Thread by @taylor_mcgraw

Look, @mattwelch, no one faults you for caring about your kid's education. The problem is when you and other parents care about your kids' education to the exclusion of everyone else's. I don't care whether you're racist or not. That's not the point. 1/
reason.com/2019/09/17/is-…

The policies that have long allowed families like yours to cluster together in the same coveted elementary and middle schools have racism baked into them. Undoing those policies is not an attack on you, it's a corrective step to fix decades of injustice borne by others. 2/

What upsets me most about your argument is your invoking of the progressive label as a shield against any questions about your community's views on race. You (shockingly) used the North's victory in the Civil War and Jackie Robinson as examples of this progressivism. 3/

But you failed to mention that the Congressman who, in an amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, exempt the North from school desegregation decrees, was from Brooklyn. Or that, in that same year, 15k white parents marched the Brooklyn Bridge to protest school integration. 4/

These folks also called themselves progressives. In fact, their arguments remind me a lot of yours.

So, no I won't compare you to the Bull Connors of the world. As a southerner, I recognize the difference between you and him: he was an honest segregationist. /end