Catching the changes as they occur is a LOT better than recognizing them as you analyze what went wrong.
Expecting integration, Americans find themselves confronting polarization and fragmentation. Amid all the problems that have made Americans sour and pessimistic, this is the deepest.
It could be that all we need is a change of leadership in order to rediscover the sense that we’re all in this together. That’s what the Obama and Bloomberg boomlets are all about. It could be we just need to work harder to overcome racism and tribalism.
But it could be the dream of integration itself is the problem.
Thank you Mr. Brooks. And I ain't mad at ya for saying it. I just want to make it clear: Black Americans were not the obstacle. Black Americans were not the ones fighting tooth and nail against it. Even those Black people who did resist it just wanted to get out of its way.
Liberals are going to assault the man for this one. Not me. It just seems to me those white folk who are inclined to are already working on understanding...what, I'm not always clear on. And there's enough white folks actively opposing integration that, added to those who are confused by their intentional fogging of the issues, and those who can't support the effort required, and those to whom it simply wasn't an issue, the handwriting on the wall has long been visible.
[TS] The End of Integration
By DAVID BROOKS
Nothing is sadder than the waning dream of integration. This dream has illuminated American life for the past several decades — the belief that the world is getting smaller and that different peoples are coming together over time.
Over the course of the 20th century, the civil rights movement promised to heal the nation’s oldest wound. Racism and discrimination would diminish. Blacks and whites could live together, go to school together and gradually integrate their lives.
The end of the cold war promised to heal the rift between democracy and dictatorship. More nations would be welcomed into the community of free peoples.
The trauma of Sept. 11 promised to heal the rifts between red and blue America. Then there were the integrating forces of globalization and technology. The growing movement of people would pave the way for multicultural societies. The movement of goods would increase interdependence. The revolution in communications technology would increase global conversation.
All these promises hung in the air, but then crumbled, even in the past few weeks.
The progress in civil rights has not produced racial integration. Amid all the hubbub about last week’s Supreme Court decision, we were reminded that five decades after Brown, blacks and whites do not live side by side, even when they share the same income levels. They do not go to the same schools. And when they do go to the same schools, they do not lead shared lives. As several people noted last week, many educators are giving up on the dream of integration so they can focus on quality.
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same old saw...,
this is Brook's mental hobgoblin...,
did he attribute it to "human nature" in this latest go round?
Brooks conflates
Brooks conflates integration with assimilation, and even so he understates the level of both in American society. The proper dream is for pluralism as Harold Cruse states. And now is the time to read Albert Murray's Omni-Americans.
Black culture is transparent and that is as clear as the fact that Oprah and Tiger Woods are #1 and #2 in the world of entertainment, ahead of the Rolling Stones. They're more American than Rock & Roll.
The Supreme Court decision has not fundamentally changed the way people live, so much as it has been a wake up call, a la 9/11 bringing attention to how people think.
And David explains how
And David explains how people think.
That's the thing...David Brooks knew exactly what he was writing.
The Focus On Quality
If the majority of white Americans and the American educational system were ever genuinely concerned about providing a quality education to all of America's children, as Brooks so confidently predicts they will be in the future, then it is extremely doubtful that Mr. Oliver Brown of Topeka, Kansas would have filed a lawsuit on behalf of his two daughters against the Topeka Board of Education. The reality is that African American and Hispanic children in America for generations were provided a separate but unequal education as compared to white children.
I believe that black folks, in the main, always believed that integration, as they defined it, meant being given an opportunity to sit at the American table and have the same access as whites to whatever bounty was placed on the table. I do not think that black folks ever saw integration, as they understood it, as leading to shared lives with whites. Black folks simply wanted to put an end to a system in which whites were able to dictate to blacks where blacks could work, live, eat, play, receive medical care etc. based on the color of their skin. Black folks' real aims and goals were much more modest than the David Brooks and Ward Connerlys of the world could ever begin to understand.
Brotha you had me at hello
FINALLY SOMEONE GETS IT !!!! King never wanted intergration the same way as the way the Black Liberal and Conservative elite wanted either. King was sliding more towards Malcolm's postion on Intergration as social policy.