While everyone agrees that black children should not have been condemned to substandard schools for one hundred years, who gave the government the right to punish little Joshua, a five year old white kid, for this injustice? Why must little Joshua have to forego the convenience of attending the school down the street and suffer riding a bus for three or four hours a day to get to a school in an unfamiliar part of town away from his friends, parents, and neighbors? Who gave the government the power to punish little Joshua today for the injustices perpetrated against black people forty years ago that Prof. Dellinger so eloquently enumerated?

School finance is the heart of the problem, not the racial composition of the classroom, isn't it?

Care to name someone who's trying to "punish" your little strawman?

Jerk us another tear.

Joshua is not a strawman. He is the five year old son of the Plaintiff in Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education.

He is not being punished by being denied one of the empty seats (yes, there were seats available) in the school down the street and being forced to spend three hours a day on a school bus to get to a school across town? What would you call it, Karl—an opportunity?

Forced busing will go down in history as one of the biggest failures ever championed by liberals. It has accomplished little other than to assuage the guilt of white liberals for the failure of the states to provide equal educational opportunities to all children.

Your insistance on characterizing a bus trip as "punishment" is a pretty clear attempt to ascribe evil motives to those who designed the system, as is your description of the "guilt of white liberals". I'm calling you on that, and will continue so long as you keep it up.

In fact, you make quite a lot of convenient assumptions, Cyclops (as long as we're giving each other names - what does "Karl" stand for in your mind, by the way?). A quick peek at a Klan website would disabuse you of the pious notion that "everyone agrees that black children should not have been condemned to substandard schools for one hundred years". And if that seems an extreme example, then you can visit, say, Montgomery, Alabama, and compare and contrast the public schools there, predomanently black, with the many white private schools in the city, and let us know what that tells you about the motives of those who want a voucher system to gouge tax money out of the public school system.

But as fun as it is to conjecture about other peoples motives with you, guy, let's take a look at your poster boy victim. Would it really surprise you to know that a majority of American kids ride buses to school, since very few live "down the street" from the schools they attend? (When I was an Army brat, my peers and I often had long bus rides to the public schools we were assigned to. Somehow, we survived that terrible trama. Go figure. Apparently, the federal and local governments thought it was best for us, and the communities we lived in, not to keep us segregated.) You tell me that Joshua was five years old when his parents tried to enroll him, and was assigned to a school so far away that the school bus would take an hour and a half to get there. (Let's all admit that that's a very long ride.) What did his parents do? Did they keep him back a year, until he was six and legally obliged to enter school, and hope for a closer assignment? Did they petition the school board for relief, on the basis that in his case the bus ride was excessively long? Did they send him to a local private school? No, apparently, they hired lawyers, and sued to have the entire desegregation plan thrown out. And kept appealing the lower court decisions until they got it to the Roberts court. (Did they have help paying the lawyers? Hummmm... did little Josuha make a great poster boy for the anti-integration cause?)

School finance is the heart of the problem, not the racial composition of the classroom, isn't it?

So I take it you believe in "separate but equal"? right? And you believe that it is a good idea that the parents in the primarily white neighborhood school have no vested interest in the other schools in the district having equal resources and quality of teachers and infrastructure? right?

And you consider it punishment that well-to-do Joshua has to ride a bus, but not punishment if a minority kid doesn't get access to the same resources as Joshua? right?

If you answered wrong to these questions, then absent bussing, what is your suggestion?

Sorry for the late reply, but I just read your message.

I most certainly do not believe in "separate but equal" because that was a phony rationale for de jure segregation. Contrary to your assumption, I do believe that all schools should have equal facilities and resources. Schools in poor neighborhoods generally do not have facilities and resources equal to schools in affluent neighborhoods because schools are largely financed by local property taxes. This needs to change, as it has in my state. The tax money needs to be spread equally between schools (see, comrade, I can tolerate some socialism).

Unlike you, I do have a problem with the State denying an open seat to a five or six year old kid in a neighborhood school and forcing him to ride a bus for 2 to 4 hours a day.in order to achieve some particular ideal racial mix dreamed up by a bureaucrat or bright social engineer like yourself.

I don't think much is achieved solely by a kid sitting next to a kid who looks different. Thus, I don't have a problem with schools that are predominately composed of one race as long as that racial composition is not the result of state action or coercion. And I believe that if a kid doesn't want to attend his neighborhood school, he should have the right to take a bus to another school.

One thing that separates us, comrade, is the degree to which we are willing to use coercion by the State to achieve some people's ideals about how society, and human beings, ought to be. I don't have a problem with white Kristine (from another thread) because she prefers to hang with people she can relate to culturally and intellectually and those people happen to be mostly white. I don't consider that a crime against the State, do you? And it doesn't bother me that O.J. Simpson likes to boink blond, white women.

Live and let live, comrade, as long as the State doesn't deny us the rights to go where we want, associate with whom we want, eat in the restaurants of our choice, and sleep in the hotels of our choice.

BTW, comrade, I consider myself a liberal--in the truest sense of the word, not a conservative.

These posts focus on a core issue and I concur with Iwasblind on most points.

At some point, Americans will need to close the chapter on racism relating to the history of slavery, Reconstruction, Desegregation, and Affitmative Action. It seems to me, though I have not lived there for three decades, that the time has come to move on. Asians, Latinos, Hispanics, and countless others, including the many who are covered in this list of labels and would prefer to be identified by clearly identifiable communities which are significant in their own right. If I was Asian in today's America, I would find these discussions tiresome and annoying. I think many in that community (broadly defined, again) do.

Iwasblind clearly notes, as a parent, I think, that policies of the past 40 years have gone too far in putting colour above community. Funding--and more importantly in my opinion--public confidence in public governance are core challenges that need to be addressed. The failures associated with those in government not knowing when to rethink Affirmative Action policies are central to the sharp decline in the US public's faith in government. Schools and education are the frontline and a generation of politicians watched the lines of political correctness a bit too closely. Now it is time to set things right, and that means for America's black community and leadership to step out of their box, and not in a way that speaks of exceptionalism, or needs special attention or highlighting.

People like comrade degsme will never end their quest for "social justice," i.e. the righting of all historical wrongs to certain groups by means of government coercion. This quest will never end because they won't be satisfied until we are all equal in every conceivable way--and that will never happen. This kind of thinking leads inevitably to tyranny.

In a racially mixed society like ours, it is impossible to figure out who is entitled to what and from whom as a result of historical injustices inflicted on one group by another. The most we can hope to have is equal protection of law for all. From there, we just have to move on.

I guess comrade degsme has written off both of us as racists and will no longer deign to reply. Too bad.