Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is being hailed as practically Joan of Arc for having been bused to a white elementary school in Berkeley in 1969. At the Democratic National Convention last week, Oprah Winfrey whooped that being bused helped instill in Harris “a passion for justice and freedom and the glorious fighting spirit necessary to pursue that passion.”
But what if school busing instead epitomizes the folly and dishonesty of iron-fisted progressive decrees that force other people to pay any price for a mirage of equality?
During her failed campaign for the 2020 presidential nomination, Harris’s touting of her busing experience was “perhaps the biggest moment of Harris’s [presidential] campaign,” the Washington Post reported on Sunday. The Harris campaign even sold t-shirts in 2019 hyping her confrontation with Joe Biden during a candidates debate on that issue. Harris declared that forced busing was necessary “because there are moments in history where states fail to preserve the civil rights of all people”—and thus the federal government must intervene. Harris championed Senate legislation to increase the federal push for school desegregation.
But busing in Berkeley actually illustrates the folly of letting politicians domineer kids and parents in the name of equality.
In 1967, the Berkeley school superintendent proposed a sweeping busing program to “set an example for all the cities of America.” The first step was effectively to scorn federal law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 specified that “‘Desegregation’ means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but ‘desegregation’ shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.” There was no history of government-mandated segregation in Berkeley. But politicians decided they could no longer tolerate black children going to school in black neighborhoods and white children going to school in white neighborhoods. Busing kids far from their homes destroyed neighborhood schools in the name of equality and made it far more difficult for parents to be involved in their kids’ education.
More than 50 years after Berkeley started busing, the city’s schools have the worst racial achievement gaps in America, except for those of the District of Columbia. Black students are on average five years behind white students despite endless special programs and interventions to close the gap. Five years is not “close enough for government educational work.”
Hellbound and Down 