Juan Williams begs the busing question
I shouldn’t have to think this hard, and it makes me suspicious.
Juan Williams begs the question in his analysis of “Little Rock 50 years later.” He laments Supreme Court decisions that reigned in busing and housing patterns have led to de facto segregation, decades after de jure discrimination was stomped out. Then comes what to me looks like sleight of hand:
This trend toward isolation of poor and minority students has consequences — half of black and Latino students now drop out of high school.
Integrated schools benefit students, especially minorities. Research on the long-term outcomes of black and Latino students attending integrated schools indicates that those students “complete more years of education, earn higher degrees and major in more varied occupations than graduates of all-black schools.”
The question begged is cause or effect. Are the home environment of the integrated families who are already doing better economically and socially themselves the real variable? Is it the superior facilities or instruction that makes the difference? Or is it integration per se — simply being around white people — that improves life chances?
Williams’ blanket statement cries out for qualification. I suspect that the research has been done and the answers are not to his liking. Otherwise I wouldn’t have to think this hard about his claim.
You can equivocate, but it ain’t equivalent
So six black teenagers jump this white kid and beat the crap out of him in rural LA. This occurs subsequent to a handful of white teenagers hanging nooses from a tree, in a patently grotesque racist gesture that got them suspended from school, but they were not prosecuted for a crime because, apparently, they didn’t commit one. Now thousands of protesters are rallying in defense of the so-called “Jena Six.”
”What we need is federal intervention to protect people from Southern injustice,” Sharpton told the AP. ”Our fathers in the 1960’s had to penetrate the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, we have to do the same thing.”
The six black teens were charged a few months after three white teens were accused of hanging nooses in a tree on their high school grounds. The white teens were suspended from school but weren’t prosecuted. Five of the black teens were initially charged with attempted murder. That charge was reduced to battery for all but one, who has yet to be arraigned; the sixth was charged as a juvenile.
The symbolism of the noose there is horrific, and it cannot be countenanced. However, there is a vital distinction that the protesters seemed to have missed. The noose was symbolic. The beating was physical assault and battery.
If you want a white on black racial parallel, go to West Virginia, where an unthinkably sick and violent racist crime was perpetrated by a handful of white inbred hillbillies, and they should be locked away for life for it.
Making excuses for this kind of violence by pointing to offensive but nonviolent provocation sends a really, really bad signal. Assault and battery is inexcusable, and community leaders should be in the business of teaching self-control and peaceful problem-solving, not cathartic revenge.
I’m all for shining a harsh light on the obscure recesses of racism in the South or anywhere else. But Sharpton and the gang are not doing their friends any favors by excusing this behavior.
