by Eric Zuesse, The Duran:
On 15 May 2024, the AP headlined “70 years ago, school integration was a dream many believed could actually happen. It hasn’t”, and it opened,
Seventy years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled separating children in schools by race was unconstitutional. On paper, that decision — the fabled Brown v. Board of Education, taught in most every American classroom — still stands.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
But for decades, American schools have been re-segregating. The country is more diverse than it ever has been, with students more exposed to classmates from different backgrounds. Still, around 4 out of 10 Black and Hispanic students attend schools where almost every one of their classmates is another student of color.
The intense segregation by race is linked to socioeconomic conditions: Schools where students of color compose more than 90% of the student body are five times more likely to be located in low-income areas. That in turn has resounding academic consequences: Students who attend high-poverty schools, regardless of their family’s finances, have worse educational outcomes.
High-poverty schools tend to be schools where far less money is available to invest in educating its youths than is so in the schools that are in rich areas. So, of course, the test-scores will also be far lower there.
Though that article didn’t mention Joe Biden’s name, he was actually the leader of the small group of Democratic U.S. Senators who cooperated with the majority of Republicans in the Senate who voted so as to defeat the only method that the U.S. Government was applying to enforce the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision: school busing.
One mainstream news-medium did, however, mention, and document, Biden’s role as a leading Senate opponent of school busing: on 25 June 2019, Janell Ross at NBC News headlined “Joe Biden didn’t just compromise with segregationists. He fought for their cause in schools, experts say: Joe Biden helped give America the language that is still used to oppose school integration today, legislative and education history experts say.” She cited a leading historian of the subject, Rucker Johnson: “Biden was particularly effective in fighting integration because he did not use the overtly racist language of the segregationists, who warned of race mixing and black inferiority, Johnson said. Instead, Biden, along with other centrists and liberals, talked about ‘forced busing, ‘local control’ and ‘parents’ rights.’”
On 9 July 2020, I posted my documentation on “Joe Biden as a Stealthy Bigot”, and let the documents, instead of historians, indict Biden on this. Here that is:
Joe Biden as a Stealthy Bigot
Eric Zuesse, originally posted at Strategic Culture
The New York Times Sunday Magazine on July 5th headlined its cover-story “America’s Enduring Caste System” and presented Isabel Wilkerson’s masterful, even profound, 12,000-word history of America’s racial caste system. She also presented it in the broader historical context. She said: “Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States.”
In 1977, Delaware’s two U.S. Senators together helped to lead what has since been the extension of America’s race-based caste system into the post-1954, post Brown-v.-Board-of-Education, era. Here is how that “shape-shifting” was done:
On Friday, July 22nd of 1977, a bill was being considered in the U.S. Senate regarding how the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 civil-rights (anti-racist) ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, would finally become embodied and carried out in specific U.S. legislation. This bill was being proposed by all three of Delaware’s members of Congress, and was the most vociferously advocated by the then-young-and-rising Senator Joe Biden. The bill was actually written by Senator Biden’s own staff, though he was only the state’s junior Senator, not its senior one, and the name of the state’s senior Senator was therefore mentioned the first among the bill’s two introducing co-sponsors.
