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The idea that school integration isn’t politically feasible has always been... dubious, let’s say.
Do you know the places that integrated most effectively after Brown and Swann? Border-state Southern counties where explicit Jim Crow systems were replaced with massive court-ordered busing plans. You’re telling me that was politically feasible but today it’s too hard?
Moreover, school integration isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. You get benefits even if the outcome isn’t perfect. No one could argue the integration plans of the past were always ideal or went off without a hitch, but they still changed a lot of lives.
A lot of the secret segregationists out there - people who claim to agree with integration in principle, but always have a million reasons we shouldn’t do it now - have discovered that a great way to kill off integration plans is to find a thousand minor problems with them.
Integrating tens or hundreds of thousands of students is a massive, complex undertaking. If you refuse to do it until every single element of the plan is 100 percent perfect and flawless and incapable of generating any political resistance at all.. guess what, you’ll never do it.
But over here in the real world, integration is something that can’t wait, because there are students whose lives are being ruined by segregation right now, today. And as tricky as the politics are, they’re not getting harder. And we did it before.
