by KaiserJeep » Mon 25 Jun 2018, 21:15:28
Sub, I think the real original purpose of the thread was to discuss both racism and reverse racism, the government response that is supposed to "fix" the problem, and all-too-often, makes it worse.
I grew up on military bases in several US States and the island of Guam. But my last two years of public school were in Manassas, Virginia, where I graduated in 1969.
Military bases were in fact de-segregated by Dwight D. Eisenhower early enough that I cannot remember the distress that my Father (then a USCG Chief Petty Officer) described to me. He was so incensed by sharing base housing with minorities that he moved off base, signing his first mortgage in Metarie, LA. We lived in Metarie, and he worked at the Customs House, down in the French Quarter. Metarie was an all White suburb, that shared a stretch of border with another (I can't remember the name) that had Blacks and Creoles and Jamaicans, distinctly different but all non-White.
On Guam (grades 8/9/10 for me) the White kids were the minorities. Grades 1-6 had on-base housing paid for by the US Government, bigger kids got bussed to public schools off base, and it was a tough place full of gangs. There were Guamanian gangs, Phillipino gangs, and Black gangs. The White kids as a matter of self defense, clung togather and travelled in groups between classes, to avoid being killed or injured. We were effectively a gang, and "our" gang had Northern US, Southern US, Western US, and NYC accents.
In Virginia for grades 11/12, I attended a High School that was nominally "integrated". If you counted the Blacks and the Whites, there were almost equal sized groups of each. But all my classmates were White, with the exception being two "token" light Brown girls that were termed "Colored" in that day and time. The Black students had seperate classes, they changed on the half hour, and they were never present in the hallways at the same time as the White kids, who changed classes on the hour.
Classes were entrely segregated, and the Black kids were in 100% in the Work/Study curriculum, with different teachers, different courses, different textbooks, and different academic standards. White kids were allowed to choose either Work/Study (for those that were anticipating Blue Collar jobs) or "College Prep" (for those that would attend further schooling). YOU didn't choose which, by the way, your parents chose for you.
There were only a few exceptions to the segregated classes. For example, the PE courses were segregated, but the Basketball/Football/Baseball teams were not. This was because winning mattered, and everybody knew that you had to have Blacks playing to win against other teams that had Blacks.
I lived in Manassas again as an adult in the mid-1980's, and by then my former HS had morphed into the Jr HS, and was entirely and actually integrated. EVERYBODY in the school district had very high academic standards at that time, because there were many students whose parents were part of the US Government, by then Manassas was an outlying suburb of Washington DC.
By all appearances, government-mandated desegregation (a form of reverse racism) had succeeded in Manassas, VA. But downtown Washington DC, and parts of nearby Baltimore, MA still had huge issues with under-achieving Black students.
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001
Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.
Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0