The bus leading backward
Most Americans would not favor a return to busing
It seemed a little odd that Kamala Harris brought up the long- ago subject of busing during a 2019 Democratic debate. Ms. Harris spoke of it as having been an unambiguous good. It was not. Older Americans recall the busing days as contentious, complicated and divisive. The idea was to try to solve the problem of de facto segregation by busing black children to public schools in white parts of town while transporting white children in the opposite direction. Almost no one was satisfied with the scheme ... in the worst light, it seemed a piece of brutalist social engineering that placed hard
burdens on the kids ( long rides twice a day to strange neighborhoods, away from friends and community). The policy offended many blacks with its implication that a black child cannot learn without sitting next to a white child.
No matter. Ms. Harris’ mind wasn’t on justice anyway. Busing was the McGuffin. She invoked it as a way of proving that she could take down the powerful white male front- runner, Joe Biden. She staged the scene in order to establish, early in the first round, that she was capable of ruthless and creative effrontery. She sucker- punched Mr. Biden ...
One of the interesting things about Ms. Harris is her swagger — the sly and private half- smile, the dare in her eye, a hint of the reckless. On the night of the debate she showed off an instinct for the cynical uses of sentimentality. “That little girl was me,” she said, her body torqued poignantly toward Mr. Biden. She conjured herself as a heroic but vulnerable child on her way to future glory ...
Her childhood occurred, mind you, not in Mississippi or the Chicago projects but in Berkeley, Calif., where her father was a professor of economics. The Harris household was intellectual, accomplished and, at the very least, solidly middle class. There was so little spontaneity in her stunt that, just afterward, her campaign offered commemorative merchandise — T- shirts showing the image of “that little girl.” All this was unfair to Mr. Biden, but his complacency no doubt needed a jolt.
... The dangerous thing now is hate’s half- brother, sentimentality — and the cynicism with which it is manipulated for purposes of gaining or keeping power.