Portside

Long before the shooting of Michael Brown, official racial-isolation policies primed Ferguson for this summer’s events.

The religious right, who liked to call themselves the "moral majority" at the time, actually organized around fighting to protect Christian schools from being desegregated.

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School segregation doesn’t happen by accident; it flows inexorably from housing segregation. If most black Americans live near other blacks and in a level of neighborhood poverty unseen by the vast majority of white Americans, then in the same way, their children attend schools that are poorer and more segregated than anything experienced by their white peers.

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Public school students in the state are increasingly isolated by race and class as the proportion of minority and poor students continues to grow.

“In the 30 years I have been researching schools, New York State has consistently been one of the most segregated states in the nation--no Southern state comes close to New York,” commented CRP Co-Director Gary Orfield. “Decades of reforms ignoring this issue produced strategies that have not succeeded in making segregated schools equal."

If we understood the important role that our government played in segregating our nation, we would feel a greater obligation to press our government to integrate it. But if we believe that segregation was an unintended byproduct of private forces, it is too easy to say there is little now that can be done about it.