In a strange throwback to about half a century ago, 2020 hopeful Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., has embraced federally mandated busing. Her endorsement came as part of the effort to disparage former Vice President Joe Biden, next-in-line to our first black commander-in-chief, as racist. Although not quite racist. Or something.
The busing debate has remained seemingly settled for the past few decades. The former California attorney general’s decision to revive it is pure political calculation, plain and simple. But it’s a poor one, both as a matter of electoral expediency and as a viable solution to integrate communities that suffer from de facto segregation.
The issue of busing as a mandatory policy is a nonstarter with voters. Back when then-Sen. Joe Biden pushed for proposals and amendments to thwart federally mandated busing measures, support for busing lingered in the single-digits. A Gallup poll in 1999 found that more than 4 in 5 Americans opposed the practice. As Allahpundit notes over at Hot Air, it’s possible that negative hyper-partisanship will render the issue less toxic among progressives, but if Harris does somehow manage to clinch the Democratic nomination on the busing issue, the Republican attack ads will almost write themselves.
All this is made even more salient when you look at how disastrous busing was, not just on principle, but in practice. Most already know about the inevitable white flight and racial hostilities exacerbated by federal busing programs following the Civil Rights era. In cases like Kansas City, billions of dollars spent on busing resulted in lower rates of white students in black districts and virtually no closure of racial achievement gaps. But few know of the catastrophe that’s become of Harris’ own city and its iteration of mandatory busing programs: the San Francisco school lottery.
Bay Area parents must apply to public schools, ranking their top 15 preferences in a lengthy and laborious process that discriminates against parents with less time and transit access to tour schools. The city then assigns a school to each student in a decision made seemingly at random. The lottery system was heralded by leftists as the future of the nation’s integration campaign. Yet the result has been that San Francisco’s schools are more racially segregated today than they were a quarter century ago. And a whopping 25% of the city’s children enrolled in private school as a result.
It’s not just that racists back in the day made busing unsuccessful. Clearly, even woke white limousine socialists in the Bluest city in the country can’t stomach ham-fisted integration plans. Candidates operating in good faith ought to approach the de facto segregation problem with better ideas, not just insistence that all must embrace failed solutions, under pain of being called racist.
In San Francisco and in metropolitan areas across the country, the place to look for answers is obviously in housing. And oddly enough, a candidate with dozens of terrible plans has one decent one. Although Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., obviously doesn’t see the matter of zoning reform in the context of racial equality, her plan to tie federal funding to the relaxation of prohibitive zoning laws would do far more to reduce racial inequality than any other plan presented by anyone in the presidential field.
NIMBY housing policy that favors single-family homes and prevents high-density housing development simply extends the racist legacy of old red-lining policies. Racially discriminatory zoning laws originated in Sinophobic sentiment in San Francisco over a hundred years ago, and while zoning laws may no longer intend to corral minorities, there’s no question that areas like the Bay Area and Los Angeles have remained segregated due to housing regulations favoring wealthy white folks over poorer and disproportionately nonwhite ones.
Harris is an unserious ideologue, and her playing politics with bad policy to dishonestly smear Biden fits in line with that. But for candidates who want to upgrade from the kiddie table of polling, an embrace of zoning reform would likely be a better use of their time and political capital than luxuriating in this busing lie.
