IS BUSING THE REAL ISSUE?

...q *Translated and reprinted, with permission, from Le Nouvel Observateur, June 5, 1978...

...V: Of course...

...The social order has been sufficiently responsive, so that most Americans have been able to ignore the cumulative indictment of our society's negative features...

...V: A classical adventurist error that can only lead the Argentinian people further on the path of regression...

...Although very few of these children or their families seemed to actually want busing, once the battle lines were drawn by the courts and the school boards they responded in predictable, and understandable, ways...

...6 It seductively rests on the urge to allow everyone to improve their conditions, but it insists that they do so by themselves...

...Ordering cross-district busing, they sought to reach into the suburban white refuges to equalize their educational systems with those of predominantly black inner-city schools...

...They fail to notice that the big stakes have been removed from competition by the hereditary rich before the race is ever run...

...Vallerino then followed up by reciting for me a list of totally unknown names...

...Such favoritism can never be the goal of a public school system in a society committed to equality of opportunity...

...2See Thomas Jefferson on Democracy, Saul K. Padover, ed...

...Let's say, rather, I give it critical support...

...the perils of small business send the great majority back to manual labor...

...L: So you support the Junta...

...The rules of the game remain the same: The fundamental character of the social-economic system is unaltered...

...It assumes a change in our sense of our own rights—from having the right to "a chance" to having the right to a decent living...

...7/bid...

...It creates a series of distortions that proceed from, express, and above all protect key institutions...

...And why have the courts been so much in the forefront of the battle...

...John Schaar, spelling out some of this ideology's social meanings, emphasizes its roots in a society where individualism "is the reigning ethical principle...

...I f the issue of busing is thus ideologically derived, it functions to distorts reality...

...Theirs is a tragic evasion, accelerating the destruction of neighborhoods 413 and the apartheidization of America, polarizing the have-nots against each other and placing shamefully great burdens on all our children...

...But most simply cannot and will not...

...Lipset and Bendix have documented that "two-thirds of the manual workers interviewed in the Oakland labor-mobility study had thought of going into business for themselves, and over two-fifths of them had actually made efforts to start their own firm...

...V: Well, for instance, the fact that the Argentina of today agrees to have commercial relations with all countries...

...Thus, equal opportunity is the perfect reform principle for confining all thought and action firmly within the assumptions of capitalist society: It breaks up solidaristic opposition to existing conditions of inequality by holding out to the ablest and most ambitious members of the disadvantaged groups the enticing prospect of rising from their lowly state into a more prosperous condition...

...If all high schools were equally effective, cognitive inequality among twelfth-graders would hardly decline at all, and disparities in their eventual attainment would decline less than 1 percent...

...Ale focus on education—and busing—and avoid the real issues...

...Only a people that already sees itself as deserving poverty until it "betters" itself would accept poor housing, unemployment, and subhuman wages as its due and fight primarily for better education for its children...

...And how ideological for any group to hope to end its poverty by forcing its children to uplift themselves...

...Certainly not to stand above the struggles of blacks and other minorities to improve their position in American society...

...liTo be sure, a great controversy exists on this point...

...But most people simply try to live as best they can, and could live quite well in a fundamentally noncompetitive world...

...Besides, on this matter of human rights one must also take care to trace lines of demarcation...

...But the real issue lies elsewhere: with the assumption that social life is and should resemble a race...

...L: For example...

...Reform thus comes to mean ensuring that the race is being run fairly and that those who finish first genuinely deserve to, as do those who finish last...

...Furthermore, the experience of the past 25 years suggests that even fairly substantial reductions in the range of educational attainments do not appreciably reduce economic inequality among adults...

...The Nixon court overruled their request for metropolitian busing on the grounds that (so far) the intent to discriminate has not been proven in the original establishment of these suburban boundaries...

...Our goal becomes to improve their competitive position in the great social race...

...It is, rather, imposed by the courts at the behest of such organizations as the NAACP...

...q 0ne of the most disconcerting phenomena about the Argentine regime is the "critical support" that the Argentinian Communist party finds it politically expedient to offer it...

...If all elementary schools were equally 412 effective, cognitive inequality among sixthgraders would decline less than 3 percent...

...V: Under the circumstances, it means to think of relations between states as being based on the principles of peaceful coexistence...

...In these days," the Court reasoned in Brown vs...

...When we confront the social problem of black poverty, then, busing appears as a natural solution because it is so much in keeping with our own core assumptions...

...I use this irritating term to emphasize that busing leads us away from more basic social problems and pits us against each other in a fight over ideologically derived issues...

...6John Schaar, "Equal Opportunity, and Beyond," Equality, J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman, eds...

...Our need to believe this—and thus to justify our society and the way we must live in it—gives the argument a power that its logic alone would not warrant...

...It should be abolished no matter what...

...Official American society must make the contest fair by giving everyone an equal chance to develop the necessary competitive skills, to neutralize as far as possible inequalities deriving from varying family and socioeconomic backgrounds...

...82, 92, 97...

...And why does anyone need to be poor in this land of abundance and even extravagance...

...L: Just the same, that means that, in tendency, the present government of Argentina is a progressive government...

...Why isn't the issue seen as equal housing or equal pay...

...120 L: Remind me who makes up this so-called Pinochet clan...

...But certainly not guaranteed work at decent wages...

...5 Since segregation deprives minority children of equal educational opportunities the Court ordered integration...

...Still, our inability to conjure up the movement we would like to see, to have it raise demands running counter to capitalist priorities and ideology is no warrant for abandoning an independent outlook...

...This choice, and the struggle following from it, can be studied in order to illuminate American society today...

...Why subject children, rather than their parents, to these enormous pressures and expectations...

...415...

...To bus black and white schoolchildren from one district to another is a mystified answer to a mystified question...

...Why not guaranteed employment...

...on the other hand, progressive elements of a democratic tendency...

...We have developed in the United States no significant ideological alternative to equal opportunity through which to think about such proposals...

...If masses of people become involved in the dispute over busing it is later, only after school districts carry it out in keeping with court orders...

...V: In relation to recent gains of the workers' and democratic movement...

...Here are his words, accurately reported...

...ibid., p. 92...

...But there are significant differences...

...But one cannot read without amazement the words of Roberto Vallarino, a responsible leader of the Argentine CP and a member of its Central Committee, spoken in an interview with Bernard-Henri Levy...

...There is, in the busing controversy, an almost imperceptible mixing and confusing of purposes...

...The image of a foot race best captures the social ideal aimed at by the Court—and by most reformers...

...This question transforms and renders palatable the more telling one: why do whole classes and races of Americans remain poor, generation after generation...

...2 A goal achieved...

...At first blush those in favor of busing are committed, as Marvin Caplan has recently put it in Dissent, "to an integrated society and to the schools as a principal instrument for integration...

...Jefferson, for example, shifts effortlessly from his pride in the new society in which men govern themselves, and his belief that all people should be treated equally by their government, to his conviction that there are "natural" social and intellectual superiors and inferiors and that permitting them to find their appropriate place is one of the new society's major goals...

...For everyone to have an "equal chance" means uplifting those who normally start in a disadvantaged position, perhaps giving them a head start...

...we focus on busing in order to avoid the real issues...

...To be a loser is to validate that we did not have what it takes to be a winner...

...If no social wealth can be pried loose—or even demanded—to eliminate hereditary black poverty, then at least the courts will place black children next to whites in the skilldeveloping institutions that prepare people for the great social race...

...For us, today, the goal can be to keep alive the tension between socialist principle and acting in the real world, to explore and reassert our commitments even as we struggle on behalf of immediate goals that may nearly deny them...

...3 David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 97...

...The problem is that blacks are relatively 409 poorer than whites...

...It is supposed to prepare us for our life's competition, and to neutralize our inherited inequalities...

...An unequal education perpetuates built-in racial, social, class, or ethnic privileges...

...Furthermore, other factors have always encouraged Americans to believe in individual advancement as a social solution: America's legendary opportunities as a newly settled land, its lack of visible badges of class, its democratic ethos and institutions, its vast economic, social, and political differences from the old country...

...We seek to throw into question many of their most cherished principles and solutions...

...on the other, we seek to avoid cynically immersing ourselves in that real world and losing our hope for any alternative...

...Not the society's but its victims' limitations become the issue, even for well-intentioned liberals and radicals...

...This will permit the appropriate inequalities of preparation, conditioning, speed, endurance, and incentive to manifest themselves...

...L: Mr...

...In reading them do not forget that, nonetheless, hundreds of Communists have been arrested because they are Communists.* L: How do you estimate the relation of forces within the army...

...For they are trying to square the circle...

...V: Not exactly...

...Such specific ways of framing social issues as demanding busing arise neither mysteriously nor accidentally...

...All that happens is that individuals are given the chance to struggle up the social ladder, change their position on it, and step on the fingers of those beneath them...

...Segregation is a social evil no matter what, because it implies a better and a worse race and perpetuates the domination of one over the other...

...L: Out of a total of at least 15,000, according to Amnesty International .. . V: That figure is exaggerated and doesn't correspond to the reality...

...Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms...

...In such a situation, genuine social interaction between races and classes could be a rich and humanizing experience for all...

...What has motivated at least a handful of district court judges is the existence of schools racially segregated according to municipal boundaries...

...Equal opportunity is our—and Jefferson's— social ideal: that American society will rank and reward us according to our talents and enterprise...

...Whatever else it may do, putting black boys and girls on a bus and sending them to a white school does not seem likely materially to improve their chances in life as well as those of the white children they sit next to in class...

...In 1954 the Supreme Court turned to what Potter called the "conspicuous exceptions" to our national pattern of mobility and, appropriately, insisted on granting them equal educational opportunity...

...The intensely American—and fundamentally bourgeois—notion of equality of opportunity has always been confusing because on the one hand it proclaims us all equal and possessed of equal rights and dignity, but on the other hand proclaims that some of us are better and worse than others among us, and deserve to live and exercise power accordingly...

...Certainly, a few "make it...

...Only then can the schools, and our society, struggle to leave behind the ideological presumption of better and worse, and to abandon the deep commitment to inequality that lies behind the ideology of equal opportunity...

...If social rules hinge our survival on competition, then of course we must compete...

...A number of people have pointed out an For Notes to this article, see pp...

...We may ask why the social apparatus has decided to focus on equalizing educational opportunities as a major way of combating the inequality in America today...

...They delude themselves to think otherwise...

...We hate Niggers" was shouted and scrawled, and fair-minded whites came marching to the defense of their black brothers and sisters...

...When we cannot avoid supporting busing—as one of the few crumbs made available to minority children—neither should we cease being critical of its assumptions and intentions...

...New York: Teachers' College Press, 1973), p. 41...

...Eliminating all economic and academic obstacles to college attendance might somewhat reduce disparities in educational attainment, but the change would not be large...

...L: According to you, then, the equation: Videlarfascism is an error...

...Especially since the 1930s society has taken responsibility for some 410 minimal things, such as a small old-age pension, some buffers between ourselves and starvation and, most recently, minimal medical care...

...But what is the practical alternative...

...Those who pin their hopes on the schools fail to see that no amount or quality of schooling can undo the pervasive effect of class, sex, and racial upbringing...

...Questioning busing thus leads us to ask about core assumptions in our social life...

...V: Summarily, I would say that on the one hand there are Pinochetist elements, ultrareactionary...

...V: If you want names, I'd say Videla [the president], Massera, Agosti, Suarez Mason, for example...

...the Integrationist," Ibid...

...Notes 'Marvin Caplan, "Truth—and Shame—about Busing," Dissent, Fall 1976, p. 383...

...8 The demand for a decent living for all flows from a different way of seeing social reality...

...Do people really seek to struggle with each other for survival...

...10 It is simply daydreaming to hope that equalizing educational opportunity among children can undo the natural and normal effects of a social system...

...4 We are, or should be, equal to become unequal...

...More specifically, the evidence suggests that equalizing educational opportunity would do very little to make adults more equal...

...The vision of "making it" places superhuman demands—and responsibilities— on the poor, because no fair race is possible where the competitors do not begin as equals...

...Thus they blame themselves, erasing the parts of American reality that do not fit the ideology...

...If guaranteed employment —not to mention redistributing wealth—goes against the American grain, proposals to allow people the chance to advance individually remain strictly in keeping with it...

...One is that the civil rights and antiwar movements began at the grass roots, and the masses of people involved framed the issues themselves...

...If we support basic human rights, even as distorted and turned back on themselves by bourgeois ideology, we also seek to assert those rights as they might be met free from mystification, in a socialist society...

...We know that the U.S.S.R...

...Busing is not carried out to meet the demands of a mass movement...

...See, for example, the account of the classroom discussion of white and black children's Christmas vacation plans in Charles Hamilton, "The Nationalist vs...

...L: When the U.S.S.R...

...With eventual changes in the composition of the Court, many liberals and radicals hope that the broader solution will prevail...

...230-31...

...in fact, the busing struggle arises on the ruins of the black movement of the 1960s...

...Which helps to explain why education has remained so important throughout American history, and has recently become a central arena of social struggle...

...How ideological, then, to fight over busing...

...But as conceptualized for them by the NAACP and the courts, the issue is not their poverty, but the educational future of children from these families...

...Capitalist society organizes the cooperation necessary to our common survival through forms that distort this cooperation and separate us from each other...

...We certainly do not favor busing on principle...

...p. 255...

...The mystified question is: how do we provide all children with an equal opportunity in the struggle for a decent living...

...This need not confuse us: "equality has come to mean, in a major sense, parity in competition...

...By dreaming of their opportunities, or thinking about those few who actually do "make it," those who are fated for the lower rungs manage to see their lot in ways that protect, rather than indict, our peculiar class society...

...Imagine children of different classes and races learning together where rising out of their parents' poverty was not the primary reason for the poorer children being there...

...V: It's a government containing progressive elements that, in fact, are predominant at the moment...

...Most liberals as well as conservatives agree that a major goal of social life is to "get ahead...

...These questions, which point us toward basic structures of American society, are replaced by one that points us toward—the poor themselves, or indeed their children...

...The first demand, asking simply for the freedom to make our own way, fortifies dominant institutions and attitudes, 411 because "it offers everyone a fair and equal chance to find a place within that order...

...In those cases where schools are used to equalize, according to the study led by Christopher Jencks, they perform this function hardly at all: None of the evidence we have reviewed suggests that school reform can be expected to bring about significant social changes outside the schools...

...Black schoolchildren, seeking only an equal education, were violently attacked by whites who sought to protect their local schools from the black influx...

...Liberals, radicals, and blacks demonstrated against conservatives, reactionaries, and racists...

...L: Who are the progressive elements...

...V: In a sense, yes, but I specify that it's a matter of progressive elements and tendencies...

...Furthermore, most people do not actually engage in a race to get ahead of others: their struggle is to survive decently, not to triumph over others...

...Reformers also generally want to make the race less harsh and to guarantee a minimal living to the losers...

...We ourselves have 71 militants who have disappeared...

...9 This study indicates that there is considerable interchange between small businessmen and workers: the dream of success and independence lures between 20 percent and 30 percent of these workers into trying their hand at business...

...5 T he Great School Bus Controversy, Nicolaus Mills, ed...

...L: In other words, the whole ruling apparatus of the Junta...

...opposes any condemnation of Argentina at the United Nations is that a leftist attitude...

...As yet there seems to be no definitive evidence on the academic effects of busing...

...And they likewise don't see that everyone else's rewards have little to do with their social contributions...

...But this can happen only if the schools can free themselves from their externally imposed task of solving the society's social and economic problems...

...See David J. Armor, "The Evidence on Busing," Thomas Pettigrew, et al., "Busing: A Review of 'the Evidence.'" David J. Armor, "The Double Double Standard: A Reply," all in The Great School Bus Controversy...

...To loudly trumpet the fact that—because of unique historical circumstances, social conditions, mass struggle, or personal energy—some Americans "better themselves" is to overlook that, by and large, there is a largely hereditary class commanding the economy, a largely hereditary proletariat, and a largely hereditary class of the underemployed poor...

...Reformers committed to the values and structures of American capitalism, yet determined to root out its inherent unfairness, would be driven to advocate bizarre solutions abolishing inheritance, perhaps, or the family...

...Whatever we may speculate about "human nature" in the abstract, the particular race most people run to stay alive and live decently is imposed by specific socioeconomic structures...

...I will seek here to criticize the assumptions behind busing, because they have had a decisive and deforming effect on our politics...

...L: And the violation of human rights doesn't bother you...

...Seymour Martin Lipset and Reinhard Bendix, Social Mobility in Industrial Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), p. 25...

...12 In the end this will only accomplish the conservatives' goal: to convince everyone that they have wound up at their appropriate station in life...

...Such an argument, of course, will not motivate courts...

...If they insist on how many Americans have been able to climb "the ladder" they ignore what it means to say that our society resembles a ladder...

...Compare the demand for equal opportunity as embodied in the struggle over busing to demanding, say, guaranteed employment for all at a minimum wage of $6.00 per hour...

...414 pp...

...On the one hand, we seek to avoid taking flight into a sphere of sectarian and doctrinaire theorizing that preserves its adherence to principle by refusing to be involved in the real world...

...They fail to see how their way of seeing inflates one aspect of social life, the competitive, while hiding another, the cooperative...

...and Cuba twice opposed condemnation of the Junta at the United Nations...

...Thus we allow the courts to quite "naturally" impose it on us—whether it can work or not, whether it destroys neighborhoods or not, whether it ruins traditional institutions such as the neighborhood school or not, whether the black families involved want it or not...

...Writing in the 1950s, David Potter argued both that America has "practiced a full measure of mobility and social equality," 3 and has remained a class society since its inception...

...After all, we need only to look at the inconclusive results of using the schools to equalize opportunity...

...But what does it mean that equal education has become a central battleground to achieve this equality...

...What has changed over 200 years is not this value, but our conception of what our society owes us as we engage in this competition...

...and claims are unwarranted that busing for integration makes a significant difference in minority students achievement level...

...419-20, absurdity in the whole business: blacks and working-class Irish fought over the crumbs of education available to their children while the children of the privileged attended classes as usual over in Wellesley (Judge Garrity's home) or a dozen other well-to-do suburbs, or at excellent prep schools...

...Insofar as the society and its agencies are involved, a rigorous equality of distance, equipment, rules of conduct, and available training should apply to all contestants...

...Reformers hooked on "equalizing" people's competitive position fail to see how much human damage can be done by humiliating the "inferiors" and reinforcing in the "superiors" a daily lesson in unconscious brutality...

...What, after all, is being said about us, to us, and by us, as we fight over busing...

...1 The main meaning of integration is blackwhite equality...

...Because General Motors in some way competes with Ford we are taught that the GM assembler, draftsman, secretary are in some sense naturally competitive with each other or their counterparts...

...Because the inverse position would lead to isolating our people and reinforcing the Pinochet clan...

...Second, children from poor families do tend to lack the skills needed to become fully functioning members of a complex industrial society—it makes human and social sense to talk of mobilizing all necessary social energies to enable them to develop such skills...

...L: So progressive means having trade relations with the U.S.S.R...

...We can hardly support it when local blacks oppose it, or when it destroys neighborhoods...

...Millions of black families live in hereditary poverty...

...In an authentic mixing of classes and races all children could be respected equally—their growth as people, not their performance, could be the main concern, and new standards of success and failure could be developed...

...New York: New American Library, 1939 [paper]), pp...

...In Boston, for example, the battle lines of the 1950s and 1960s Southern struggles were grudgingly recreated...

...To be sure, a number of factors confuse matters for us...

...Most mystified are those who accept the ideology most fully, oppose busing and indeed most reforms: they believe the race is being run fairly already...

...But how ideological it all is, seeing the question of living decently through the lenses of the great social race...

...Extending the mentality of the marketplace to all spheres of life, it sees "the whole of human relations as a contest in which each man competes with his fellows for scarce goods, a contest in which there is never enough for everybody and where one man's gain is usually another man's loss...

...It is an old problem for socialists, being both principled and realistic...

...This demand, which on the face of it is not very radical, says very different things than the demand for "a chance...

...Lost in a different kind of distortion are those who understand that the race is fixed, but believe that reforms can force it to be run fairly...

...Solution to what...

...There's a rightist way of handling the question and a leftist way...

...L: Regression in relation to what...

...There is a third level of distortion, which takes in all of the above and more—all those who, however reluctantly, accept the notion of a race as an indelible given of social life...

...Without ideological and political alternatives, those who do not "make it" can only see their failure through the available lenses...

...Liberals have their own agenda: it is not ours...

...New York: Atherton Press, 1967), p. 237...

...V: Yes, of course...

...Topeka Board of Education (I, 1954), "it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education...

...Think for a moment of an integrated education in a setting where poverty has suddenly been abolished by guaranteeing work for all at a very high minimum wage...

...Christopher Jencks, et al., Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1973 [paper...