Confessions of a 14-year-old bigot (reformed)

[captainsblog]

Since today's football games have been about the most lopsided and boring ventures I've seen in years [edit: okay, the early one was], I'm more comfortable turning this afternoon into a readin' and writin' exercise about a touchy subject. The reads are these: an article from this week's Buffalo alt-weekly about the 1970s defeat of metro-school integration in the north; and a book I just found at the library, titled simply Levittown, which was plainly about the enclave one suburb over from where I grew up, but which turned out to be about the same touchy subject of race and class relations in this great All Men People Created Equal country of ours.

Levittown, Long Island is the reason I live in Amherst, not Buffalo; and that you live in West Boxford, Mass., or  Upper Darby, PA, or Shaker Heights, Ohio, or Shermer, Illnois (if there fuckin' was one). It was a 1940s experiment that turned into a 1950s institution, but which, sadly, was founded to a large extent on 1850s principles of segregation. The book tells the tale of a brave yet branded couple who dared to defy their deed restrictions and sell their pre-fabricated Cape Cod on Deepgreen Lane to a family of color- 30 years before anyone would have called them anything other than "Negroes" or worse.

The Jewish Levitts had suffered prejudice of their own on their way up the economic ladder, yet chose the easy path of continuing it, rather than opposing it. There's a poignant and very sad Times article from 1989 about how the Levitt scion lost his shirt in a variety of housing busts through the 1980s, yet it is absent of any reference to the black elephant in the subdivision, which didn't really get recognition until sociology studies of this century.

Unless, of course, you count the silent majority who were aware of, and afraid of, that elephant as far back as the mid-1970s. Nixon was clearly one of them. The 14-year-old me was another.

My suburb, one to the west of Levittown, was about as homogeneous as they came, yet there were winds blowing. Hempstead (home of Eddie Murphy), Roosevelt (home of a very majority-minority Howard Stern), and Westbury had already faced the seismic effects of blockbusting realtors, and all were within biking distance of my still-safe junior high school. Uniondale, bordering us on the west as Levittown did on the east, had become significantly diverse (i.e., dangerous) by my senior year of high school- enough for the administration to cancel the long-standing football rivalry with them in favor of one with Clarke High in the northern reaches of our own district.  Even as a ninth grader, I knew there was a chance we would be subjected to that Horror of Horrors known as forced busing- and that the U.S. Supreme Court would decide, in a case called Milliken v. Bradley, whether I would be forced to spend my last three years of secondary school at Big Bad Black Hempstead High School, or even over the city line into ::shudder:: Queens,-, in either of which, no doubt, I would have been killed in a knife fight during the first period of my first day there.

Milliken was the governor of the state of Michigan, which opposed efforts by lower courts to integrate the almost-100% black schools of Detroit with its neighboring, almost-100% white, enclaves like Grosse Pointe. Bradley was a bureaucrat along the way who'd supported such a plan. The Nixon administration's lawyer, Robert Bork, argued to the five Nixon appointees on the court that, hey, suburbs like Grosse Pointe hadn't done anything wrong other than to exist, and those arguments and opinions carried the day over the sentiments of the likes of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Detroit and Grosse Point remained separate but unequal, and so did Levittown (and my district) from riff-raff like Hempstead.

The fourteen-year-old me was thrilled. The fifty-year-old me apologizes and would like a do-over.

----

One of my high school social studies teachers described U.S. race relations as this: In the south, white people don't care how close blacks get as long as they don't get too high. In the north, white people don't care how high blacks get as long as they don't get too close. My dozenish years of real-life experience confirmed at least the second part of that (since I'd never lived outside New York- still haven't- and therefore could only relate to the northern part of the equation). On the rare occasion that a school, or a church, or a police experience brought us into contact with a minority in authority, nobody had any problem with that. But I graduated from a 676-member senior class which, maybe, had 10 people of color in it, virtually all of them from the tiny swath of Air Force Base housing between our town and Uniondale. It wasn't any problem with them that had me rooting for Milliken and against Bradley, but rather a fear of the big shiv-wielding black kids from the urban high school a town to the west of that, which turned out to be as much of an urban legend as our fear of all the kids from McCleary, the other junior high feeding into our high school, who we feared to be a bunch of shiv-wielding galloots regardless of their race. (Turned out, once we got to know them a year or so later, that they'd heard the same vicious rumors about us.)

Now, going on 40 years since Milliken, urban districts are even more marginalized, and resembling prisons more than institutions of learning, and safe suburban districts are fewer, further between, and even more judgmental about the kids who attend them. The court got it wrong- and so did I.

Comments

[headbanger118.livejournal.com]

Don't even get Bill started on the issue of busing. As a small child he got on a bus for an hour and 45 min. bus ride ONE-WAY to the other side of Charlotte, as opposed to attending the school that was 15 minutes away...where his mother worked.

Busing would not have worked in my area. The County and City schools were different systems, and there were about 4 times as many county as city school. Virtually all of the minority students already lived in the city,which had only one high school and 2 middle schools. Black students would have been bused...to their own school.

I've never been a fan of busing. To me, it's insane to drive kids all over hell and half of Georgia. To me the thing to do is to provide better school EVERYWHERE (btw, don't think a back-water Appalachian school is any better than a school in the hood...in some cases --as in facilities and books -- it's worse) and encourage equal housing in all areas.