In 1974 in Boston, they forced Boston public schools to racially integrate by court order.
There was a busing battle about getting kids in Black neighborhoods onto buses and into schools to integrate them.
A lady on the news in 1975 said that in a few years, the schools would be all coloreds and niggers, no whites. Give them fuckin niggers everything, then.
Forty years later, Boston public schools are largely PoC, as White Flight took over, leaving schools that used to be quality (which is why integration was so desired in the first place) in shit. They’re more segregated now than when they were allowed to be by law.
Now they’re trying to cut down on the bus system that takes those PoC children into the schools.
:|
In 2012.
This is racism, people. It doesn’t go away. It just changes to suit the new laws and changes name. Instead of “you niggers can’t come to our school”, it’s “take all the money of out those schools and move it to where the white kids are going and then make it much harder for Black people to get to those schools because…uh…budget problems!!!”
RACISM HAS NOT SUBSTANTIALLY DECREASED SINCE THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA.
IT JUST GOES BY MANY DIFFERENT NAMES NOW.
If they fucking cut funding for the METCO busing program, I will be SO FUCKING DONE with my home state. I went to a school where kids were bused from underfunded, overcrowded schools in the city, and it was great for the students who came to our school because it is a rich town with lots of taxpayer money to fund lots of programs.
The schools are extremely segregated on the South Shore, which is where many of the kids in the busing program go to. In my experience, many of the students who came to my school from the busing program actually utilized more of the programs and clubs than the rich kids who were actually from my town. At the high school level, it was definitely a better experience for those students than at the schools in their district. However, throughout elementary school and middle school, I saw many kids who were in the METCO program get punished and labelled “bad” for things that never got the white kids in trouble. In fact, I found this little chart from the MA Department of Education that has stats about my town in reference to that.
We have a decent-sized Cape Verdean population in town, but since most of the families have only been here since the 50s or 60s, there weren’t more than maybe 15 or so Cape Verdean kids in my grade, which was about 220 students overall. Having the busing program at least made the overwhelming whiteness a little less, but not enough. But I very, very rarely saw much outright racism between students, and I only heard about anything like that from PoC friends of mine a few times. When they went to cut the METCO program all together several years ago, hundreds of students from my school took time after school to go and protest at the state house along with other Boston students.
I guess, in short what I’m trying to say is that all students benefit from the busing program, especially PoC students. These towns should be putting money forward to the program, instead of just the state funding it, because the increase in diversity among the student body makes the white students at least a little less racist than they would be.
oopfacts
(via genderbitch)
