what do i think about busing?

i was born in canada in 1981. this is neither something i've dealt with in my lifetime, nor in my geographic area. it has no relevance to me at all, and i've never had to form an opinion about it or take a stance on it.

but, what is the legal issue, here? well, on the one side you have the rights of parents - something i tend to minimize - to send their kids to the school of their choice, and on the other side you have a social engineering policy designed to better integrate kids. the media coverage doesn't seem to be framing this as an issue of competing rights, but that's exactly what it was in the 70s. i mean, if i had kids, i'd want some kind of say or another on what school they're attending....that's not a trivial concern....

in canada, we try to address segregation (insofar as it exists; our black population is much smaller, so we have more asians, and they tend to be relatively advantaged when they come in) through city planning rather than busing. that is, we try to ensure that we don't have these sprawling wealthy gated communities on one side of the city and these low income slums on the other, but rather create mixed neighbourhoods by city ordinance. so, developers are required to create a certain amount of low income housing in proximity to their bedroom communities. yes, we've been slacking on that recently, but it still defines the way our cities are created.

so, when i was a kid, my mom's welfare-subsidized townhouse was literally across the field and down the path from my father's four bedroom mansion. you can look them up on google maps. my mom was on farriers way, and my dad was on mozart court. the schools didn't have to bus people around because the neighbourhoods were mixed up.

i understand that i'm side-stepping the question, but maybe that's the point. i don't want to be snide in pointing to the unnecessary carbon footprint that busing creates, but i think there's a valid desire to have kids go to school in the communities they live in, across the board.

and, let's not forget that kamala harris was not a poor kid, either. i think the framing is a little skewed, in that sense.

so, i think i might argue that if you want to increase integration then there are probably better ideas than busing, and that there are valid reasons to push back on it, even if i would broadly defer to the community over the individual in terms of "parenting rights". and, i'd have to see the specifics of what biden actually argued - which i have not taken the time to look into in detail - before i could form an opinion on it.

but, that's not a thirty second soundbite of a black woman hitting an old white man with a bad tan on being racist. again: i'm not sure how substantive what she said really was, but i acknowledge that she sounded good saying it.