I mentioned that my family moved to Charlotte in the mid-70s, just as Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools were compelled by the feds to go from a neighborhood school model to an integrated school model, with busing. Growing up in Northern Virginia and North Carolina, I was accustomed to a polite level of racism that I was barely aware of, thinking it was the nature of reality, not a flavor of it. I look back and am appalled that the black people who experienced it felt they had to nod and smile and pretend it was okay.
In Charlotte, I saw something different. I saw the yelling and contorted faces and open hatred of total strangers, which would have been absurd had it not contained so much intended pain. The sentiment that was expressed ad nauseum at the time was, “You can’t make people be friends. You can’t make people learn to live side-by-side. You can’t force these kids together, but they’ll still be segregated, because that’s how people are.”
Boy, were they wrong. We were part of a giant social experiment, and for the most part, it worked. The parents never understood it, but children became friends with the other children around them, and life with people who are different was normalized. (What a lot of parents fail to realize is that childhood is similar to prison, in that children have zero agency. Children learn to work with the available resources, because they have no choice.)
At some point after I left, Charlotte went back to a neighborhood school model. And now, some 40 years later, they are in the process of reintegrating. I don’t know whether this is from forward-thinking education policy-making (what I hope), or to keep the feds off their back (what I believe), but it’s definitely got a retro flavor.
Because the good people of Charlotte are spouting the kind of ugly, thinly veiled (or not veiled at all) racist “those people” crap like someone decided to do a remake of Blazing Saddles.
The nuns were clear: racism is a sin. If you believe in God, but think God made some people less worthy than others, that’s a sin. If you believe that some people deserve less for their children by virtue of the color of their skin or the circumstances of their birth, that’s a sin. If you think speaking ill of people unlike you is okay as long as those people are not in earshot, you’re wrong. It’s a sin.