The number of black kids in the schools I went to (prior to college, and even then it was never more than about 5% at UCLA in 1988-1989) was never more than about 2%.
One of the marks of Orthodox Jews is that more than 90% of them send their kids to Orthodox Jewish schools.
In ninth grade, I had a two-hour commute to and from school. It was miserable and the worst school year of my life. I had hives every night. I failed two classes (Spanish, Algebra) my first semester at Forest Lake Christian School. Then I transferred to Placer High School so I could take journalism classes and my grades improved to better than a B average (without taking any honors courses).
I’ve mentioned many times that, in my experience growing up in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley in the 1960s and 1970s, white flight from the public schools was pretty much Jewish flight. It can be dated fairly precisely to 1978 to avoid integration due to the mandatory school busing imposed by an ACLU lawsuit on the giant Los Angeles Unified School District.
Why? Back then, Catholics tended to go to Catholic schools, and Protestants lived in independent school districts like Pasadena, San Marino, and in Orange County.
Moreover, San Fernando Valley Jews were highly enthusiastic about public schooling. One of my older memories is hearing from my Jewish teammates on my baseball team at the local park that Catholic schools were kind of un-American. Jews went to public schools to demonstrate their commitment to civic Americanism.
But then, very quickly, they stopped.
Yet that massive historical example that happened 38 years ago at the heart of the world capital of the entertainment industry has largely been lost in the mists of time. Thus, when 27-year-old Atlantic interns denounce all those horrible white people who white flighted away from integrated schools, they tend to picture evil white Southerners who were probably secret Klansmen, meatheaded Catholic ethnics, and snobby WASPs who wouldn’t let their great-grandfathers into their anti-Semitic country clubs, but they don’t picture people much like themselves.
So, I figured I’d better post a rare 21st Century article documenting that I’m not just hallucinating all this history. From the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles seven years ago:
A Brief History of Jews in Public Schools
by Rachel Heller
Posted on Nov. 30, 2009 at 2:01 pmWith the many LAUSD schools having spotty reputations, and given the array of private schools to choose from, Jewish support for Los Angeles public schools in recent years has been at best tepid. But that wasn’t always the case.
Jews in L.A. have had a long and textured relationship with the public education system. From the 1890s, when the city first established elementary and high school districts, through to the 1960s, public education was a mainstay of the Jewish community.
But when school demographics began to shift as working class Latino and African American populations burgeoned, many Jewish families pulled out of public schools and migrated to the private realm.
The Jewish exodus from LAUSD reached its peak during the desegregation movement of the 1970s. After the ACLU filed a lawsuit in 1963 to end segregation in L.A. schools, the LAUSD board created voluntary integration programs, introducing magnet schools and giving district schools the option of busing students from lower-performing facilities to higher performing schools. In 1976, the California Supreme Court charged state school districts with enforcing integration. In response, two years later the L.A. school board began a sweeping mandatory busing program that would reassign more than 60,000 students, transferring minority children from downtown and South L.A. to predominantly white schools in the San Fernando Valley and the Westside, and vice versa.
This was a particularly nuts example of the high tide of liberal social engineering since it involved busing kids from the San Fernando Valley over a mountain range — the Santa Monica Mts. / Hollywood Hills — and down to South-Central L.A.
Students often were bused up to an hour away from where they lived, and the move caused a public outcry among both whites and minorities over what many parents saw as “the end of neighborhood schools,” according to former LAUSD school board member David Tokofsky. Racist and classist prejudices also turned some white families away.
In the first year of forced busing, the district lost 25,000 white students, recalled Shel Erlich, the former longtime head of the LAUSD communications office. In the second year, an additional 17,000 left. In 1981, after only three years, California residents voted down all mandatory busing programs and the plan in Los Angeles was suspended.
But the damage had been done – in the late 1970s, Erlich said, the district was about 30 percent white; now, that number hovers below nine percent.
“[Busing] drove a huge number of Jews from the public schools,” said local author and Jewish Journal columnist Bill Boyarsky. “Parents were not comfortable sending their children to a school where their kid might be the only white person in the class.”
Jewish leaders had taken both sides of the busing debate. Educator Jackie Goldberg, who would later win seats on the Los Angeles City Council and the California State Assembly, headed the controversial Integration Project in the late 1970s that pushed for mandatory busing. Activist and later U.S. Congresswoman Bobbi Fiedler, on the other hand, led the vocal Bustop movement in the Valley that fiercely opposed busing and challenged the program in court.
… Private schools flourished; Jewish day schools proliferated in the 1970s and 80s.
So, I wanted to get this on the record because it’s otherwise disappeared down the Memory Hole.
Thus, when the young lady from The Atlantic reads Matthew Weiner, creator of Mad Men, going on and on in interviews about how he could tell there were anti-Semites lurking everywhere in 1981 at ultra-exclusive Harvard-Westlake in the Hollywood Hills (which was then 40% Jewish), she feels a righteous thrill. Meanwhile, it never occurs to her to wonder why Weiner’s parents were paying for him to attend an exclusive school founded by Episcopalians, when just a few years before they would have thought it right and fitting to utilize Los Angeles’s fine public school system. The young lady from The Atlantic could empathize more with the creator of Mad Men more than she can empathize with the Klansmen, Catholic ignoramuses, and the WASP anti-Semite golfers for whom she blames the failure of school integration, but she’s almost never called upon to wonder why Weiner’s Hancock Park parents put him in private school.
It just doesn’t come up. Why would anybody who is professionally interested in the history of white flight from the public schools ever think about something as obscure as America’s second largest school district, which happens to be in the second most televised place in America?
By the way, one of the funnier interviews with Weiner was conducted by David Samuels, who is now being widely denounced by the members of the Obama Administration media echo chamber for inducing Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes to spill his guts a little too frankly for the Administration’s good.
But Samuels does this to everybody, especially fellow Jews: he’s supersmart about getting inside his subject’s head and getting him to talk about his motivations that he normally keeps under wraps.
COMMENTS:
* Investment tip: buy within walking distance of an Orthodox or Sephardic temple for a steady stream of buyers.
* Diversity is fine when it occurs naturally and with the consent of all parties. Forced, artificial diversity is not “enriching,” it’s insane.
* Still, these posts by Steve are worthwhile. They just might help remind people in the megaphone media that this is a two-way conversation now and they might want to dial down their gas-lighting game. Fifty years of unrelenting guilt-tripping and taunting can get on the collective nerves of others.
* Jews are considered white when doing so helps Jews, and nonwhites when doing so helps Jews. When Jews do things that are not kosher under societal mores (like fleeing areas flooded with undesirable ethnic groups) it’s called “white flight.” Yet Jews simultaneously hold up the Holocaust narrative as The Worst Thing In Human History and use it as the primary excuse for undermining most non-Israeli nationalism.
* Rapper Ice Cube of N.W.A. was bussed from South Central to attend high school more than an hour away in Woodland Hills. Interestingly, Woodland Hills educated Ice Cube left NWA to unleash a series of controversial, anti-Semitic tracks. Ice Cube brought us The Predator album so there were some good things to come out of LA bussing.
* I heard a white guy tell about his experiences with being bused in grade school back in the early 70s. Every year he was sent to a different one, and he always had to deal with being the new kid in class, the outsider. Every year he was torn away from the few friends he’d made the previous year. He soon quit making friends at all because he figured out he’d never be allowed to keep them.
It was the sort of environment where a blazing extrovert might have thrived, but he wasn’t an extrovert, and he says he found it traumatic. He wanted stability, not to be someone else’s social experiment. He said he doubted he added much of any value to the lives of the black kids whose schools he was sent to, and the busing didn’t do him any good, either.
* I think anyone who thinks White America is going to wake up and fight back, should take a long look at Busing in the 1970s and 1980s.
Almost no one ever voted for Busing. It was imposed on people by the courts and the bureaucracy. The Civil rights bill was supposed to ban government mandated segregation, not require Government enforced desegregation across entire school districts.
Reagan campaigned against it, but the republicans would never pass a bill against it. Howard Metzenbaum would get up and say “I’ll filibuster any anti-busing bill” and the Senator majority leader Dole/Baker would go “sorry, we just can’t pass a bill”. And that was that.
And people just took it. Most of them, instead of getting mad and fighting, just ran away. Or as Steve wrote put their kids in private school. In effect paying for their kids education twice, once thru taxes, then thru private school fees.
And this was in the 1970s-1980s when supposedly the country was more “racist” and “right-wing”.
* That’s a very sad story. For $50 I’ll write the screenplay and we can shop it to Hollywood. From experience though I doubt they’ll be interested.
The better Screenplay would be the story of a disadvantaged minority, say a black kid, who was uplifted by a magnanimous benefactor, say a Jew, who took it upon himself to fight the good fight against WASPy gentiles who stood in the way of this good looking, gifted disadvantaged minority kid.
At this point in story developent we should take a look at casting. I have Dustin Hoffman in mind for the beneficient Yidden and Denzel Washington for the disadvantaged minority boy’s father.
Let’s put the backdrop as contemporary Fergusson Mo or a fictionalized variant. We’ll have a NYT reporter covering the unrest and assuredly signaling virtue to the utmost. This is the angle we’ll use: the story will be told amidst the chaos of BLM with a Charles Blow-type homosexual NYT reporter narrating the unfolding drama.
I work cheap, contact me for the screenplay, I can have it done tonight. We’ll make millions.
* >>>Jewish leaders had taken both sides of the busing debate. Educator Jackie Goldberg, who would later win seats on the Los Angeles City Council and the California State Assembly, headed the controversial Integration Project in the late 1970s that pushed for mandatory busing.
From Wikipedia: “Goldberg is openly lesbian[1] and was a founder member of the California Legislative LGBT Caucus. She is one of three openly gay and Jewish members with Carol Migden, and Mark Leno.”
Not surprised. Radical, Jewish, lesbian with no skin in the game heads the “controversial” project.
* I can tell you from personal experience that being a White-Jewish kid in one of these minority schools really sucks. You get the usual bullying from Black and Hispanic kids, while also receiving ostracism from your fellow Jews cause your parents actually sent you to one of these “ghetto” schools. Unsurprisingly, many of fellow Jews went on to become liberal zealots (a few of them work for groups like the ACLU) while I eventually became an admirer of Pat Buchanan and Paul Gottfried. The Cossacks no longer matter to me…
* I lived for a few years in a city where the local high school was heavily black, but there was an honors program created to keep white kids from fleeing the school entirely. There was a far left Jewish family across the street from us. The dad was (literally) a card-carrying ACLU member. His son got kicked out of the honors program. Instead of going to classes at the same high school with the normal (i.e., mostly black) students, the kid somehow transferred to the neighboring high school which (coincidentally!) was about 95% white.
* I wonder how many white people have lost long-term friendships with black people over what I’d call “the interpersonal ferguson effect,” which could basically be described as the white guy not buying the old-timey black narrative of victimization.
I’m white, and I had to cut one loose lately. I got tired of the old-timey neglected negro narrative. He clung to it like a religion, even though he’s had a pretty successful life, thanks to white folks, and never lifted a finger to help black folks. He’s of the “I got mine, let them get theirs” school of ignoring the people he likes to defend almost unconditionally. His town is all white, as is his significant other, and he loves it. But let him see “12 years a slave” and he turns into Samuel Jackson on a bad day. Just bizarre.
* Ze’ev Chafets wrote about Jewish flight from his native Pontiac and other parts of metro Detroit in Devil’s Night. Most moved nearby. The author moved to Jerusalem. Now that’s flight.
* Robert Weissberg nails it:
If you looked around our cultural landscape and tried to find two groups with different values that venerate different things, who worship at different altars, it is hard to find two groups more different than blacks and Jews. Jews are obsessed with education, blacks destroy it. If you’ve gone to school in the inner city, you know that not only do they hate the idea of learning, but they assault their teachers and physically destroy their schools.
When blacks move into a neighborhood, the first people out are Jews. Jews did not invent white flight but we perfected it. As far as intermarriage and social exchange, there’s almost zero. They just don’t mix. Jews are not into crime. The sorts of things that blacks specialize in — muggings, assaults, rapes — are not a Jewish predilection.
How Jews really relate to blacks is something Jews hardly talked about except when they are amongst themselves. When Jews get together in a safe place and talk about blacks, they will use the term “schvartze.” When you go to Leo Rosten’s Joys of Yiddish, he’s very careful in what he says. With “schvartze”, he becomes tight-lipped. “A black person, a negro.” That does not begin to depict what the term means among Jews. There may be a degree of affection, as in, ‘I hear Mrs. Schwartz got a new schvartze.’
It is not necessarily a negative word. It’s not the same thing as nigger. If you inserted the word ‘nigger’ to achieve some lexiconic variety, Jews would be genuinely offended. There can even be a degree of affection in schvartze. As in, ‘Ahh, I heard Mrs. Schwartz got a new schvartze. Oh, how nice.’”
When you use the term ‘schvartze’, it always implies cognitive inferiority. The mental picture of a stupid black embedded in the term schvartze is true even with pro-civil rights [liberal] Jews… Adding the phrase ‘dumb schvartze’ is superflous, reserved only used for the most egregious stupidity. Invisible baggage likewise includes gullibility, emotional excitability, and a weakness for here-and-now conspicuous consumption. Violence, especially inter-personal, alcohol-induced mayhem, is also associated with schvartze. The image that comes to the mind with Jews when you say ‘schvartze’ is simple-minded, impulsive, easily seduced by trinkets. This is extremely close to the traditional Southern image of blacks, almost identical to what many Southerners would privately say about blacks… This is continually reinforced by daily experience, such as in integrated public schools.
We had a procession of cleaning ladies [in New York]. Growing up, I honestly believed that all black people come from a thing called The Agency. We’d hire black cleaning ladies and invariably they’d steal and drink the liquor and my mother would come back and say, ‘I’m calling up The Agency and getting another.’ Very few Jews of my generation had any other contact. We had a procession of handymen and cleaning people come to my house.
It was always believed that any Jew can ultimately out-smart any schvartze except save being confronted by a demented gunman. Despite immense cultural chasms, Jews held themselves as innately capable of finessing blacks thanks to their superior wits, verbal talent, and a mastery of black psychology. The unmatched success of Jewish ghetto merchants and Jewish civil rights leadership positions proclaim this truth. Even today Jews may secretly brag about their success in beguiling blacks in contentious interpersonal relationships. People sometimes ask me, ‘What did you do when they showed up as a demonstration to your office?’ This happened to me one time. A bunch of angry young blacks came to my office… I said, ‘I just relied on the wisdom of my ancestors. I gave them a little rope-a-dope. I moved around. I said this, I said that. Within half an hour, they were fine. I sold one a suit and several new jewelry and they were happy. They got a deal from Mr. Weissberg.’
Where personal manipulation might fail, the storehouse of survival tactics sufficed exceedingly well. Black pathologies were bearable, especially since most black mayhem was self-inflicted. Jews might even profit from these disorders as merchants or nanny state therapists. Threatened Jews can flee deteriorating neighborhoods, enroll their children in private schools, hire security guards, co-opt black leaders financially, or otherwise escape.
Jews see no conflict between righteously defending black criminals as political prisoners and living in fortress-style buildings.
On the one hand, Jews dread blacks physically. When Jews see blacks walking down the street, they feel tremendous fear. Yet they dutifully pay the danegeld (extortion money).
For most Jews, it is the white goyim who pose the most threat. Contrary fact-based argument fall on deaf ears. Like the schvartzes, the Chinese [and Japanese] are never called goyim.
Blacks are incapable of such well-organized horror [as the Holocaust] unless directed by nefarious whites… A full-scale pogrom is beyond their capacity. Can you imagine blacks systemically rounding up thousands of Jews or even keeping tabs on Jewish neighborhoods? Assess enemies by capabilities, not intentions… The schvartze pose minimal risk. They’re too stupid.
* MORE: Some people seem to think that being Jewish is somehow different than being white, in a racial sense anyways. Do those idiots think that blacks somehow perceive a Jew as being different than a white person? No they don’t. Most Jews are caucasian, yeah they have some distant Middle Eastern origins but most Jews of today have resided in Europe for millennia and are nearly genetically identical to most white Europeans, as far as blacks are concerned they have white skin and practicing the Jewish religion doesn’t exempt them from black racist violence. Jews know that and that’s why they leave when there are too many negroes.
* …the entire point of busing wasn’t “racial equality.” It was to deploy political means to destroy white communities and (heterosexual, male-centered) families. The latter obviously involved removing the locus of familial authority from the male and the home to the state and its female lesbian autocrats. A process that continues, on steroids, to this day.
* The forced integration of schools nationwide was the result of court cases initiated by the American Civil Liberties Union ACLU) which had been under Jewish control since its original gentile founders (Roger Baldwin et.al.) had been purged for opposition to the growing influence of the Communist Party in the organization in the early 1940s.. What occurred in San Francisco in particular during this era of busing is both curious and illustrative . The Jews who pushed for integration through groups like the ACLU must have somehow thought (or known) that they would be excluded from it once it came into effect.
San Francisco, up to the period of this busing, had had three academic high schools: Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Lowell. For decades all of these three schools had produced thousands students who were accepted at all sorts of high level universities including places like the Ivy leagues and Stanford. Lowell, one of the three high schools, was a magnet for one particular type of student , Jewish. It was so heavily Jewish that I know of someone who transferred out of Lowell to Lincoln High School in the late 1950s specifically because he claimed that his social life was being curtailed the many Jewish girls there wouldn’t date gentile males. (Interestingly the Jewish males were able to date the much more accepting protestant girls. ) Lowell was in effect a defacto Jewish public high school with large percentages of both Jewish students and teachers.
When busing came around a curious thing happened, It was suddenly decided without any public input that Lowell would henceforth be considered the primary high school for college bound students in the city with strict admission criteria to be instituted while Washington and Lincoln were left to accept the bused students and then be left essentially to their own devices (i.e neglected). In the following years both Lincoln and Washington ended up essentially falling apart academically and becoming more and more violent , disrupted, and ghetto like. Lincoln in particular suffered the most from this neglect. I remember seeing police cars almost constantly were circling it during school hours during this period.
This situation continued for several decades before Jews in particular started to feel the pinch of competition from an increasing number of even more academically motivated Chinese. This resulted in an increasing number of Jews who were no longer able to get into Lowell and whose parents then had to choose between the problem ridden Washington or Lincoln high schools or MUCH much more expensive private schools or (gasp) strict Catholic high schools. The recently arrived Russian Jewish emigres in particular were in a quandary because they were simply unable to pay these private school fees. What to do?
It was only then when a move was made to clean up both Lincoln and Washington High Schools.. This was done by, among other things, instituting far more advanced placement classes there, taught by much better teachers,transferring the worst of the teachers and large scale booting out the worst of the trouble makers by pushing them into the newly set up, so called “charter schools” ( the worst of which are essentially nothing more than crypto reform schools with just as active a police presence.) Lincoln and Washington have apparently finally got their full maintenance budget restored as well. So much for integration. Things have improved greatly since then but Lincoln is particular has never really overcome the problems of the past because the Chinese still hold it in such low repute because of it (very) violent past.
At the same time as the aforementioned changes in the high schools occurred another interesting event happened. With Jewish parents in the main leadership roles, the toniest neighborhood of San Francisco, Pacific Heights, tried to preserve its local public elementary school, Ulysses Grant, from busing. What was interesting was that many of these these very same, very liberal Jewish parents had been among the main financial backers of the ACLU which had pushed busing in the first place. Somehow these Jews thought they they would be spared its effects of integration while only the gentile lumpen proletariat would experience it. What hypocrisy.! These parents tried to prevent the busing of their children by using their considerable financial and political muscle and access to the best legal representation. The ultra liberal San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD). tolerated these uppity white folks for a while but then became irritated. A solution was needed.
The school district suddenly decided to bulldoze down the up-to-now beautifully maintained and stately Grant School. It was did it quickly and thoroughly leaving only a totally vacant lot after the bulldozers left. Not even the smallest remnant of a foundation remained. End of problem. The Pacific Heights students now had no choice but to go to another (thoroughly integrated) public school, right! Not quite. Virtually all of these now school-less students were transferred just as as rapidly to private or Catholic schools. Since then, the wealthiest parents in the city no longer had any vested interest in public school their interest in funding them with additional tax increases suddenly waned significantly. They still don’t send their children to public schools. Just like NYC.
Interesting note: I was driving around provincial France in the early 1980s in a rental car while staying in youth hostels and camping. In a small, remote french village I decided to camp in the local campground. The french girl behind the counter at the office counter there spoke to me in very good idiomatic English.I asked her how she had learned such good English. She replied that she had been an exchange student in the United States the previous year. I asked her where and she replied “San Francisco.” I then asked her what high school she had attended. She replied “Abraham Lincoln.” I asked her what she thought of Abraham Lincoln High School. She summed up her opinion in just four words, “It was very violent.” Nothing else was added. This was the most lasting impression she had about an American school.
