got an even longer paper trail than Hillary. If you’re a swing voter who took a chance on Trump to drain the swamp, why would you pick the biggest swamp creature in the Democratic field?
I get that Biden is a white Irish Catholic and culturally he speaks the language of the white working class more fluently than anyone on that stage other than Bernie. It’s why I think he would’ve been a stronger candidate than Hillary in 2016. But he’s also four years older and seems to have learned nothing about the ideological shift in his party and the broader country since 2016.
Obama-Trump swing voters are economic populists and cultural conservatives. Biden is the exact opposite of that. A centrist by greenroom and think tank standards, but nowhere near the actual center of the American electorate. They are far closer to Bernie and Warren on economic issues than Joe Biden.
Christopher says
You’re getting into unserious territory calling Biden the biggest swamp creature, plus last I checked polls show Biden beating Trump by the widest margins. I’m not arguing that others can’t also win, but all evidence is contrary to your suggestion that Biden can’t. Obama’s popularity I think is more salient now that voters have seen the exact opposite in terms of temperament. Why do you so often claim to speak for other voters as defined as a certain segment of the population with no data to back it up?
SomervilleTom says
Elizabeth Warren correctly nailed Joe Biden years ago before she was even elected because of his aggressive promotion of the 2005 BAPCPA rewrite of consumer bankruptcy laws that devastated working-class and middle-class families struggling to keep up with skyrocketing credit card health insurance bills. Those changes were requested by and directly benefited the huge Delaware finance firms that were profiting by plundering those suffering people.
Ms. Warren cites that specific issue and conflict as the catalyst turning her into the political figure she is today.
That legislation was a direct assault on the 99%. It was a direct gift to the credit card companies that bankrolled Joe Biden as the Senator from Delaware. You might not remember that, but I certainly do.
That incident alone is pretty swampy, and it’s joined by a long list of others.
I frankly don’t care about any poll today. I am all too aware of similar polls in late June of 2015 showing Hillary Clinton a clear winner (emphasis mine):
How meaningful did ANY of these landslide polling numbers for Ms. Clinton turn out to be?
The evidence against Joe Biden has been public for years:
– Opposition to busing
– Support for the 1% against the 99%
– Support for the 2003 Iraq war
– Support for the Hyde Amendment
etc etc etc.
Joe Biden is at or near the very bottom of my list of candidates. Why on EARTH would we pick him when there are so many other better candidates?
Christopher says
Well, to the four points near the end:
Opposed to busing – so am I
Support for 1% – I understand representing DE
Support for Iraq War – forgivable given context; so did many other mainstream Dems; execution was the WH responsibility
Support for Hyde Amendment – I’m OK with that, though he has switched recently.
I know polls can change, but until I see numbers don’t assume the ones we have so far are wrong.
SomervilleTom says
It appears that the difference between us is why we have primaries. Presumably Mr. Biden will get your primary vote, and Ms. Warren will get mine.
jconway says
I’m personally offended by that charge.
Here’s a whole thread I made a month ago doing exactly that.
here’s the frequently cited Lee Drutman study showing that the electorate is center left on economics and divided on culture with the fiscal conservative/social liberal slice Biden represents being a small and insignificant sliver.
Here’s some fresh polls showing Biden losing a lot of ground to Harris from Morning Consult
And another from CNN.
Here’s the Stanley Greenberg Polling piece I previously posted about and linked to talking about why relying on an anti-Trump strategy is not the right way to win back economically stagnating voters.
So actually let me ask you to produce data to back up the unfounded assertions that Biden is more electable than others who are now beating Trump by similar margins and why his above the fray anti-Trump strategy will work where Hillary’s did not.
doubleman says
Kamala is very good. Her answer on insurance companies and deductibles was perfect. As was her answer on immigration.
Hickenlooper, Bennett, Swalwell, and Yang should get out. Williamson had an oddly great answer on health care and a truth of politics that people don’t win on laying out policies.
doubleman says
Harris absolutely drew blood on Biden with a discussion of race and Biden’s record.
I thought it was beautiful.
Kamala could (and should) get a huge bounce.
Bernie did not expand his base.
Biden did poorly and this could (and should) hurt.
Buttigieg didn’t do enough.
Everyone else on the stage was forgettable.
Christopher says
I can respect that Mayor Pete came right out and said he didn’t get it done regarding police and race.
SomervilleTom says
incorrectly nested comment removed
SomervilleTom says
I found tonight’s debate empty of substance, especially in comparison to last night.
I wonder if perhaps tonight’s cohort of candidates adjusted their answers based on what happened yesterday. I wonder if the moderators similarly changed their questioning tactics. I found tonight’s questions aimed at provoking fights rather than helping understand the similarities and differences between the candidates.
I thought Joe Biden was the strongest of the candidates tonight. His deep experience was apparent. I think that Ms. Harris walked into a trap and made a fool of herself by injecting her own experience into the debate. I just checked the history, and Mr. Biden is exactly correct. Last year, The city of Berkeley California celebrated the 50th anniversary of their locally originated busing plan for school integration. Mr. Biden’s stance on forced busing has always been that it should not ordered by the federal government. He has always supported locally-originated busing plans like the one that put Ms. Harris on a bus as a child.
Ms. Harris either did not bother to research or didn’t care that she has egregiously mischaracterized Mr. Biden’s position. I expect more from a legitimate candidate — Kamala Harris lost my vote tonight with that exchange.
Bernie Sanders was showing reruns tonight. I’ve seen them so many times that, like each of the original Star Trek episodes, I can speak all the dialog. I am just SO weary of his shtick.
The others were all forgettable, with a few good one-liners here and there.
Now that I’ve seen all twenty, it’s down to two candidates for me: Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker.
I understand the support for Joe Biden, I just don’t join it. Since I’ll almost certainly be voting in Massachusetts in 2020 (if there is actually a 2020 election), I’ll probably write in either Ms. Warren or Mr. Booker if Mr. Biden is the nominee.
jconway says
Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but my college friends and I have been group chatting each debate and we all found Harris to be the strongest of this group. We all thought Biden had a bad night, but people 40 and over on Facebook and here seem to think he handled himself well, so maybe it’s a draw?
Pete had some good moments but overall didn’t wow me like he did in person. He’s like Obama in that speeches and pontificating are strong suits and partying in sound bites is not. I can’t help but think he’d be doing better if he were a Governor and if Obama hadn’t run this wonky post partisan playbook already.
Leaving this round I’m also getting tired of Bernie. It seems less and less likely he’ll be the nominee the longer this goes on and his base continues to stay the same instead of expand. Obviously the next round should be the top 7 or something. I think Warren, Castro, and Booker earned a spot from last nights and Pete, Biden, Harris, and Bernie from this one.
doubleman says
Same here. Universal agreement among friends that Harris was the strongest and that exchange with Biden was brutal for Biden.
SomervilleTom says
To you it was brutal for Mr. Biden. To me, it was an embarrassment for Ms. Harris.
I find her apparent eagerness to essentially lie about him to be an absolute deal-breaker. She claimed he opposed the program that she remembers from her childhood. In fact, Mr. Biden strongly supported that program.
She’s lying.
doubleman says
She’s not. He was an opponent to the idea of busing.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/06/joe-bidens-response-to-kamala-harris-on-busing-is-going-to-haunt-his-campaign/
Looking at news results, this is absolutely the biggest story of the night. Most stories I’ve seen so far are not favorable for Biden on it.
SomervilleTom says
You’re going to have to do better than a MotherJones piece if you want to persuade people who disagree with you.
Had Ms. Harris cited the experience of Boston or pretty much ANY other city where children were bused against the will of local government in court-ordered busing, her argument would have been sound.
She instead pandered to emotions by citing her own personal experience — and trying to ignore the fundamental difference that separated Berkeley CA from Boston MA.
The busing Ms. Harris remembers from her childhood was initiated by the city council of Berkeley CA. It was cited by Martin Luther King as an example of what America should be doing. Joe Biden supported that program.
The busing in Boston MA that Mr. Biden opposed was ordered by Judge Garrity and forcibly imposed on the city. It was fought bitterly and hard then and remains contentious today.
Mr. Biden was dead wrong to oppose that forced busing. Ms. Harris could have and should have used Boston MA (or any similar forced busing site) as her example.
Facts are facts, whether being contemplated by a 20-something or a 60-something. The fact is that Joe Biden supported the busing program that Kamala Harris remembers.
She is lying when she strongly implies otherwise.
doubleman says
How about this one?
Or this. This. This.
Or this gem.
I think you’ll have to show some evidence that he was actively in favor of one kind of busing but not another.
SomervilleTom says
Will you at least concede that her argument would have been stronger if she had cited Boston instead of Berkeley?
jconway says
No since personal stories resonate far more with voters than citing a historical episode (sadly) unknown to most Bostonians let alone most Americans.
I also think it is absolutely fair. He was a consistent opponent of busing to integrate schools and teamed up with segregationists to kill it. That is his literal record. There is no record of him ever championing controlled choice or voluntary busing as an alternative.
SomervilleTom says
I also think the burden of proof is on you and Ms. Harris to show evidence of his opposition to the Berkeley busing — Mr. Biden did not make the accusation.
I want to remind us that I am most emphatically NOT a supporter of Joe Biden, and I am as appalled by his opposition to forced busing as you.
It is the use of what to me are dishonest attacks that I oppose.
SomervilleTom says
Elsewhere on BMG, you’ve self-identified as a millennial.
I feel compelled to remind you that I remember the civil rights era. I grew up just outside Washington DC. I was there in 1965. I watched the columns of smoke rising from the city in the “long hot summer” of 1968.
I do not need reminders of the emptiness and hypocrisy of state’s rights arguments about civil rights.
I was here in Boston when Joe Biden was a freshman Senator.
The controversy about forced busing is not something I extract from Google searches — I lived it.
The Berkeley CA decision to integrate their schools WAS revolutionary. You seem to completely discount it.
Of all the examples to cite tonight, Ms. Harris chose the single most celebrated example of a city CHOOSING to use busing to integrate its schools.
Do you think that choice was coincidental?
jconway says
She choose the school system she grew up with to point out that a leader fights the race based fears of his constituents instead of giving into them. Her parents were brave. Brave to get married in the 60’s and brave to send her to those schools. Biden was not brave.
The issue is not whether Biden specifically opposed voluntary busing in Berkeley-it’s that he gave into the fears of his white constituents in Delaware and prioritized them over the white and black voters who wanted integration. He didn’t volunteer to send his own kids to integrated schools like her parents did. They integrationists may have been a minority at that time, but so were abolitionists and civil rights supporters at different times in history. I trust the girl raised in an interracial household in multiracial schools over the adult Senator who couldn’t look his constituents in the eye and tell them they’re wrong.
SomervilleTom says
@I trust the girl …:
As I recall, you joined the criticism of Ms. Warren for using her own life story. It seems to me that you are judging Ms. Harris by a standard different from the one you applied to Ms. Warren.
I trust the woman who bases her judgement on fact, and who chooses arguments based in fact that most clearly show the behavior she criticizes.
I trust Elizabeth Warren. I want nothing more to do with Kamala Harris.
jconway says
Your ignoring that various facts that Doubleman and I are bringing up that bolster Harris’ arguments. CNN agrees with us. Your issue seems to be with Harris herself and not what she brought up.
I am not sure what your referencing in regards to Warren’s personal story. If it’s the DNA test she eventually followed my advice and apologized to the Native American community for using a test they find insulting and illegitimate. I’ve had no issues with that since then and consider the matter closed.
Warren is the first candidate I became a recurring donor to the other day so it ultimately did not affect my support for her. There are a lot of areas where Harris deserves criticism, her valid and righteous attack on Joe Biden is not one of them.
jconway says
And while you and my father, who actually had rocks thrown against the group home school bus he drove through Southie and Dorchester, were appalled by this city-Biden stood with the likes of Louise Day Hicks hiding behind the fig leaf of neighborhood schools while Joseph Rakes would’ve attacked Kamala and her classmates if given the chance. Is Biden a racist like Rakes? No, but neither was Louise Day Hicks. Both “only wanted” “neighborhood” schools. It’s Kamala and her parents who took a real courageous stance.
SomervilleTom says
@Louise Day Hicks:
Indeed, that is my point. Mr. Biden was egregiously wrong on busing. It is totally appropriate to call out his racism, and I am certainly not defending it.
Ms. Harris could have used Boston and Louise Day Hicks, and her argument would have been much stronger. Mr. Biden DID side with racist bigots like Louise Day Hicks.
The decisions a president must make should be based on fact, rationality, and logic. The apparent willingness of Ms. Harris to parade her identity rather than cite actual cases of actual racism that Mr. Biden supported disqualifies her.
jconway says
I listened to the clip on Boston Public Radio. Jim and Shirley Leung agree that Harris was the standout and Biden lost for what it’s worth so did most of the callers. So you’re in the minority here quibbling over a minor detail.
She said his opposition to federal busing made it harder for voluntary busing at the local level. That is neither inaccurate nor dishonest. The other pieces I linked to below show how the climate of ending federal desegregation directly impacted voluntary desegregation in places like Berkeley. It made it that much harder for those communities and those students.
SomervilleTom says
@ I’m in the minority:
I get that. It’s not the first time I’ve been out of step with mainstream “liberal” orthodoxy.
My bottom line is that Kamala Harris has joined Joe Biden near the bottom of my list of favored candidates.
The coveted Toms-worst-place-candidate slot is owned by Tim Ryan after his embarrassing night in the first round.
jconway says
I give Ryan mixed results. I agree he has no business running for President. He’d make a great Senate candidate against free trader Rob Portman.
Christopher says
What I think I know about Hicks is that she actively opposed the very concept of integration which went beyond neighborhood schools.
Christopher says
Every example you give seems to be playing games rather than fixing the problem with schools.
doubleman says
I agree with your top 7. Too many others are wasting time.
I think Williamson might see the biggest bump among the low single digit candidates. Her answers were odd but in some ways wise and will stand out as more appealing than many others.
SomervilleTom says
I’m really troubled by these “generational” arguments.
A misquote is a misquote, whether the audience is 30 or 60.
Are you saying that people under 40 don’t care about intellectual integrity?
I was part of a generation that famously said, as teenagers, “Don’t trust anyone over 30”. That same generation was fully capable of enthusiastically supporting Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, or for that matter Robert Kennedy — each of whom was well beyond 30.
If you are correct, so that those under 40 truly ARE unable or unwilling to demand intellectual integrity, rationality, and objective debate, then we truly are lost.
We are talking about leaving behind the foundations of the Enlightenment and returning to the Dark Ages.
jconway says
I like the McCarthy/Kennedy analogy.
Biden is 68’ Humphrey. Establishment backed and saddled with unpopular policy positions. Bernie is McCarthy. His run moved the debate in the right direction and paved the way for Warren to get in the race but you can’t quite picture him in the White House or his movement leading him there. Warren is RFK. Idealistic but also a ballsy behind the scenes operator who knows how to wield power and get things done.
SomervilleTom says
Heh. And just to extend the analogy, Kamala Harris is Shirley Chisholm.
I hope there is no Sirhan Sirhan in today’s picture.
jconway says
Shirley Chisholm was awesome. I had her poster in my classroom last year.
Christopher says
See, even though I disagree with busing as we’ve discussed, I thought Harris’s personal testimony on this matter was the most powerful moment of the night.
SomervilleTom says
Am I the only one offended by her dishonesty?
Her “personal testimony” was premised on the lie that Joe Biden opposed the program that she remembers. In fact he strongly SUPPORTED that program.
jconway says
Yes? Even the right leaning pundits thought it was powerful, as did the commentators on Morning Edition where I heard the exchange.
I also don’t think it’s dishonest at all. Forced busing was a term first employed by the Roger Ailes led communications team on the Nixon campaign. The phrase is not an objective one, but a dog whistle to indicate opposition to school integration.
The fact that Biden so willingly worked with outright opponents of integration to scuttle it is all the proof I need he was wrong and Harris is right.
The bigger issue is that when Republicans exploited white fears of miscegenation to roll back school integration that Biden’s instinct was to compromise with those forces instead of fight them. Forces that were opposed to Harris even existing as a mixed race person let alone going to a mixed school. He never should have compromised with them and his actions definitely made it harder on families and communities pursuing voluntary integration by giving in to the climate of fear.
Ted Kennedy may have also taken drinks with Eastland but he also took a lot of heat for leading on integration while Biden followed the racist fears of his constituents.
SomervilleTom says
I agree that her attack was powerful, that’s what I don’t like about it and that’s why I compare it to the infamous Willie Horton ad. It was devastatingly effective and powerful (as was the followup revolving-door ad).
One more time — I oppose Joe Biden and I agree that his position on forced busing was wrong — just as I agree that his position on the Iraq war was wrong and his position on the Hyde Amendment was wrong.
I would join the chorus of kudos for Ms. Harris had she chosen Boston instead Berkeley as her cudgel.
jconway says
That’s not what she said Tom. She made it clear he opposed federal desegregation efforts which made voluntary ones like hers harder. As she said, having the power of the federal government on the side of integration would have helped her program. I can’t find the transcript but she’s not wrong that “local control” and “states rights” are and were code words. The study I cited shows how the programs her and I grew up with lost all their federal funding in the Reagan years thanks in part to the climate of fear Biden perpetuated instead of fight. That’s her argument. Nowhere does she say he opposed Berkeley’s busing program, he didn’t. Just like he didn’t oppose abortion rights when he refused to fund it. But cutting the funding makes it so much harder for these plans to work. Our schools are more segregated now thanks to Joe Biden.
SomervilleTom says
I quoted the transcript elsewhere last night. It most certainly IS what she said.
SomervilleTom says
Here is the exact quote where she talked about busing:
I’m sorry, but this is just dishonest. She says “You also worked with them to oppose busing.” Then she offers her own experience. Mr. Biden did NOT oppose the busing program that she remembers. In fact, as he pointed out, he instead strongly supported it.
She is turning facts on their ear.
I agree with Ms. Harris that we have to take it seriously. I disagree strongly with her implication that an “intellectual debate” isn’t serious.
I emphatically reject her intellectual dishonesty in this clearly rehearsed attack.
This is as bad as the Willy Horton attacks on Mike Dukakis and the Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry.
doubleman says
She’s right. He did work with them to oppose busing.
He opposed using the federal government and wanted to leave it to local control. You may think that is support of local busing programs, but his other quotes at the time don’t back up the idea that he was a proponent of busing of any kind. And we know how local control or “states rights” have worked on civil rights issues throughout this country’s history.
SomervilleTom says
He opposed forced busing.
An intellectually honest argument would have used an example that he actually opposed.
When people make an argument against “states rights” in the context of a civil rights issue, they don’t cite the states that voted to ban segregation before the federal mandate.
jconway says
Louise Day Hicks also went to great pains to separate herself from southern segregationists and say she opposed Jim Crow. This does not change the fact that her efforts, aided by Senator Biden, actually made life worse for black people in the North.
Biden said similar things then and now. He even claims he got into politics inspired by the civil rights movement. Yet he made a choice to side with bigoted voters over the NAACP of his own state and the black voters of Wilmington who wanted integrated schools. Families that might have been similar to Harris’ with the misfortune of living in a community that was not as outwardly progressive as Berkeley.
Berkeley also resisted integration.
From a history of that integration effort:
So in this full context I think it is appropriate to say that Biden joined Reagan in opposing this funding and through his actions on behalf of scared white parents he hurt Kamala and her classmates in Berkeley.
SomervilleTom says
You very effectively make my argument for me.
Kamala Harris could have and should have cited Boston. The comparison between Joe Biden and Louise Day Hicks is accurate and devastating.
fredrichlariccia says
A Biden/Harris ticket thought came into my mind as I watched the debate.
SomervilleTom says
Heh. I’ve been similarly wondering about Warren/Booker ticket.
jconway says
If Democrats acted as ballsy as Republicans we would have Warren/Harris.
The assumption is always that you balance the ticket to win, yet in my lifetime the GOP always doubles down on authoritarian conservatism (in different flavors) instead of appealing to moderates. Why should the Democrats be different?
Tim Kaine was embarrassed by Mike Pence on the debate stage. Harris would eat him for lunch. The racist and sexist voters turned off by this ticket are already wearing Trumps hat. I don’t see the risks really. I’m tired of always seeing my side water itself down while the other side doubles down on the Kool Aid and bile.
SomervilleTom says
I find Cory Booker far more persuasive than Kamala Harris.
Perhaps we’ll see them on the same stage, I think that will be an interesting contrast-and-compare.
jconway says
Actually Tom education policy experts believe that opposition to forced busing has also weakened the legal and political foundation for voluntary busing. From the Berkeley Ed school blog:
Harris is arguing that by opposing forced busing, and “busing” is the short hand then and now for forced busing, that Biden also hurt students like Harris in communities trying to voluntarily integrate. Not to mention the overall issue that he sided with the likes of Louise Day Hicks and made the same arguments she did and valued those bigoted voters over the education of black kids like Kamala Harris.
The education of all children suffers because of persistent school segregation which is worse today than it was under Brown. Liberal white politicians like Joe Biden retreating from the fight in the 1970’s hurt instead of help. We could hardly construe his position as one of support, if anyone lied on that stage about busing it was Biden about his own record.
Short of being a victim of a Willie Horton dog whistle, Biden’s Senate tenured
is a career long exercise in running away from confrontation on behalf of women and minorities. Harris was right to call it out.
SomervilleTom says
I agree that Ms. Harris was right to call out Mr. Biden’s long opposition to forced busing, that is not my beef with Ms. Harris.
I very specifically and narrowly reject her conscious choice to use her own life story instead of, for example, Boston and Louise Day Hicks.
Mr. Biden was offensively wrong about forced busing, just as he was offensively wrong about the Hyde Amendment. One of the reasons why Robert Byrd was never a presidential contender (and, according to the cited piece, not nominated to the Supreme Court) was his early embrace of racism and the KKK. Mr. Byrd also supported the Vietnam war. Mr. Byrd saw the light later in his Senate career, but he never had the audacity to run for President.
I oppose Mr. Biden’s candidacy. I believe his long history of poor judgement on crucial issues makes him unsuitable for the office he seeks.
I support the argument and criticism that Ms. Harris made against him, and I applaud her decision to make that argument last night.
I think she betrayed and disqualified herself by choosing her own ambiguous personal history rather than citing Boston, Louise Day Hicks (among a shamefully long list of Boston political figures) and Mr. Biden’s support for their racist bigotry.
jconway says
Her personal history was directly impacted by his support of these racist policies. I think she was quite clear in saying that the issue isn’t that he opposed her program directly but that he also didn’t have her programs back or support federal funding for it. That’s a huge thing.
Your Hyde analogy is spot on. He compromised with the antichoicers to craft a “neutral” policy that actually had the real world effect of limiting the reproductive choices of poor women and women of color. Harris is also saying that while he voiced support for voluntary integration his opposition to federal desegregation and compromises with segregationists actually undermined those programs. The data show that we are no better off today than we were before Brown. That’s directly the result of liberals like Biden dropping the ball. It’s a sharp and valid argument.
SomervilleTom says
We very much agree on our opposition to Joe Biden.
drikeo says
I was one of the kids in DE Biden was trying to stop from getting bused. Got shipped from my suburb into one of the roughest sections of Wilmington in 1978. Kids in other grades who got shipped the other way faced protests. Formative experience and quite literally the best school I ever went to. Learned things about race and privilege that stick with me to this day. Joe Biden was wrong as hell and I’m glad they knocked me out of the white flight cocoon in which I was being raised.
Christopher says
I suspect you’re in the minority to be glad. If it really was a good school, great, but I thought the root cause of all this was that schools in minority neighborhoods, or to which minority kids were deliberately bused for the purpose of maintaining segregation, were generally not as good as the white schools or those in white neighborhoods.
SomervilleTom says
There are many ways to measure “good”.
My youngest son chose to move in with us in the fall of his junior year in high school. He left a north shore public school that consistently scores higher than Somerville on pretty much every metric (I don’t know about spending per pupil).
The school he left had better theater equipment, better athletic equipment, new hallways, better test scores, etc., etc., etc. It was also lily-white. There were essentially no people of color and not even many Jews. English was the only language spoken by nearly the entire school (I don’t know about the faculty). The entire student body was from essentially the same middle-class economic segment.
He loved and thrived at Somerville High School. At the first school concert a few weeks after he transferred, we all loved that the music was as diverse as the young men and women performing it. Blacks, Latinos, Haitians, Portuguese, Russian — on and on and on. The program literally spanned the world. It was true that the sets, lighting, and audio gear at Somerville was much less elaborate than at the school he left behind. He has said many times that whatever challenges that brought about were dwarfed by the benefits of being among so many different languages, cultures, and viewpoints.
I think that children born into white privilege able to obtain what they need and want even when immersed for a few years in schools that do not score as high in metrics created by whites for whites. I think the lessons they learn about life, people, and diversity are far more valuable than whatever limits their time in urban schools impose on them.
Christopher says
I definitely would use the metrics described in your third paragraph to determine a good school, though it would certainly be fine for the population to be more diverse. I guess for me the primary mission of a school is academic so if I’m sitting in a fourth grade math class trying to master long division, that endeavor is not going to be impacted one way or the other by the skin color of the kid sitting next to me.
SomervilleTom says
@ the skin color of the kid sitting next to me:
Which is why white children are not harmed by being bused to black schools.
Christopher says
Way to twist my arguments! I have NEVER suggested that the problem with busing is the integrated result. The problem is being forced into a lower quality school just to make the color balanced, and that there is something to be said for going to school close to home.
SomervilleTom says
I don’t think I’m twisting anything. You wrote “if I’m sitting in a fourth grade math class trying to master long division, that endeavor is not going to be impacted one way or the other by the skin color of the kid sitting next to me.”
I expressed my agreement with that.
I think you’re correctly describing the stark differences that separate white from black schools, and using those differences to argue against forced busing, because your claim is that it harms the white students so affected. I think your argument assumes its own outcome.
Whether we like it or not, a lesson we learned in the draft is that white voters are more eager to solve problems that primarily impact minorities when those white voters are more exposed to those issues.
During the early years of the Vietnam war, young black men were far more likely to be drafted — and therefore killed and wounded — than their white counterparts. That dynamic changed when the draft lottery was imposed in 1969, so that young white men were as likely to be drafted as young blacks men.
It is not surprising that public sentiment rapidly shifted against the war as more and more white sons came home in caskets and wheel chairs.
I’m not claiming that forced busing solves the problem of substandard urban schools. I argue instead that your argument perpetuates and reinforces that problem.
A government official who refuses to ride the T is less likely to prioritize fixing the T than an official who depends on the T to get wherever they need to go. White voters whose children are attend excellent well-funded schools are less likely to prioritize fixing urban schools then voters whose children are forced to attend the schools they refuse to fund.
Christopher says
Yeah, I’ve always been reluctant to enact policy for the sake of penalizing life choices, proving a point, or manipulating support/opposition. Since you bring up the draft I’ll use that as another example. If we must have it then it should be applied fairly, but I emphatically disagree with those who say let’s have a draft when it is wholly unnecessary from a numbers or existential threat standpoint just to spread pain around for its own sake. For the record, IMO the most recent time a draft was actually justified was probably WWII.
SomervilleTom says
@ reluctance:
What you call “manipulating support/opposition” others call “effectively governing”.
The point is that the draft lottery worked. Whether justified or not, shifting the draft to the more race-neutral draft lottery caused voter support for the Vietnam war to collapse. Since you presumably find the Vietnam era draft unjustified because of your opposition to the war (as do I), the fact remains that while the unjustified draft affected mostly black (and poor white) men, that same draft was enthusiastically supported by mainstream white America. It was only when white America was affected by the draft that white America turned against the war that motivated the draft.
While we’re on the subject, it is no accident that the next step taken by white America was to replace the draft with the present mercenary military system. Under the new system, mainstream white America pays black and poor white men and women to be killed on their behalf. Since the blood price of the thirst for war is again paid by somebody else, white America again clamors for war in various places.
In any case, I view forced busing as a necessary but not sufficient component of any successful effort to create a fully integrated public education system.
The benefits to minority children and the first-hand exposure to inner city schools for white children and their parents both more than compensate for whatever costs are imposed.
The benefits of full immersion in a diverse cultural social group are, in my opinion, among the most powerful ways that forced busing helps white children break the cycle of racism that otherwise traps all of us.
Christopher says
We obviously completely disagree as to the goals of public education then. For me its to get everyone well-versed in academic material. At the K-12 level I do not see integration as an end unto itself. As for the military I do not believe a free country should force someone to put their lives at risk unless there really is no other way. We need to expand opportunities to be sure, but nobody is forced these days to join the military, and that is as it should be. However, if you do choose that path you accept the risk knowingly and willingly that you might engage in combat.
SomervilleTom says
Surely an overriding purpose of public education is to prepare every person to be full contributor to and participant in American society. Public education began with the revolutionary realization that a successful representative democracy requires a literate and well-educated electorate.
The celebration of diversity is surely a key aspect of what makes America great.
jconway says
You’re missing the forest for the trees. Why are the “lower quality” schools always in poorer and browner neighborhoods? The data show busing white kids there actually makes them better and gets them more resources. Busing black kids in the other direction also gives those kids a better opportunity to excel.
What’s easier than busing in theory is giving housing vouchers to everyone so that more people of color can move into our 98% white communities. And upcoming to build more affordable housing and increase the 41b allotment and not allow towns to get away with dumping their 41b stock into senior housing to keep it “in the neighborhood”.
I got bused to a diverse academically gifted program in middle school and has a much better time than if I had stayed where I was. Busing didn’t negatively affect my education in the slightest. Under controlled choice parents still have a say and school quality improves across the board.
Christopher says
OK, I suspect the reason you did better in the school you were bused to was that it was an academically gifted program, but ideally such programs would be in every school.
jconway says
That’s an awfully narrow way to define education. I’m grateful for my public education in an intentionally diverse school system not unlikely Kamala Harris’ or Somerville High where Tom sent his son or drikeos experience in the systems Biden tried to prevent. I felt better equipped to deal with the real world, which should be the number one thing we produce. An active and informed citizen capable of thinking for his or herself. Not a better test taker able to build a better widget or design – a better app. Those qualities are ancillary to preserving our country.
I was the only white kid in a U Chicago seminar to bring up the fact that blacks weren’t at the table at the Founding. The sole black student in that setting appreciated the hell out of me for that. The only one in the dining hall who had read James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston. The Andover kids and Westchester County kids had no idea who these black authors were.
My brother and I always realize that we gravitate toward the diverse tables at school and now in our workplaces. That we actually seek out diverse friends,. This is such an important commodity that even corporations are starting to value it.
Neighborhood schools have little educational value in a globalized world. Most kids these days don’t stay in the neighborhoods they grew up in and we shouldn’t want them too. I know leaving the Cambridge bubble for the stark segregation of Chicago better prepared me to teach kids in Roxbury living under same conditions. One of our Revere math teachers who was born and raised in rural Ohio is grateful she finally met black and Hispanic kids in college. Ditto the Revere counselor from Newton North who remembered helping out METCO friends. It made them become better public school teachers equipped to deal with the real world.
My Cambridge public school education has been far more valuable than my U Chicago education when it comes to empathizing with my students and checking my privilege. My siblings and I all have formed interracial families, I am not sure if we would’ve had we stayed in our formerly white Irish Catholic bubble in North Cambridge. My friends from my neighborhood who stayed in the neighborhood and went to Matignon or Arlington Catholic instead of Rindge are all Trump voters now.
If we want to break the endless cycle of racism and racially polarized politics we need to expose kids early to kids from other races. It’s the only way we can move forward as a country to be the colorblind city on a hill you want. The authors of Brown recognized that segregated schools will always harm non white students and MLK articulated how it will harm white students.
There’s a reason college educated whites are more comfortable with diversity and this is because our elite colleges value creating artificially diverse environments. If test scores were all that mattered Harvard wouldn’t consider diversity in its applications. If the elite get exposed to diversity so should the working class and suburbanite white kids. We should want the police officers of tomorrow of all races to have black and brown friends today. It becomes much harder to be prejudiced when you have formed cross racial friendships and those are likeliest to happen in integrated schools.
By the way minority test scores consistently go up in integrated schools. They do not in segregated schools. So even if all you care about is tests and data the data show these schools work better.
drikeo says
You’ve hit directly on one of the lessons about privilege that I learned. The better test scores, that was a function of me and my classmates, not our schools. Anyone can teach comfortable, middle class kids. We were obedient and didn’t have a host of other issues to contend with in our daily lives.
So, when the teachers from the inner city got a hold of us, they were used to pushing kids and fighting to keep their attention. We were used to reading the textbook and working on some ditto paper assignment in class. What we got was teachers who were switched on every class, every day. We read whole new things. We had class discussions. We got introduced to the notion that maybe there’s to history than what’s in the textbook. We heard whole new things (music teacher played the Bar-Kays “Holy Ghost” and the germinal form of what we now call rap music, in addition to some of the rock music we were used to – and some NYC punk stuff we weren’t). I was in 6th grade and we blew through our math before the year ended, so our math teacher taught us algebra. We spent the next two years bored out of our skulls in math class, waiting for them to catch up.
The teachers were outstanding. I’m sure the test scores would have insisted otherwise before and after us, but that’s because the kids who lived there were dealing with a life way harder than the one we were living. I repeat, Joe Biden was wrong as hell. We actually learned a few things about life that year.
Christopher says
OK, but I have experience to show that what you are describing and what I am describing need not be mutually exclusive. As is often the case the issues that might hinder someone’s education is really about class rather than race.
drikeo says
Sure, though segregation has conflated race and class in many places. So I got to learn about both.
At the end of the day, the opposition to busing was about wanting to reinforce white flight. For instance, framing it as a local issue is absurd. Needham and Roxbury are two separate districts. So are Mattapan and Hingham. Those walls are constructed at the local level, and not even for nefarious purposes. Cross-municipality busing can only be done if organized above the local level.
The effort to shut it down was a sop to white suburbanites who were trying to wall themselves off from race and class issues. As a society, we’re only now coming around to the realization that was not a positive thing. Multiculturalism and the quest for new New Deals are an overdue reaction. I don’t think the takeaway is that Biden’s a secret racist, just that he’s the wrong person to lead us away from a paradigm he helped build.
SomervilleTom says
At least during most of the second half of the 20th century, few officials or even voters were “secret racists”, in the sense that they privately harbored hostility towards minorities that they kept away from the public. If racism was that easy, America would have solved it generations ago.
There are multitudes of white voters and officials who feel uncomfortable walking through black neighborhoods. There are multitudes of whites who reach out to friends and colleagues to help their kids enter the workforce — those friends and colleagues are nearly always white. So the white networks of privileged whites welcome the white progeny of those privileged whites into the white network. The spots are always filled by the time Black kids hear about them.
As the game of musical chairs accelerates, fewer and fewer privileged whites have spots to offer even to their own friends because so much wealth is being vacuumed by the uber wealthy at the very top. The resulting barriers to Black kids grow higher and higher.
The evil that Joe Biden represents is systemic racism. No one individual is ever racist, no law or regulation ever explicitly names race as a criteria. Yet the result is that blacks are excluded. Blacks acquire none of the newly-generated wealth. The workforce remains white. The alumni networks remain white.
The 2005 rewrite of the bankruptcy laws greatly increased the suffering of those already in economic pain, and directly benefited those who were already wealthy. It was obvious at the time that those who suffered were disproportionately black and that those who gained were pretty much exclusively white.
The boardrooms of large Delaware financial firms were largely white in 2005.
Joe Biden could have, should have, and probably did know that the bankruptcy law changes he was spearheading would be devastating to the black community.
He didn’t care. That was Elizabeth Warren’s beef with him in 2005, the beef that launched her political career.
Christopher says
I get that there was plenty of opposition to busing so as to reinforce white flight, but I assure you that has nothing to do with MY reluctance to support that tactics.
SomervilleTom says
@ nothing to do with [your] reluctance:
It has the same outcome, though.
The effect of opposing busing is to perpetuate racial disparity.
Christopher says
Not if we do other things right, like actually level the playing field among schools with our resources.
SomervilleTom says
@ actually level the playing field:
Oh, you mean separate but equal?
Christopher says
Equal certainly. I only get upset about separate if it were deliberately caused. We all know that deliberately separate schools were also very deliberately unequal. I finally found an op-ed that expresses my views pretty well, and the headline in particular is spot on. (Paywall alert: I had to switch browsers to get around it.)
SomervilleTom says
I saw the Kevin Cullen piece and thought of you.
Mr. Cullen is dead wrong. I was here, I remember — I didn’t read about it in Google hits. For example, Mr. Cullen writes:
That’s not my recollection of what happened. That’s not what was argued in court. The “hypocritical whites” in their “segregated suburbs” did not elect the school committees that segregated the schools. They did not vote on the property taxes and they did not vote individual schools up or down.
Massachusetts allows local control of schools, and that local control in the affected neighborhoods resulted in illegally segregated schools. The communities in question had been flagrantly corrupt and racist for years. Boston had plenty of opportunity to remedy the situation before Judge Garrity’s 1974 order, and chose to flout the law.
There is nothing hypocritical about demanding that a city or town obey federal law.
The fundamental animus was against desegregation. The same anger would have been directed at ANY other policy that forced the same result.
The anger was and is racist. The city was in denial of its racism in 1974 and some — like Mr. Cullen — remain in denial today.
Mr. Cullen himself admits the truth near the end of his piece:
Claiming that those who cheered George Wallace were not racist is like claiming that those who cheered Adolf Hitler were not antisemitic. The claim is utter nonsense and epitomizes denial in the original sense of “Holocaust Denier”.
In the final paragraph of his editorial, Mr. Cullen makes the equally specious claim that accurately characterizing those who oppose busing in Boston as “racist” works to Mr. Trump’s benefit.
So Mr. Cullen would have us believe that someone who:
1. Illegally segregated public schools in 1974
2. Loudly opposed, often violently, court-ordered busing in 1974
3. Supported George Wallace in 1976
4. Is willing to support Donald Trump in 2020
is not racist.
Sorry, but that’s absurd. What we’re talking about is classic racism, even if unconscious. It is no different from whites in Alabama and Mississippi during the Jim Crow era who professed to have nothing against “colored”, they just “weren’t ready” for integration.
jconway says
My only addendum to that is that it is hypocritical to call out the white working class parents in Boston for resisting busing while letting the white suburbanites off the hook. METCO doesn’t absolve them for walling off their resources.
SomervilleTom says
@white suburbanites:
I think that’s a different topic.
White suburbanites didn’t violate the law. If there are no blacks in a given community, then it isn’t illegal for that community to have no blacks in its schools. It’s offensive (it’s why my son prefers Somerville to the north shore suburb that he left), but it isn’t illegal.
The difference is that these Boston parents (not just working-class, by the way) consciously and illegally segregated their public schools. This segregation wasn’t the only illegal thing happening — the investigation preceding Judge Garrity’s 1974 ruling found widespread corruption. For example, the going price for being a principal of an elementary school was $3,000 and a principal of a high school $6,000. The Boston public high school system of the early 1970s was a sorry corrupt cesspool.
I don’t think being working-class lets parents and the government they elect off the hook. They intentionally separated students into white schools and black schools. The remedy ordered by Judge Garrity was extreme because the problem it addressed was extreme.
I’d like to see the state impose a much higher graduated income tax, perhaps allow local surcharges on that income tax, and shift the funding for schools, fire and police from towns to the state. I’d like to see the property tax burden be reduced to near zero in no small part because it is among the most regressive of the taxes we collect.
Once that shift has happened, I’d like to see school spending per pupil decrease in towns like Dover, Carlisle, and Brookline and increase in cities like Boston, Lawrence, Pittsfield, and Springfield.
jconway says
To be crystal clear I was not letting the white parents in Boston off the hook. If anything I am am saying that I dislike it when the Newton’s and Dover’s of the world pat themselves on the back for METCO, when it’s been shown those kids also face racism and isolation when they attend those schools. Not to mention upper crust white patents who use coded language who routinely try and cut METCO in their districts.
There is this mentality in the state and I’ve seen it in other parts of the country that people should avoid moving to “x place” because “x place” has ‘bad schools’. Even within a district. Two districts I’m organizing in this summer have had very contentious issues with redistricting “neighborhood” schools within the district. It’s very tied into race, class, xenophobia and a fear that their kids will lose out while kids from “that bad part of town” will “ruin” their kids education. Even doors I’ve knocked with Priuses in the yard and “Hate has no home here” signs.
SomervilleTom says
@To be crystal clear:
Understood.
It seems clear enough to me, especially in examining the history that lead up to the 1974 busing decision as well as the history afterwards, that the entire state is to blame.
We didn’t integrate Massachusetts public schools in the 20 years between the 1954 Brown decision and the 1974 ruling by Judge Garrity. We haven’t integrated Massachusetts public schools in the 45 years since the 1974 busing decision.
What phrase, besides “systemic racism”, better describes that absolute denial of the law of the land?
Christopher says
Well, there ARE objective ways to measure how good schools are: extracurriculars offered, student-teacher ratio, facilities. In my town I was fortunate to be within the turf of the newest elementary school, but one year we were threatened with a redraw into the neighboring school which did not have the same facilities and resources. It wasn’t a matter of “those” kids since the demographics were very similar (plus we’d all be together in junior high anyway), and I know some who may have been redrawn into the newer school did not want to lose the neighborhood school feel.
Christopher says
Can you explain how Boston deliberately segregated? Did they bus kids across the city to specifically black and white schools (the very practice in Topeka that prompted the Brown case)? Did they somehow gerrymander the districts served by the various schools to pack white areas into one school district and black areas in another? Did they unequally fund schools based on in which neighborhoods in which they were located?
drikeo says
That’s the very fight we’re having in 2019 over school funding. The dirtiest secret about the legacy of busing is the very worst aspects of white flight were allowed to calcify.
Christopher says
I was glad that Cullen acknowledged that much of the opposition was in fact racist, which makes him more credible. However, it does match much else of what I have read regarding this episode. I can tell I am very much in the minority on BMG, but I think I have a lot more company with the wider public. I’ve even seen both polling and anecdotal evidence that busing was not universally in the African American community. I actually dispute based on how I read this particular op-ed that Cullen believes that your numbered points equal non-racist.
jconway says
Lol read up on housing history. The ghetto is by design and not by accident. There is no such thing as a naturally occurring all white or all minority neighborhood. Government built that and has a responsibility to fix that.
Christopher says
I fully understand the ghetto is by design, and obviously oppose housing discrimination. Why can’t those neighborhoods also have excellent schools?
jconway says
Cause Cambridge kids get 28k per pupil and BPS gets 5k per pupil. It’s also been discovered that the BPS exam schools have a higher per pupil spend than the high schools in the poorer and browner parts of town.
Now you could argue those kids are
more deserving and it’s a meritocracy since they passed a test. The same test used by the area prep schools. I was laid $50 an hour in Chicago to help rich kids pass that test. You think the kids in Mattapan are getting that test? Assuming their schools and teachers even bothered to tell them about the exams. So meritocracy in a lot of ways is a smokescreen for racial exclusion. It doesn’t work until all our kids have access to the same quality of education.
So we are still living in the pre-Garritty era when some schools even within a district get more money than others.
Not to mention those areas with “poorer” schools tend to be most vulnerable to charters and they lose even more money to charters. You don’t see charters sprouting up in Lynnfield.
It almost always correlates to race and class.
I would put all the money into the same pot and let DESE give every Bay State kid the same amount of money regardless of district. If we did that you would see a rebellion far worse than the busing crisis. “We paid 700k to get into this district!” And instead of hard hats in Southie it’ll be the Prius and Volvo drivers in Brookline, Arlington, and Concord. The old Phil Ochs Line “ten degrees to the left of center in good times, five degrees to the left of center if it affects them personally”.
SomervilleTom says
In America, issues of class are indistinguishable from issues of race.
It is literally impossible to address one without addressing the other.
The task is made immeasurably more difficult by a definition of “racism” that limits it to conscious feelings and explicit acts.
Christopher says
See and I think that is the crux of our disagreement based on our experiences. We’ve been round and round on your last line of course, but I prefer to solve what the actual problem is. If it really is racism, like all too often when there is a confrontation between a black civilian and white cop, then absolutely address that. If the problem can be solved by resources then I see that as primarily a class issue even if there is strong racial correlation. I think a key difference between you and me is you see a black person and assume s/he has been left behind and is struggling socio-economically, whereas the black people I usually encounter or interact are otherwise like me. They grew up in my town, my neighborhood; went to my school, pursue similar interests or careers. Doesn’t mean they’ve never encountered racism, of course, but they aren’t all from the stereotypical ghetto.
SomervilleTom says
I categorically reject your “key difference”.
I look at data, not individual men and women. The handful of black people you usually encounter or interact with are the fortunate few who are able to occasionally penetrate the bubble of white privilege that surrounds you.
Most black people can’t afford to live in most white towns in Massachusetts. Most aren’t able to get into the same schools you get into because of the same white privilege.
You stubbornly refuse to consider the mountain of actual data about the actual effects of systemic racism. The causal connection between the “class issue” you cling to and the actual systemic racism that creates and perpetuates it is similarly well-documented.
In this specific issue, I find your attachment to your beliefs to be strikingly similar to the attachment of climate change deniers to their resolute denial of the equally compelling science of climate change.
Systemic racism remains a fact, whether or not you call it a hoax.
Christopher says
Climate change is hard science whereas we’re discussing the social sciences, so I reject that comparison. I get there is a strong correlation, but I say directly attack the class issue rather than use race as a proxy.
SomervilleTom says
The analysis of the data showing the causal relationship between class differences and race is just as hard as climate science data.
Blacks suffer economically because our economy systematically discriminates against blacks.
That is a cold hard fact that your resolutely deny.
Christopher says
It would only be a cold hard fact in the hard science sense if it applied to absolutely everyone without exception (ie every white person in the country were better off than every black person). In hard science we know without question or exception what will happen when say certain chemicals mix or an object is dropped within the earth’s atmosphere.
jconway says
Would you trade places with a black male in this country? Moreover have you met or known a black or brown person who has never experienced racism at some point in their life? I don’t know of any. Even in the C Suite blacks have to work harder to get the same level of pay and respect as their white peers.
Have you read Michelle Obama’s autobiography? Her day to day life in white spaces from Princeton to Harvard Law to Sidley Austin was a non stop exercise in withholding her anger when confronted with daily micro-aggressions. She never felt fully comfortable to be fully herself, and that’s the reality we are talking about for the folks able to get in these spaces. A far higher percentage will never even see the opportunity. If you think we live in a color blind meritocracy you are living in denial my friend.
Christopher says
No, and I believe I acknowledged that they have all likely experienced racism, and I never said we have a completely color blind meritocracy. I said the correlation between race and quality of life is not absolute.
SomervilleTom says
@absolutely everyone without exception:
Nonsense. Smoking cigarettes causes cancer. That’s a cold hard fact. The outcome is well documented. The difference in cancer rates between smokers and non-smokers is well documented. The pathway that connects the damage caused by cigarettes to the cell changes that we call “cancer” is well documented. Not everyone who smokes gets cancer. It is not possible to connect a single cigarette or even pack of cigarettes to a given case of cancer.
While tobacco companies have evaded liability judgments for decades by sophistry such as demanding proof that a given cigarette or brand of cigarettes cause cancer, everyone except tobacco company executives and defenders knows that such demands fly in the face of hard science.
Cigarettes cause cancer.
Pretty much every physical phenomenon is probabilistic at some scale of observation. We know without question what pressure is exerted on the walls of given container of a given volume of gas at a given temperature. That pressure is the result of gas molecules hitting the walls of the container. At higher temperatures, each molecule hits with higher energy. The trajectory of any one molecule is random and therefore unpredictable. It is not possible to enumerate the specific molecules of gas that will hit the container in the next time period. Yet the pressure is VERY predictable.
The data that shows that class issues disproportionately impact minorities is similarly hard. Your claim of “hard science” is unsupportable.
Systemic racism is a fact.
Christopher says
Again, hard science, backed up by the scientific method of going from hypothesis to theory. Smoking causing cancer is demonstrated by more than just a statistical correlation between those who smoke and those who get cancer.
SomervilleTom says
It is clear that you aren’t familiar with the literature connecting economic distress to race.
Christopher says
I know much of it is linked to race, though obviously not all of it since there are poor whites and middle and upper class blacks.
jconway says
Wheres your data Christopher? Seems you are relying on black and white outliers to disprove the men’s. What’s the percentage of upper and middle income blacks compared to whites and poor whites compared to poor whites?
The mean wealth of white families is nine times higher than African American families. That data is from the Economist.. Now you can alleviate this in a race neutral way-Cory Bookers baby bonds and Elizabeth Warren’s housing policies would close this gap in a way that benefits poor whites. But the fact that an income based metric will help blacks more than whites on average is more proof that the income disparity is real.
SomervilleTom says
@Hard science, scientific method:
Seek and you shall find. It took me less than five minutes with Google to find many instances of current research with hard science. An example is Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective (emphasis mine):
Your argument is starkly inconsistent with virtually ALL published research about the impact of our economy on blacks (and especially black men).
Christopher says
OK, but studying people will never be completely a hard science. As a political scientist with some statistical background this is a little closer to my area than the hard sciences, so I have some idea of what to control for and how to interpret the data.
jconway says
You consistently cite your personal experience whenever we bring up data though. Again, I strongly encourage you to talk to people of color about this. The same five white guys arguing on the internet is clearly not going to change your mind, maybe expose yourself to other points of view and see what people of color are writing and saying about this topic. Ask the ones in your life about their experiences. They will welcome the opportunity.
Christopher says
Well, I do in fact talk with people of color from time to time, but I have never tried to claim that their experiences aren’t true or don’t count. One person’s experience cannot translate into a universal claim, but that IS all it takes to negate someone else’s universal claim if that experience is contradictory.
jconway says
Data show that white poverty and black and brown poverty are very different problems with different solutions. There is no way to achieve racial justice in a race neutral way. We have subjugated black and brown to white for centuries, we may have to give up some privileges to level the playing field. That’s ok.
jconway says
You don’t have to be from the “ghetto” to experience systematic racism. I strongly encourage to ask them about their experiences and whether they align with your color blind view of the world.
Christopher says
You consistently twist my meaning! I KNOW the rest of the world is not color blind. However, if we are to ever get to true equality. We need to insist to ourselves, each other, and the rest of the world that such is ideal and practice it ourselves.
SomervilleTom says
It sounds as though you demand that we steadfastly deny and reject hard data in favor of your essentially religious belief.
It seems to me that we need to insist to ourselves, each other, and the rest of the world that we examine what is actually happening, compare that to our ideal, and identify the source of the differences.
You are presuming a “solution” and demanding that we remain attached to it no matter how far it diverges from actual experienced and measured reality.
Christopher says
What I’m suggesting is insist on the result and work to make it happen. The ideal result is that we are all judged not by the color of our skin, but the content of our character, so let’s stop playing games and just do that!
jconway says
And we do that by redistributing wealth to close the black white gap. We get that by integrating schools. It’s hard to achieve the utopian result you desire when you reject all the remedies that would actually solve the problem and achieve the result.
couves says
I know people around here are sick of Bernie’s message. But he really should stick with what got him here. His basic message speaks to the politics of the moment and comes across as genuine. (Any time he starts wading too much into identity politics, he just sounds ridiculous.) I also think his analysis is spot on. Big change requires a movement.
Having said that, Warren was solid, so she may be the beneficiary here. The polls will be interesting to watch.
SomervilleTom says
I very much prefer Ms. Warren’s pitch.
I think she is plowing the same ground and doing so far more effectively.
jconway says
I made a much longer post on the differences today, but Bernie is leading a movement while Warren is leading a campaign. Bernie’s performance this time around is convincing me that he does best as a Senator inspiring a mass movement from the outside looking in while Warren can be the president on the inside looking out.
If you reverse the roles it just doesn’t make sense. Bernie is too uncomfortable with political institutions to lead one while Warren is too much of a wonk to lead a movement. It makes far more sense for her to lead the executive branch while Bernie pressures her and her opponents on the outside.
jconway says
Does he need to win the White House to lead that movement and can he lead that movement from the White House? I think the answer to both questions is no.
Warren is running to do specific things for a specific role. I think that makes her a far more effective potential president.
drikeo says
Bernie yelling all the time cannot play well. I agree with him about a lot of stuff, though I’m not shopping for a group identity (and that’s increasingly becoming his focus). Yet I’ve got to believe his act wears thin on too many people. I thought he had an awful night from that perspective.
Trickle up says
We are still on track for a race between Elizabeth Warren (or maybe Bernie Sanders) and the Uplifting Centrist.
For that second slot, Biden is toast and Harris did well, but a long bumpy ride awaits.
Darned if i did not momentarily see Buttigieg as a running mate for the right candidate.
jconway says
Pete did well last night, but his policing problem is not going away. Even before this tragedy you could hardly read an article on Pete that did not mention his difficulty connecting to black voters or his black constituents in South Bend. I hope he changes his approach, unlike Biden, he was crystal clear on owning and atoning for his failures and blind spots.
Trickle up says
He’s not a contender.
SomervilleTom says
Agreed. After the debates, I feel the same about Mr. O’Rourke. I think his fleeting moment of fame is past.
Christopher says
He’s doing what he legally can while an investigation is ongoing. Swalwell challenged him to just fire the chief, but that seems awfully kneejerk.
jconway says
It was also knee jerk when he fired the black chief over a taping scandal. It seems the black chief got caught illegally taping his subordinates to see if they were saying racist stuff about him (which they were). So I get Pete may have had to fire him, but what did he do about all those racist insubordinate cops? I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but black voters in South Bend aren’t, and this is the kind of issue that will continue to dog him.
Christopher says
Well, it sounds like that the chief himself is culpable in the incident you mention, whereas for all I know the current chief was harping on his officers daily to make sure the body cams were on and this cop in question didn’t.
jconway says
We can always rely on you to jump to the cops defense
Christopher says
OK, you can lose the attitude. I always give benefit of the doubt until I have more information. Besides, didn’t I just say it sounds like the previous chief WAS himself culpable? There should be investigations before consequences – what’s the problem with that idea?