[BretLudwig]

Unintended Consequences Of Busing
[James Fulford]

"Ilkka Kokkarinen at The Fourth Checkraise has a post about the
autobiography of Kevin Weeks, a an Irish mobster from Bostons South
Side:

I did find the description of Southie and its Irish Catholic working
class culture in which the author grew up interesting, though, as it gave
me a better idea of the mechanisms that connect poverty and violence. The
author also didnt mince words to describe his personal experiences
with
the Boston school busing scheme that used the white working class as
pawns
for rich liberals to show how progressive they are (while excluding their
own kids from this scheme, of course), with well-known unintended
consequences of accelerating the white flight both to suburbs and private
schools, and gutting the public school system to leave it for those who
have no alternatives. Im sure that he would have learned to fight and
distrust authority even without this scheme, but it certainly didnt
help.[The Fourth Checkraise: Hooligans in paddy wagons]

Weeks was born in 1956, and went to South Boston High€“heres an
excerpt from his autobiography:

The saddest part is that there is a generation of Boston kids walking
around today who basically have no high school education, who were
condemned to not even mediocre jobs because of one mans decision.
These
kids couldnt get a decent education because Arthur Garrity took that
opportunity away from them. A grand experiment, at the expense of the
children of Boston, ultimately failed. But not before blood was shed at
South Boston High. We now had black students in the school who were often
twenty-one or twenty- two, older than the typical eighteen-year-old South
Boston senior. You could feel the hatred in the corridors. Just a year
earlier, there had been a great atmosphere in those same classrooms,
where
learning was taking place.

Students looked forward to going to school, to their classes, to
sports, and to just being around one another. But It one year later, it
was like Beirut. You were just waiting for the next fight to erupt. Kids
from South Boston werent running scared, though. South Boston High was
their home, and no one was going to come in and take their home from
them."


http://www.amazon.com/Brutal-Untold-.../dp/0061148067

http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2008/...ces-of-busing/

--
Message posted using http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/group/rec.audio.opinion/
More information at http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/faq.html