Have All Those ‘White Moderates’ Martin Luther King, Jr. Decried From Jail Become Today’s Anti-School Choice Progressives?
Again, here we see King's well-intentioned white moderates as today's white progressives. And again, the forces of what King fought against are at work. The opposition to expanded choices for families of color in residential clusters where schools don't work feels precisely like the denial of the kind of freedom white progressives have so much of they don't even notice it. In a world where education means so much, it feels like, for these kids, they care about it very little.
Nothing is served by sending a child to a school that does not work, is the wrong fit, or that many white progressive parents would never choose. And no institution has a higher value than the soul of an individual child that is being wasted away by underperformance. King offered that "Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever." And that the "yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself."
When one looks at the waiting lists for schools that work—of all kinds—the similarity is so striking the only way to not see it is to ignore it. The "order" of pre-civil rights America was not more valuable than freedom, and the ability to pursue it, for black and brown people. We used to call opposing this notion racism. Today, do we call it "progressivism?" I hope not.
posted by Whitney Tilson at 12:30 PM
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