Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Legal Commentary Blogs -> The Buck Stops Here

Legal Commentary

: The Buck Stops Here

Has Desegregation Had an Overall Negative Effect?

By Stuart Buck, Esq.

No. That's not what the book argues. It's more like this: segregation was a cancer on American society, and desegregation was like a powerful drug that combatted the cancer. Powerful drugs can have side effects that need to be addressed, but that doesn't mean that it was better to have cancer. Two recent blog posts (by Matthew Yglesias and Jamelle Bouie at Tapped) make the mistake of assuming that my book argues that desegregation was an overall negative. They then point to statistics from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showing that the black-white test score gap has moderately decreased since 1978. They then conclude that "the resources made available by desegregation have done a lot to improve educational outcomes among African Americans" (Bouie) and that "desegregation probably has had some ironic effects, but the main effects of African-Americans? greater economic, social, and cultural equality have been about what you would expect" (Yglesias)...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Buck Stops Here on July 07, 2010 (boomark / email).