November, 2023 archive

When I was a young ‘un, back in the olden days, and my previously all-white high school started to integrate, suddenly two private all-white schools sprang up in my rural community (I think one of them still exists). To be blunt, they enrolled kids of white parents who were afraid of black folks.

That’s why we called them “seg academies.”

Those of us who stayed in the public schools and got to know and study and play sports with the black kids (who I am certain were carefully screened and chosen to be the early integrators of the previously all-white schools in those early days of integration) looked on those schools–well–somewhat contemptuously. We were in school with the black kids, we got to know them at least a bit, and we realized that they were people like us. True, we may not have gotten to know them all that well, but we got to know them enough to realize that they were human beings like us.

Later on, when I was well out of school, my mother, who was a math teacher, taught for many years in my county’s now-integrated school system. More than once, she told me that they had more problems from (oh what the heck, white) parents than they ever had from students. She was born and raised in South Carolina, but she was able to rise above prejudice to see persons.

And now comes Thom to point out that the proponents of seg academies are still around and still trying to pervert public education to promote racial prejudice.

Grung_e_Gene considers the carnage in car nation.

My hosting provider tells me that this site is scheduled for maintenance on November 8. They promise that disruption should be minimal, but the site may be unavailable for a bit.

Michael in Norfolk wonders why the right-wing increasingly acts like it hates America.

He theorizes that it may be because the American ideal–one never reached but often enunciated–of freedom and liberty for all may have become a little too close to being more than a mirage on the horizon. They want to put someone in charge to turn the clock back, if not to the 1850s, at least to the 1950s.. Here’s a bit of his piece:

. . . perhaps the main complaint of those on the right is increasingly they find opposition to their infliction of their antiquated and grievance driven beliefs on the whole of society. Hence, their support of authoritarian rule where they believe others will be made subordinate to they power and control.