ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, September 9, 1996 TAG: 9609090113
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
TYPE: READERS' FORUM
School mix reflects our neighborhoods
``ARE THIS region's schools racially integrated enough?'' This is a question to which individuals, however logical, can provide only subjective answers. An objective answer is reached only through one or another of three social processes.
The first process, purely political, tends to lead to ideological conflict, dichotomization of citizens and winner-take-all coercion of one side by the other.
It's concerned not with desires of individuals, but rather with desires of majorities, whether of voters, powers or politicians.
For generations this process has been at work polarizing and radicalizing many people into either total segregationists or total integrationists. To one side, any degree of integration seems too much. To the other side, no degree of integration seems enough.
When not intimidated, however, most people gravitate toward someplace in the middle that is more convenient and comfortable than extreme.
The second process, normally predominant, results from mixing political and market processes. It's the least predictable of the three, for its outcomes depend on kinds and degrees of government restrictions upon management decisions at schools public and private.
The third process, purely market-based, works through freedom of choice for both education providers and education ``shoppers.''
The market's motto is ``the customer is always right,'' so an unintimidated market process tends to create and sustain, in schools and elsewhere, a variety of degrees across a full range from zero to total integration.
Both political and market processes provide ``objective'' answers to the question of how much integration is enough. But how much is ``enough'' for the moment is just however much the process provides at the moment.
Politics tends to create uniformity, one way or the the other, while the market tends to create variety. The variety that exists in public schools in the city is to a significant degree the result of the variety that exists in neighborhoods as the result of the market for real estate.
Each reader should ask: ``Do I want to live in a city in which school policies, regulations, student populations and general environments are all the same or all different? Do I want more politics and less market or more market and less politics? Or am I happy with the current mix? And what do I think is right or better for society in general?''
Of course, each individual's answers to these questions will also be subjective.
Objectivity is available only in the subjectively unsatisfactory mix, and that mix is always changing.
MIKE MARLOWE
BLACKSBURG
Should we strive for Detroit's level?
I WOULD like to address the issue you raise in the Reader's Forum question: Are this region's schools racially integrated enough?
My thoughts are that they absolutely are not and never will be at the present rate of achievement. Something more will have to be done, maybe a whole lot of things, before racial utopia is achieved (a 50-50 black-white split).
In spite of the government-subsidized baby-breeding program, being carried out at taxpayers' expense at such locations as Hurt Park, Lansdowne Park, etc., the black population seems pretty static at around 20 percent. Lord knows our white girls are already doing all they can to help remedy this racial imbalance.
We may have to go to Detroit and find out what they did to achieve a 76 percent black population in such a short period. We may want to consider paying a bunch of our white liberals here in Roanoke to move up there. This would have a dual positive effect. While reducing our white population here in Roanoke, and therefore moving us closer to racial utopia in our schools, it would also make them happier to be in a more integrated school system.
I fully realize that this is probably not the solution you are looking for or one that your liberal agenda would recommend. But desperate situations call for desperate actions. And, let's face it, you have tried everything else.
So, what say? Let's give it a shot and make everybody happy.
RAYMOND A. SIMMONS
ROANOKE
Integration hasn't promoted tolerance
THE QUESTION is: ``Are this region's schools racially integrated enough?''
The answer is they are integrated far too much for the well-being of society. For example, look at violence in our schools, which was never there before integration.
Contrary to popular belief, high morals, standards and values do not rub off on others by association. Instead of trying to make us ``tolerant'' of the lifestyle of other races, it would be much better to teach them what we expect in a civilized society.
Martin Luther King went up on a mountain and saw the races of people living in harmony with each other. What he did not see is the change of lifestyle, social conduct and attitudes which the negroes must make in order to be acceptable to the white majority.
All the Black Power in the world cannot make the white majority accept Negroes. Only a change of heart and mind in the Negroes can do this, and it starts in their own homes.
KENNETH E. VAUGHN
RADFORD
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