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Not sure I can. I mean, you’ve already provided the standard argument: that minorities are responsible for (insert QoL decrease here). It could be a bit stronger, since I don’t believe you really demonstrated the link. If I had to pass the test, I’d start from your argument and try to explain how the Midwest is simultaneously cheap and very, very white.
As for Baptists and bootleggers, I have no trouble believing Boomer antiracists would be included in such a coalition. I just…don’t see much evidence of them. The Boomers I know are pretty conservative, and today that means skepticism on immigration. It’s the Gen-Xers who are more likely to take the neoliberal or progressive stance. And in both groups, old-school race blindness still holds more sway than antiracism.
Then again, I’m in a pretty conservative part of the country, surrounded by defense engineers and a family of rednecks. My finger isn’t exactly on the pulse of Boomer sentiment.
I grew up in South Carolina. Yes, yes I have. Around 60% black for my abysmal high school.
You proposed that black people are icky, so white people turned to the last refuge of legal discrimination: price. I think this is a flawed theory. If an all-white school was so valuable, the Midwest would look very different, as priced-out whites moved to the educational utopias of Ardmore and Lincoln.
What do the terrible schools of the Midwest and the Deep South and the rust belt have in common? They’re poor as hell. The unemployment and the addictions and the fucked-up families are not conducive to good schools or to successful citizens. They’re also not unique to black people.
I know the answer to all your questions. I also know you’re mistaking correlation for causation.
If black people caused poor schools, you would expect white-bread schools to do much better. As far as I know, that’s not true out in the boonies. The common factor is poverty, and I don’t think the Civil Rights Act is to blame for that.
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