One area where America is more racially divided than before Barack Obama took office

[bigtree]

When asked if the U.S. is more racially divided than it was when he took office six years ago, the President responded: "No, I actually think that it's probably in its day-to-day interactions less racially divided.

excerpt from NPR's first on-camera conversation with President Obama (Full Transcript Available Starting Dec. 29) http://www.npr.org/about-npr/372903748/advisory-npr-news-interview?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social


from ProPublica @ProPublica
Michael Brown’s high school was separate and unequal. Here’s a look at the segregation of our modern day schools http://propub.ca/1xbR6mn



How School Segregation Divides Ferguson — and the United States
by Nikole Hannah-Jones, ProPublica December 19, 2014


IN 1954, when the United States Supreme Court rejected the notion of separate but equal schools in its Brown v. Board of Education decision, St. Louis ran the second-largest segregated school district in the country.

After the ruling, school officials promised to integrate voluntarily. But the acceleration of white flight and the redrawing of school district lines around black and white neighborhoods allowed metropolitan St. Louis to preserve its racial divide. Nearly 30 years later, 90 percent of black children in St. Louis still attended predominantly black schools.

In 1983, a federal judge ordered a desegregation plan for the entire metropolitan area. At its peak, some 15,000 St. Louis public school students a year attended 16 heavily white suburban districts. Another 1,300 white students headed in the opposite direction to 27 new magnet schools in St. Louis.

The program left another 15,000 of St. Louis’s black students in segregated, inferior schools. But for the transfer students who rode buses out of the city, the plan successfully broke the deeply entrenched connection between race, ZIP code and opportunity. Test scores for eighth- and 10th-grade transfer students rose. The transfer students were more likely to graduate and go on to college. In surveys, white students overwhelmingly said they had benefited from the opportunity to be educated alongside black students. The St. Louis model was heralded as the nation’s most successful metropolitan desegregation program.

But from the moment it started, the St. Louis desegregation plan was under assault. The cost would eventually reach $1.7 billion. In 1999 the program was made entirely voluntary. Today, about 5,000 students get to escape the troubles of the St. Louis public schools — a small fraction of the number who apply for the privilege of doing so...

Decades of public and private housing discrimination made St. Louis one of the most racially segregated metropolitan areas in the country. A network of school district boundaries has, to this day, divided students in racially separate schools as effectively as any Jim Crow law...

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/sunday-review/why-are-our-schools-still-segregated.html?_r=0


Still Separate and Unequal
Why American schools are becoming segregated once again.
by Jamelle Bouie

As Nikole Hannah-Jones details for ProPublica, federal desegregation orders helped “break the back of Jim Crow education in the South, helping transform the region’s educational systems into the most integrated in the country.” She continues, “In 1963, about 1 percent of black children in the South attended school with white children. By the early 1970s, the South had been remade—fully 90 percent of black children attended desegregated schools.”

The problem today is that these gains are reversing. As the Civil Rights Project shows, minority students across the country are more likely to attend majority-minority schools than they were a generation ago.

The average white student, for instance, attends a school that’s 73 percent white, 8 percent black, 12 percent Latino, and 4 percent Asian-American. By contrast, the average black student attends a school that’s 49 percent black, 17 percent Latino, 4 percent Asian-American, and 28 percent white. And the average Latino student attends a school that’s 57 percent Latino, 11 percent black, 25 percent white, and 5 percent Asian-American.

But this understates the extent to which minority students—and again blacks in particular—attend hyper-segregated schools. In 2011, more than 40 percent of black students attended schools that were 90 percent minority or more. That marks an increase over previous years. In 1991, just 35 percent of black students attended schools with such high levels of segregation.

Even more striking is the regional variation. While hyper-segregation has increased across the board, it comes after staggering declines in the South, the “border states”—Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, i.e., former slaveholding states that never joined the Confederacy—the Midwest, and the West. In the Northeast, however, school segregation has increased, going from 42.7 percent in 1968 to 51.4 percent in 2011. Or, put another way, desegregation never happened in the schools of the urban North.

Today in New York, for instance, 64.6 percent of black students attend hyper-segregated schools. In New Jersey, it’s 48.5 percent and in Pennsylvania it’s 46 percent. They’re joined by Illinois (61.3 percent), Maryland (53.1 percent), and Michigan (50.4 percent). And these schools are distinctive in another way: More than half have poverty rates above 90 percent. By contrast, just 1.9 percent of schools serving whites and Asians are similarly impoverished.

read more: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/05/brown_v_board_of_education_60th_anniversary_america_s_schools_are_segregating.html



UCLA Report Finds Changing U.S. Demographics Transform School Segregation Landscape 60 Years After Brown v Board of Education
Segregation Increases after Desegregation Plans Terminated by Supreme Court May 15, 2014

Since the 1990s, the Supreme Court has fundamentally changed desegregation law, states the report, and many major desegregation plans have ended. CRP’s statistical analysis shows that segregation increased substantially after desegregation plans were terminated in many large districts including Charlotte, NC; Pinellas County, FL; and Henrico County, VA.

"Brown was a major accomplishment and we should rightfully be proud. But a real celebration should also involve thinking seriously about why the country has turned away from the goal of Brown and accepted deepening polarization and inequality in our schools,” said Gary Orfield, co-author of the study and co-director of the Civil Rights Project. “It is time to stop celebrating a version of history that ignores our last quarter century of retreat and begin to make new history by finding ways to apply the vision of Brown in a transformed, multiracial society in another century.”

This new research affirms that the growth of segregation coincides with the demographic surge in the Latino population. Segregation has been most dramatic for Latino students, particularly in the West, where there was substantial integration in the l960s but segregation has soared since.

The report stresses that segregation occurs simultaneously across race and poverty. The report details a half-century of desegregation research showing the major costs of segregation, particularly for students of color and poor students, and, conversely, the variety of benefits offered by schools with student enrollment of all race

Among the key findings of the research are:

-Black and Latino students are an increasingly large percentage of suburban enrollment, particularly in larger metropolitan areas, and are moving to schools with relatively few white students.
-Segregation for blacks is the highest in the Northeast, a region with extremely high district fragmentation.
-Latinos are now significantly more segregated than blacks in suburban America.
-Black and Latino students tend to be in schools with a substantial majority of poor children, while white and Asian students typically attend middle class schools.
-Segregation is by far the most serious in the central cities of the largest metropolitan areas; the states of New York, Illinois and California are the top three worst for isolating black students.
-California is the state in which Latino students are most segregated.

read more: http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/2014-press-releases/ucla-report-finds-changing-u.s.-demographics-transform-school-segregation-landscape-60-years-after-brown-v-board-of-education/


...for folks here who will be looking to defend President Obama based on the quote I put at the heading of this post, I didn't intend to cast blame his way for these disparities; that would be absurd. I would, however, like to know what measure of 'interactions' he's using to conclude that the nation is 'less racially divided since he took office.' I think that's a profoundly subjective statement which can easily be challenged (and almost certainly will be) on many socioeconomic levels of interest and concern.


...here's an interesting perspective on the racial divide by writer, Zak Cheney-Rice

13 Startling Numbers Reveal the Reality of Black America Under Obama December 19, 2014

{snip}

1,007: The number of active hate groups in the United States as of 2012. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, that's 119 more than there were in 2007, the year before Obama's election. In 2000, there were just 602.

39%: The percentage of black students enrolled in schools that were more than 90% minority in 2011 — a strong indicator of poverty, disadvantage and the various disparities that come with them, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

12.4%: The unemployment rate for black college graduates in 2013, a number that's been climbing since 2007. That's more than twice the unemployment rate for white grads in 2013, which stood at 5.6%.

$33,321: The median household income for black families in 2012, down from $37,558 in 2007. Compare that to $57,009 for white families in 2012 — a nearly $24,000 gap that hasn't just remained constant, it's actually widened since the early 1970s.

read: http://mic.com/articles/106868/13-numbers-that-highlight-the-difference-between-obama-s-post-racial-dream-and-reality


...if someone here actually agrees with the President, I'd like to hear the reasons why, and, I'm actually more interested in reading responses than debating them.

[Scuba]

1. Sounds like Barack was either being overly tactful or is ignorant of what's really happening.

[PragmaticLiberal]

2. I vote for overly tactful.

[Stellar]

3. You can call him many things...

but ignorant isn't one of them.

[Igel]

4. Calling somebody "ignorant" is not the same thing as saying "ignorant of ________."

"Obama is utterly ignorant of the state of affairs in Slavic syntactic theory. He's also woefully ignorant of current research in the reconstruction of Na-Dene languages."

These are true statements, and trying to say otherwise would be knee-jerk defensiveness at a ridiculously high level.

One cannot truncate these true statements down to "Obama is utterly and woefully ignorant." This changes their meaning because the sense of the word "ignorant" has to change once it no longer has an grammatical object.

It would be like quoting "You can call him many things but ignorant isn't one of them" as "Stellar said--and I quote--'You can call him many things. gnorant is ... one of them.' " (Hey, I punctuated it correctly, so I guess it's okay. Thing is, it's not ethical.)

[Jackpine Radical]

6. Wonderful pedantry.

Nicely done.

And for me, "pedant" is not a bad word. I appreciate precision in thought.

[Fred Sanders]

8. "Ignorant of what is really happening"...seems precise and clear enough to me in the context of

racial division, which is the context of the comment.

Obama is not ignorant of what is really happening in race relations in America.

[jwirr]

5. From the beginning there were forces working to keep it this way. For one thing the number of

students who were taken out of their neighborhood schools and bused to other schools was not a large number of children. Also there has never been a large movement to integrate neighborhoods. A few moved but most stayed right where they lived. The cost of moving prohibited a lot of people.

And the white parents who objected to integration found another way - they sent their children to private schools and started working on getting vouchers to pay for it. That left public schools with those who could not afford private schools. It is a shame that many of these private schools are run by church groups who make little of no effort to integrate them.

The exodus of white students from public schools is also what keeps them unequal. Instead of making sure that the public schools are equally funded the states have actually begun to fund the private schools. (Before the civil rights movement when my children attended a church school - we paid for it ourselves.)

There are so many social injustices that contribute to the unrest today that it is not surprising that things are getting worse and not better.

[bigtree]

9. the limitations and deliberate, inevitable obstruction, diversions are a good argument

. . . for just investing what's needed to improve the impoverished schools.

Thing is, generations of students who are impacted in negative or positive ways aren't pawns in some abstract political chess match. Real lives are being impacted by inferior schools, inferior educational resources; thus, in the absence or inability to secure funding for degraded schools, decisions are made to order the integration through busing or whatever means available to provide better educations; equal opportunities for learning. What we have now isn't an either/or situation - unequal funding is the real reason for the disparity.

Integration is a laudable and desirable goal, but, in this case, it's the disparity in the quality and state of the schools which is the most compelling reason to desegregate; and the most compelling reason for the 'white flight' of those with the means to escape the sorry school systems.

[jwirr]

15. Back in the day I remember that it was hoped that if enough white students had to go to the

schools in the black communities that there would be a move toward more equal spending on all schools. I do not exactly remember what happened to that hope but it is obvious that it did not come about.

It is also obvious today that is the one thing that has some hope left to bring the change we need in communities like Ferguson MO and others like them.

That and funding for new black owned businesses.

[JI7]

7. Obama didn't say every cop was to blame

And he didn't make them a target for attacks

[JDPriestly]

10. The key is here in my opinion:

"$33,321: The median household income for black families in 2012, down from $37,558 in 2007. Compare that to $57,009 for white families in 2012 — a nearly $24,000 gap that hasn't just remained constant, it's actually widened since the early 1970s."

It is a vicious circle. Even in our society in which economic inequality is becoming a very serious problem, better education and a higher level of education in the community are the keys to increasing incomes. Schools in poor communities (which are often minority communities) full of children from families in which the parents are less well educated do not offer the opportunities that schools in affluent neighborhoods offer.

Magnet schools bridged the gap. My children went to Magnet schools. They were great, but did not offer good opportunities to enough children.

I support Obama's plan to provide pre-school education opportunities for all children. And I would recommend a teaching method like Montessori that emphasizes the importance of accepting each child. Accepting each child, including each child in the group, is the key to handling behavior problems. Anger comes from feeling excluded and alone. Anger makes learning very difficult.

Busing children is very expensive and really hard on families. My children went to Magnet schools in buses some years. It was really, really hard. It is tough enough to get kids out of bed to go to school at the normal time. Getting them up even earlier is hard on the whole family.

But our neighborhoods especially in urban areas are segregated. I would say this, with the lack of really good pre-school experiences for children), is the big hurdle to improving education for all our children.

So, pre-school and doing something about segregated neighborhoods such as building low-income housing in wealthy areas are my suggestions.

[NewDeal_Dem]

13. We need to do something like raise income for low income groups, not build low-income housing

in wealthy areas -- which just turns into a big fight and if successful turns the neighborhood from wealthy to poor. What's the point?

All the crap to 'help the poor' just keeps the poor with us. Get rid of the poor with decent paying jobs, stabilization of the social safety net, etc.

[JDPriestly]

17. So how do you get decent-paying jobs?

How do you stabilize the social safety net?

We need more than slogans.

I suggest that we end our trade agreements and impose tariffs. I think we have the trade agreements in the hope that they will make the world more peaceful. I think we may be making the world more peaceful but making our country more violent and much weaker. The cheap wages overseas are temporarily fooling American consumers into thinking they have plenty. That is an illusion that will be lost as Americans notice that their incomes are not keeping up.

I realize that I am extremely pessimistic, but that is the way I see it.

Increasingly discretionary income goes to a very small percentage of our population. But it is taxed as if it went to a larger percentage, although not equally to all of the population.

Wealthy people think they are paying more than their share in taxes. The truth is that the disparity in wealth is so great between a large percentage of Americans and the very few at the top, that we are not living realistically.

How do you get decent-paying jobs when pay is so low in countries that we compete with for jobs?

I have suggested a value-added tax with the revenue going to lessen the disparity in wealth we have, but people say that is regressive. We could raise the minimum wage, but we don't have the votes in Congress for that even though Americans vote to raise it all the time. Besides, if we have higher wages, how do we prevent jobs from being shipped to low-wage countries?

[NewDeal_Dem]

21. How do you build low-income housing in wealthy areas? Answer: you don't. Little money for

new housing projects, especially in 'wealthy' areas. Low-income housing has been being destroyed for years, and most of what's replaced it isn't enough, nor really 'low-income'.

How do we do stabilize the safety net, get better paying jobs, etc?

I can't think of any way except a movement of people to do so, and abandon reliance on the 'political class,' whose loyalties are decidedly mixed, to put it charitably.

There was plenty of money created out of thin air when the bankers needed it. US GDP per person, inflation-adjusted, is higher than ever in history. The wealth exists; the political will (& knowledge) is what's lacking.

[Tuesday Afternoon]

11. It is not MORE racially divided but, it is less subtle and more blatant now, and there are those

who are now PROUD to be racist and make no bones about disclosing the fact. Which, is bringing it out in the open where it is actually easier (albeit ugly) to confront. The boil festered long enough. Obama was the needle that pierced it.

He is carefully (astute, politically) phrasing and being tactfully diplomatic in tone.

Hard line to walk and he does it well, imo.

[NewDeal_Dem]

12. How does the election of a black president mean the US is -more- racially divided, or make it so?

I don't see it. What I see is racists and political operatives who already existed coming out of the woodwork -because- a black president was elected.

There's simply no way to compare the racial situation today to what it was when I was a young person in the late 50s. It's a completely different world.

[bigtree]

18. different world, not comparable to the '50's - true

...also true that whatever racial attitudes that have surfaced or are being openly expressed existed before Barack Obama was elected.

That's small comfort, though, and doesn't diminish the danger in these open expressions of hatred and bigotry or, of course, minimize the importance of highlighting and denouncing them. There's a very real and pernicious effect of the tolerated and advantaged racism in political campaigns, appeals, and pay-for-view punditry. In one of the most visible effects, devaluation of black lives has manifested itself in unequal justice from police, prosecutors, and jurors alike.

I'm sure you realize that comparing what black citizens are experiencing today to the '50's doesn't make today's injustices and abuses any more palatable or acceptable. It doesn't take much imagination or anecdotal evidence to project what the effects of unchecked bigotry toward black citizens could mean for our communities or individuals in the future.

[NewDeal_Dem]

20. I don't think there is more racism today than in the 50s or even 60s. And in fact, I think a lot

of this apparent racism is being purposefully ginned up for political purposes, just like the deblasio 'back-turning' is being ginned up for political purposes.

[surrealAmerican]

14. This is largely because of a Supreme Court ruling in 2007.

Not that de facto segregation wasn't an issue prior to that, but the ruling made it very difficult to take any positive steps to desegregate in places where there was a will to do so.

[LittleBlue]

16. Busing was a flop here in Seattle. No one liked it in the end

It was a huge inconvenience. The white kids who could afford it attended private schools. Other whites merely fled to suburban enclaves where they didn't have to deal with the school district. The black kids who were bused into white areas did poorly and felt uncomfortable, largely because this could involve a ridiculously long bus ride in Seattle traffic to a school where they had no friends. We dropped it because parents grew to hate it.

http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=3939


As long as people have the freedom to live where they want, this will never work.

[BumRushDaShow]

19. It's largely due to housing patterns

with the peak of white flight, not just from urban areas to suburbia, but in the last 15 or so years, from suburbia to "exurbia" (former rural areas that saw development).

However, due to several recessions and the high gas prices over the past decade, a weariness over 2 hour commutes, an increase in empty nester households, and young adults seeking more to life than strip malls, a reversal is underway... where a number of urban areas are seeing an influx of whites back into slowly regenerated cities, and a move of blacks to the older suburbs and small towns surrounding the large cities as the cost of living and taxes begin to skyrocket in the cities.

E.g., Washington D.C. used to be nicknamed "Chocolate City", with a black population just over 60%, but by 2000, it was down to just over 50%, now jokingly referred to as "Chocolate Chip". Similarly, New Orleans pre- and post-Katrina saw a drop of blacks from 67% to 60%. I expect that by the next census, Detroit may have a dramatic shift as well, where many have lamented how the city housing stock is carefully being bowled down in preparation for a whiter, wealthier clientele.

Having lived here in Philly > 50 years, there's not a day that my jaw doesn't drop to see whites moving into neighborhoods that they hadn't lived in since the 1950s... Even the neighborhood that I grew up in that had always been "integrated" and progressive during the '60s, followed by a final large white exodus during the early '70s, is suddenly changing where (and I hate to say this but it is what it is) whites are actually buying houses formerly owned by blacks (something that never or rarely happened in my lifetime). To me, the change is dramatic.

How this will translate to improvements to the school issues (where the battle rages between for-profit charters vs public schools), we shall see. We may see a brief period of "equilibrium" before a re-segregation occurs (with blacks in the 'burbs and whites in the cities), but then this requires other factors, like income equalization, in order to maintain stable housing patterns and provide enough funding to support superior educational facilities in every locale. Nothing will happen overnight, particularly because of the decades-long decay, but some of us are hopeful given a new incoming-Democratic governor.

And in answer to your question, I think those who follow the beltway and RW noise machines, should know better about how any issue gets magnified... If it "bleeds", it WILL "lead". The fact that that President Barack Obama got elected twice, which required a good chunk of the white population (40%), should be a key to where we are as a nation (because it is a "national" barometer versus a regional one).

I read an article a couple days ago about the big Christmas migration "home" by a number of northern and western transplants to southern states. I am busy hunting it down, but in essence, the movement of non-southerners to the south has changed the demographics of some of these states (notably VA and NC), where they were able to rally enough to get a (modern) Democratic President elected and notably, a black one. The 2nd go-around was tougher, but for anyone to deny that something has changed, is truly naive. The barrier to a breakout of sorts, comes down to sheer desperation of those determined to halt the progress by their spending obscene amounts of $$$ to saturate the airwaves with propaganda and line the pockets of selected politicians, to suppress the changes.