Learning to Act
Busing has anything and everything to do with race. While the term does broadly remain “race-neutral,” it also leans heavily towards the desires of white families, as it is designed by white people and to the benefit and convenience of white people. Hannah-Jones encapsulates the priorities of many of these families during desegregation: “white Americans’ veneration of neighborhood schools has never outweighed their desire to maintain racially homogeneous environments for their children.”
So many of the decisions and outcomes of this era were at the hands of white parents and white legislatures who would rather disrupt and impair the school systems in which their children attended than “allow a single black child to attend a ‘white’ school.” The laws in some Southern states were especially enabling for these white parents, sparking the infamous Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education. Oliver Brown just wanted his daughter, Linda, to be able to attend her neighborhood school, but “Kansas’ state law allowed school systems to segregate at the behest of white parents, and so the Topeka school board bused Linda and other black children past white schools to preserve segregation.” The court decision did declare that “separate but equal” educations were still inherently unequal, but a fraction of Congress still had Confederate ties and were still not open to integration. This led to the creation of The Southern Manifesto of 1956; a text warning Southerners of the “chaos and confusion” that would come alongside school desegregation.
Hannah-Jones emphasizes how the current silent state many of us remain in is an act of neglecting the fact that segregation is not dead, and that “black children are as segregated from white students as they were in the mid-1970s when Mr. Biden was working with Southern white supremacist legislators to curtail court-ordered busing.” Even when at the time when desegregation was thought of as a relevant fight that we were still fighting, many Northerners could only bear to support it from a far. Once black anti-segregation activism spread to cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York, the white support that seemed so strong during the desegregation of the South began to crumble.
“For the first time she felt satisfaction not from thinking but from acting” (Tubali 3).
Arendt’s curiosity and discovery of politics and taking action speaks volumes for how change should be initiated, and what techniques work most effectively. What drove Arendt towards this active mindset can probably be traced to concentration camp encounters that seized her innocence and left her feeling responsible.
I feel like this is something everyone can relate to, maybe just on different scales. We feel complacent until an experience grabs us and shakes the desire to act and say “never again” out of us. Arendt would say that probing an idea or social structure, picking it apart and challenging it are absolutely necessary steps in order to create a dialogue and create change. Arendt also connects action directly to getting politically involved. Without real political initiative and concrete steps and resources, ideas about change are nothing but ideas, and quite abstract ones at that. Politics require both dialogue and interaction according to Arendt, so while active thinking does connect one to an awareness of their surroundings and the world, it still isn’t enticing or creating change.
Arendt’s statement that “thinking is dangerous” reminds me of some of Baldwin’s ideas on education. Baldwin notably said “The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.” While thinking as a whole is not the same thing as education and school systems, I still see a similarity. Baldwin connects learning more about the world and thinking outside the box with being exposed to injustices you may have never been aware of. I’m guessing that the danger of thinking that Arendt is referring to is only created by learning of things that wipe away your innocence and humble your worldview.
Lastly, all of history is partial, even most facts and data. Research is still coming from a specific source, and more often than not, that source has a stance for which that data is supporting. The new information I’ve learned about the Marin census can even be used as an example for how data and reports do not show the whole truth. If data is accepted to be fully true, it is likely that there is still a side that is being neglected and pushed even further away by that same data and its acceptance. Busing certainly fits this bill, as most of the people dictating the story and legislature during desegregation were the ones reporting the facts and possibly manipulating the truth.
