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Comment by hurbledr | Hacker News Reader

> My point is simply that large-scale, forced integration made race relation problems much worse. It created problems where little existed.

Are you really arguing that desegregation created these problems? Seems a bit backwards to me. I think it's incredibly obvious that race relation issues existed long before the desegregation of schools.

You could argue that desegregation caused problems for white people where there were none before, but even that I find a bit questionable. There are many disadvantages to growing up in a homogeneous society.

I think everyone agrees that correcting racism, or tribalism if you prefer, is a difficult task, and one that we are still grappling with. Of course, there were other methods of desegregation proposed at the time, but very few were proposed in good faith, and none that I know of were as swift or effective as mass desegregation.

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Did you read my post? https://devinhelton.com/busing-in-boston I'm talking mostly about Boston, though I've found the same things when researching other northern cities. I'm not sure about the American south, I haven't studied it enough to either confirm or question the conventional wisdom.

In Boston, there was surely some racial animosity and shit talking before forced busing became a big issue. But it didn't seem to be that bad -- for example there is that quote in my post of the black school teacher who said she never had problems at Southie High before the busing. The busing made relations much worse, and the images we have of people being cartoonishly racist only came after forced busing.

none that I know of were as swift or effective as mass desegregation.

In the northern cities, mass desegregation failed in every single way. It did not improve race relations, it did not make black people better off, it did not result in more integration. Read my post.

>Boston did not have a Jim Crow system – if a black child lived in a white area, he could go to the local mostly white school.

So you are arguing that Boston was so racially tolerant in the 70's that they had no racist policies either explicit or implicit, and that a black kid could go to a white school completely unmolested? That they wouldn't be yelled at or beaten? That they would be welcomed with open arms?

What I wrote is what I wrote, and what argued is what I argued. Boston did not have a Jim Crow system whereby all blacks kids went to black schools and all white kids went to white schools. Schools were assigned by neighborhood, (with some ability for transfers). So if a neighborhood was all white, then you get a very white school. Mixed neighborhoods had more mixed schools. Here is a racial breakdown of the schools, two years before forced busing: https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m0...

So what was the experience like of the non-white kids in a majority white school (or vice versa)? That would vary a lot based on the particular school. I certainly do not argue that all schools would "welcome with open arms" outsiders of a different ethnicity. And especially not Charlestown High and South Boston High -- those neighborhood were quite parochial. When Italians started going to Charlestown High for instance, they were called "Wops" and such and there were fights. I don't have any good information on the experience of any black students attending those schools before forced busing. Most black students taking advantage of open enrollment would have gone elsewhere because Charlestown High and South Boston HIgh were crappy and overcrowded.

There was a voluntary busing program in Boston called Project Exodus in the mid 1960s whereby up to 600 black students were bused to mostly white schools. There was a survey of parents, that found ( https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m0... ) : "Other findings indicate that the mothers think that grades have improved, the amount of homework the children have to do has increased, their children have more white friends, that there is not a lot of prejudice or discrimination encountered at the new schools. With respect to this last distribution, only seven (or 10%) of the respondents felt that their children encountered a lot of prejudice, fifteen percent thought their children encountered some, while 70 percent thought their children encountered litttle or no prejudice or discrimination"

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