Yes, actually, I am old enough to have experienced a desegregation system, though mine was white/Latinx. I entered Mesa Public Schools in third grade, in 1984, when my parents moved there. They didn’t really do a lot of research before picking a school district/house – it was much harder then – and the neighborhood school I walked to was an integration school. My parents considered this bad luck – if they’d had more foresight, they wouldn’t have put us in integrated schools because my parents are terrible people. When we moved again a couple years later, to Yuma, I was again in a desegregated system, from fifth grade through my freshman year. We moved a third time after that, to a non-integrated district about which the less said, the better. My education there did not suffer, but only because I fought to get the classes and education I needed. (It was deeply sexist, racist, and generally awful, and if the place burned, I’d hold an Irish Coffee bash on the ashes to flip the bird to the dominant culture who made it hell for outsiders.)
Personally, it was great. I got a stellar public education, and I am absolutely a Third Culture Kid. I speak Norteño with decent fluency (better when I follow a telenovela and keep in practice; it erodes if I neglect it) and since my friends were Latinx, I was immunized against my parents’ racism. I got admitted to two Ivy Leagues and two Seven Sisters and didn’t go mostly because even with scholarships, I just couldn’t swing the money (this was mostly due to my parents being shite with money). I took the state scholarship offer instead and escaped my parents’ destructive patterns. In my integrated schools, I was always competing with a diverse and brilliant group of peers who brought strong, challenging perspectives to our core group of nerds. (I was one of two white girls in a group of twenty, all with 4.0+ GPAs.) In my non-integrated school, I could coast and that wasn’t good for me. I loved my integrated schools and my classmates. I hated the ones that weren’t.
Those cracker parents in the TAL episode make me ashamed to share a skin tone with them. Integrated schools help every student in their halls. Segregated schools just hurt everyone, but most especially the students with the fewest resources to defend against the harm done to them.
