“That little girl was me,” declared mocha madwoman Kamala Harris during the first debate of the Kallikak Party candidates, as she “devastated” Joe Biden by making the killer point that she’d been among the first of her kind in her city to “integrate” a school via busing. As a service to my millennial and Mennonite readers (plus the one or two of you raised in a rape dungeon by your creepy uncle), mandatory school busing was an attempt to racially “balance” public schools by shipping white kids to black schools and black kids to white ones. The resulting racial harmony was supposed to usher in a utopia…an “Age of Blaquarius,” if you will.
Biden, back in the days before his brush with a cancerous tumor (by which I mean Obama), was vehemently anti-busing. As was I, because in 1978, the bus was a-comin’ for me.
My parents bought a house in a quaint little L.A. Westside neighborhood specifically because there was a school nearby. I’ve always despised mornings, and my mom knew that the best way to get me to go to school hassle-free was if I could sleep in as late as possible each morning.
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A school a half block from the house was perfect.
But during my fifth-grade year, the school district told me I’d have to get up 90 minutes early to catch the bus to the intersection of Dolemite and Sweetback. No fucking way, and I’m pretty sure I said that exact sentence to my mom. My reluctance wasn’t racial. As I often mention in this column, I attended majority black junior high and high schools, while my candy-ass white friends opted out for private ones. But damned if I was gonna wake up at 5:30 a.m. five days a week because Shmuely Zipfelschitz of the ACLU got a court order. Not with a perfectly fine school a half block away.
So I told my parents, let’s find a private school as close as possible. That’s literally how we chose it—distance. The school’s academic record was irrelevant. The Newbridge Academy for Pampered Rich Douchebags (I may be remembering the name wrong) was where I spent the second semester of fifth grade.
I hated it—it was pretentious, Jewy, and the kids called the teachers by their first names (even the principal was “Mike”). But I got to sleep in, so I stayed.
I have several black friends my age who were bused that same year. Cleve is one of them. He’s a “civilian” with a normal life who’d prefer his real name not be used. But if his name is fake, his story isn’t.
Cleve also had a school a block away from his home…an entirely black school. So the courts said, “Go north, youngblood,” and he did. Cleve’s experience was positive. Academically, he noticed little difference between the new school and the old one. Clean white public school or drab black public school, the teachers were the same UTLA automatons. If you’re serving slop from a filthy trough, does it matter if it’s served on a paper plate or a silver platter?
