The distinction between "I want my tax dollars to fund my local community", and "I hate blacks, let's structure our education policy so that we keep them down" is immense.

Local control of education does two things. It gives local communities control over their education spending. It also hinders the redistribution of wealth towards communities in need of additional education spending. This impacts communities irrespective of race.

And yet the explicit racism in the education system is well documented and the support for creating and maintaining these kinds of structures is insanely well documented.

Ya know, how black people were forced into specific neighborhoods near construction, their neighborhoods were specifically targeted for destruction for things like highway projects, their neighborhoods are targeted by NIMBY movements, their neighborhoods are targeted with red-lining that prevented them from improving their neighborhoods, and in some cases like Tulsa they were just straight up burned to the ground for having the audacity to be a wealthy black neighborhood.

They didn't say "Oh lets structure our education system this way so it hurts black people", they said "lets structure our education system this way, and we don't really care that black schools will be worse because our kids go to white schools that we intentionally divert funding to our schools anyway and the police will forcefully remove them if they try to move into our neighborhood".

Then when schools get desegregated you say "Oh, well, we can't explicitly segregate, so we'll just make it based on zip code so we aren't forced to co-mingle." and what do you know? Schools didn't start mixing because it was often illegal for minorities to move around.

In my city it was illegal for black people to move to white neighborhoods, so even after desegregated they had another 20 or so years before they could legally get into a "white" zip code.

You're refusing to connect basic facts again. I get it. I have to be a conspiracy nut who's in the lefty echo chamber. If I wasn't, I might be right, and if that happened you might have to cop to the fact that you had an advantage in life, and that systems aren't actually neutral where you rose to the top.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Feb 19 2021 07:43pm

And what about the implicit discrimination? Ya know, where people make up arbitrary categories to allow or disallow voting based on which racial groups use which forms of ID most commonly. Or remove polling locations on the same rationale.

Systems don't have to mention race to be racist as hell. If you want to avoid making it explicitly racist you just look at demographically sorted data and target policy that way. Or increase police presence in an area so the crime statistics go up, and then justify further abuse because "the neighborhood has a high crime rate". That's also neutral right?

You probably see where I'm going with this. It is not sufficient to just say "let's make the system not recognize race" because it's incredibly easy to create a system that recognizes proxies for race and have the same effect.

When you pretend to be color blind you miss these systems being put in place.

I have no idea what you specifically referring to.

No one is arguing that redlining in housing didn't exist, or that it did not have a deleterious impact on black financial mobility. We are discussing whether the structure of the education system, specifically that it is locally funded, is by design racist. Local governments (see New England townships) in the United States predate the formation of the country. As a federal republic, the United States is organized as states with sovereignty over health-care and education. Local control is an in-built function of our political system. The United States is very diverse (good), which in turn is correlated with lower levels of social trust (bad). Lower social trust leads further to a preference for local control over taxes and spending.

Local control gives communities the flexibility to control how much they want to invest in education. It also creates disparity as wealthier communities are able to invest significantly more. We see this not only at the local level, but at the state level, where wealthier, mainly blue states, are able to ring-fence their tax base and prevent funds from assisting other, poorer, states. This promotes inequality between states, just as local measures increase inequality between communities. But again, there is nothing racial about the origin.

The issue I have with your framing is that you insist on seeing everything through a specific racial lens. It is much more than that. There are benefits to local control, there are also costs. There are benefits to a federal republic, and there are drawbacks. There are benefits to a one-party state, and there are severe disadvantages. Sometimes these costs, drawbacks, and disadvantages foster local and regional inequality. That does not make them inherently discriminatory, nor does it make the intent to discriminate on ethnic or racial lines. What we see today is an attempt to weaponize racism into an argument for widespread structural change. It is a false dichotomy. There are measures which we can and should take to eliminate the residual impacts of racism in this country. But what we've done instead is launch a moral crusade against every structural pillar of society all the way back through the Middle Ages and into our Classical past. It's unhealthy and completely counter-productive.

@ Bolded - Of course you don't, because you're looking for an individual instance of somebody saying "I hate blacks so lets organize things this way" instead of looking at the whole. The specific local funding of schools may not have been designed for racial reasons, but collecting and distributing funds based on property taxes was continued for those reasons in conjunction with red-lining, racial movement laws, and intentional destruction of minority neighborhoods, over-policing, and diverting funding away from minority schools as a way to keep minorities down. We had walk-outs because white people didn't want their kids going to school with blacks. If you think the public didn't actively enforce inequality in the schools using their "local control of funding" then you're daft. and I don't think you think that, I think you're intentionally avoiding connecting it to the greater web of facts because you have a need to compartmentalize because you can't handle inconvenient conclusions.

We're way off topic anyway, we can come back to this later if you want.

So, you've basically admitted at this point that, in fact, we don't have adequate spending on education in a lot of ways because the distribution is garbage. So we under-invest in education and healthcare in the communities that we have a greater police presence in. Defunding the police means taking some of the funding to lower the police presence, and replacing it with social services to help those areas. So instead of the police responding and shooting or arresting somebody having a mental breakdown, you get a healthcare worker to calm them down and help navigate getting help. You're also kind of an idiot at this point if you think the police treat wealthy neighborhoods the same way they treat poor ones, so the point that "we have heavily policed wealthy neighborhoods" is moot.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Feb 20 2021 11:12am

Separate racists from the underlying system. You are listing historical examples of racial discrimination That is not an indictment on how education is structured, nor the curriculum taught. It is not a vast conspiracy.

Police funding is a function of crime. There is a lot of crime; communities have responded by redirecting a lot of police resources. There is no epidemic of police officers killing mental health victims. It is less than a fraction of total police killings. Removing officers will result in additional crime related deaths. We are already seeing the effects of mandated police pullbacks. If there is an argument to make for additional health resources, make it. But all of the data suggests that it is a minor concern in context of American policing.

The police situation in wealthy and poor neighborhoods is different. Police are not going to be as on edge in a city where violent crime is low. Nonviolent offenders are often discovered in the course of pursuing violent crime. No violent crime, no nonviolent crime.

I'm not sure what we are arguing about, though. You are proposing that we defund the police because you're concerned about overpolicing. That is all that Democrats have to acknowledge.

North Carolina's 2013 voting law pushed by the GOP had several sections of it struck down due to racist voter suppression in the courts.



https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/07/north-carolina-voting-rights-law/493649/

Probably like a 9

i don't think that ANYONE who is even remotely interested in politics doesn't KNOW that republicans are more or less openly looking for ways to disenfranchise voters, particularly minorities and other potential democrats. they've been caught doing it so many times, admitted to it on the record, and are currently (in florida and georgia amongst others) undertaking massive efforts to restrict voting.

the game is pretty much 'i pretend it's not true, challenge you to PROVE it in a way that i can't find some silly excuse or move the goal post (spoiler: impossible), and if you can't deliver that, i won and reality doesn't matter'.

meanwhile in the real world: