Matthew Yglesias links to a post from Arnold Kling from the Library of Economics and Liberty in which Kling talks about how much better the days were in which school districts were smaller, and how we were more free then.
Amen. I live in one of those mega-school districts, which gives unbridled power to the teachers' unions. The widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced has much more on this theme. (Note to intellectual bullies: please do not confuse nostalgia for decentralized school districts with nostalgia for "separate but equal.")
Yglesias writes:
So I'm not going to say that Kling is a racist who's nostalgic for the days when segregated schools were enforced by a campaign of systemic terrorism enabled by state authorities. Instead I'll just observe that Kling, while not nostalgic for the massive disenfranchisement of African-Americans, seems in practice to be blind to the interests of non-whites, of gays and lesbians, and of women.
Amen to that. In a country full of people who think the Obama administration is racist against white people, and that's the only racism that matters, many conservatives and others fail to understand that there is a sort of casual racism in which you just happen to "forget" about people who don't look like you. Kling, for instance, made no distinction between the small-school-district 1940s and the segregated 1940s. The problem is that doesn't take into account the system that, as a whole, was harmful for nonwhites and non-men. This is the kind of casual racism and sexism of neglect that can lead Tea Party members to conclude they're not racist, even though they actively advocate for 10th Amendment absolutism in which states would never have been forced to stop segregation by the federal government. Racism takes many forms, and if I've said it before, I'll say it again: it's not just perpetuated actively.
-- Monica Potts
