Just Curious

Segregation in Omaha, Nebraska

Just got this. Ernie Chambers, a Nebraska law-maker of African American descent, had recently sponsored a bill in the Nebraska Legislature that would have divided up the current school district of Omaha into three: one largely black, one white, and one mostly Hispanic.

Now what's up with that? Some kind of bad joke? I'm sure Malcolm X didn't have this in mind when he first famously argued for black community schools. That was about self-help. It was about community-building and grassroot socialism (well almost.) But this? It smells like state-sponsored segregation and it looks like state-sponsored segregation: it probably is. Apparently disparate impact argument is no longer working very well at the Supreme Court level in recent decades, but still this is very troubling.

The even more troubling aspect of this fiasco is that some local conservative Republicans (mostly white) are standing behind Mr. Chambers, the outside-of-the-mainstream radical. This revives the age-long myth of the racist conservatives, always lurking in the background ready to support whatever measure that would separate their middle-class kids from the poor, the wretched, and dare I say it, the "coloreds." It also confirmed my earlier conclusion that racists/sexists/naturalists and modern liberals ("Rad-Libs") really are the two sides of the same coin. They're definitely on the same boat, ready to deny the dignity of the individual person.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/15/us/15omaha.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Let's just hope that Attorney General Bruning of Nebraska has enough backbone to stand up against this onslaught.

posted by James Chang @ 12:27 PM