Omaha Turns Back the Clock: Re-Segregation

RUSH: This is a story that’s got people on both sides of it pretty passionate. It’s from Lincoln, Nebraska but it’s actually about Omaha. (story) “In a move decried by some as state-sponsored segregation, the legislature voted Thursday to divide the Omaha school system into three districts – one mostly black, one predominantly white and one largely Latino.” Now, these used to be called “neighborhoods” back in the old days. Now they’re called “districts.” It used to be that you went to school in your neighborhood, but then along came the liberals and said, “Ah, no, no, no, no, no! We’re going to bus people half the day to get to and from school because we want diversity. We want people in disadvantaged schools to have better opportunities.” Well, clearly in Omaha it isn’t working.
“Supporters said the plan would give minorities control over their own school boards and ensure that their children were not shortchanged in favor of white youngsters.” Now, I’m really confused here because I thought Dr. King and the civil rights movement were all about integration because it was felt that minorities were being short-changed by being left out of the establishment anything, establishment school, establishment businesses, and so forth. Now, after decades of the civil rights movement, what we have found is it happens in universities; it happens in a number of places, the minorities successfully integrated and then once they got inside segregated amongst themselves within the new integrated place. I can’t give an example right off the top of my head, but things like, “Black Students Against Economics at Yale,” I don’t know, something like that, even after they got in. Or women. They were part of the minority, too, and they finally integrated and they separated amongst themselves as feminists and feminazis and all that.

Now we’re reading that integrated schools result in blacks being short-changed. Am I reading this right? Yeah, that’s exactly it. So we’ve turned back the clock here 40 years with this attitude, not the move in Omaha, but with this attitude. “The plan would give minorities control over their own school boards and ensure that their children were not shortchanged in favor of white youngsters.” So they want to go back to the segregation days. That’s what it sounds like to me.
“Republican Gov. Dave Heineman signed the measure into law. Omaha state Sen. Patrick Bourne criticized the bill, saying, ‘We will go down in history as one of the first states in 20 years to set race relations back.’ ‘History will not, and should not, judge us kindly,’ said state Sen. Gwen Howard of Omaha. Atty. Gen. Jon Bruning sent a letter to one of the measure’s opponents saying that the bill might be in violation of the Constitution’s equal-protection clause and that lawsuits almost certainly would be filed. But its backers said that at the very least, the bill’s passage would force policymakers to negotiate seriously about the future of Omaha-area schools. The breakup would not occur until July 2008, leaving time for lawmakers to come up with another plan. ‘There is no intent to create segregation,’ said Omaha state Sen. Ernie Chambers, the Legislature’s only black senator and a longtime critic of the school system. He argues that the district is already segregated because it no longer buses students for integration purposes, instead requiring them to attend their neighborhood schools.
“Chambers said the schools attended largely by minorities lacked the resources and quality teachers provided other schools in the district. He said the black students among his north Omaha constituency would receive a better education if they had more control over their school district. Coming from Chambers, the argument was especially persuasive to the rest of the Legislature, which voted three times this week in favor of the bill before it won final passage on the last day of the session… The 45,000-student Omaha school system is 46% white, 31% black, 20% Latino and 3% Asian or American Indian. Boundaries for the newly created districts would be drawn using current high school attendance areas. That would result in four possible scenarios; in every scenario, two districts would end up with a majority of students who are racial minorities,” the way they’re going to redraw this. “This passage will force policy makers to negotiate seriously about the future of schools in the Omaha area.”
When I read this business, “Chambers said that schools attended largely by minorities lack the resources and quality teachers provided by others in the district,” and we’re talking about public schools across the board here. Now, why is this the case? Why is it now going to require minorities controlling their own schools for them to have quality schools? It seems to me like this is a backwards move, and (interruption). Well, now, Mr. Snerdley (who is black), is saying, “No, it’s about damn time.” Well, I’ll be interested in your perspective. You tell me during the break here why this is about damn time, because there’s obviously something I’m not getting here, because this seems like the only thing we’re missing here is George Wallace at the schoolhouse door or something.
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RUSH: Back to this Omaha school split along racial lines business. Mr. Snerdley, who is black, says that basically the integration didn’t work because the blacks never had any power once they were integrated. The resources were allocated by people who still had the power, and even though the integration of the students took place, integration of administration and so forth didn’t, to the extent that it created any power. So basically what you have here is the failure of the public school system, which is, as we all know, run and controlled by teachers unions and liberals out of Washington. So the fact that the people in Omaha are having to admit here, “Hey, certain people aren’t being educated in a liberal public school system,” even after clamoring for integration, is a tantamount admission that liberal ways of dealing with problems, again, are demonstrated not to work.
You know, I also remember, I’ve had a couple — well, a lot more than that — I’ve had a lot of discussions with Dr. Sowell, Dr. Thomas Sowell who is also black and he grew up in Harlem and a lot of other places. I’ll never forget one time he told me that when he grew up in Harlem before Harlem became what it is today, he said it was black, but you had black professionals, including teachers, and they were educated. They had values. They were all oriented around the church. The culture was intact, it was superb, and they held their own in academic contests with kids from white schools around New York and so forth, and once the integration came along, all that just disintegrated for some reason, and apparently what’s happening is that they’ve finally owned up to the problem in Omaha, and so they’re going to go back and try to fix it by turning back the hands of time.

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