A black person calling the pot a kettle

Posted by Marc Hodak on October 11, 2007 under Revealed preference | Comments are off for this article

The WSJ had an article about the difficulty certain communities face in continuing efforts at school integration. It was suggested that the integration debate was driven as much by the politics of test scores as the politics of race. It turns out that the mostly black schools significantly under-perform the predominantly white schools, even where the average income of the black families appears to be fairly high. So, black parents are eager to get their kids into the predominantly white schools because they have a reasonable expectation that their kids will get better educations there. Conversely, white parents don’t want their kids to go to predominantly black schools because…well, they’re racists. Or at least that’s a sentiment that the story writers appear willing to promote.

Ms. Horan says she moved her family to Milton from Boston 10 years ago seeking open-minded neighbors, only to be confronted by the same prejudices that she had hoped to leave behind. “Hurtful as it is to admit, racism is alive and well and living in Milton,” she says. Mr. Lovely, the board chairman, denies any racial tension.

The race card is an unfortunate draw, here, because Occam’s razor provides a perfectly simple and eminently reasonable explanation for why the white families don’t want their kids displaced into predominantly black schools, an explanation that has nothing to do with racism, even if racism exists (which it surely does). If the predominantly black schools were outperforming the white schools, who doubts that 80 percent of the white families would be clamoring for their kids to get into those schools? One can make the case that many of the other 20 percent might be racists, and they’d have a point, but it would have no more bearing on the discussion than pointing out that a similar fraction of blacks are probably racists, too.

I’m fine with the demise of the “separate but equal” doctrine. I think that most people (80 percent of us, anyway) would protest government-enforced segregation. But very few of us (especially those of us who made the tough, personal choices to position ourselves to make useful trade-offs for our kids) see the sense in government-enforced desegregation. Both doctrines treat individuals as tools of the state, trying to coerce a certain social outcome.

Unfortunately, much of this issue is a consequence of the collectivist manner in which most school systems operate. The government is inherently a part of the solution because it is inherently at the root of the problem.