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For many, attending racially mixed schools has been a life changer [edsource.org]

 

By David Kirp, EdSource, July 1, 2019.

As everyone who wasn’t Rip-Van-Winkle-ing during last Thursday’s presidential debate knows, in 1969 California Senator Kamala Harris was part of the second class to be bused across Berkeley in order to attend an integrated school. The senator deployed this bit of autobiography in a well-choreographed takedown of Joe Biden, who stumbled in attempting to explain his opposition, at that time, to what opponents decried as “forced busing.”

Biden’s inept response — that he had been opposed to mandatory busing ordered by the federal government, not voluntary plans like Berkeley’s — drew a civics-lesson response from Harris about the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the former vice president has been on the defensive ever since.

Scoring points against your opponent, as Harris did, is the essence of politics. But what went undiscussed during the debate is the power of desegregation to change the arc of children’s lives. Kamala Harris benefited from the fact that, as one of her classmates told a New York Times reporter, her new classroom was a veritable United Nations. “Busing gave us opportunities to leave our neighborhood and see affluence.” It was, the classmate added, a life-altering experience.



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