美国国家公共电台 NPR This Supreme Court Case Made School District Lines A Tool For Segregation

 

NOEL KING, HOST:

Picture two communities. They share a grocery store and maybe a Main Street - people living just blocks or a couple miles apart. But for their kids who go to different schools, they are a world apart. On one side of the line, you have fresh paint and new computer labs. On the other, many fewer resources and many more students of color. Now, these boundaries show a country where schools remain segregated¹ and unequal, and a big factor in that is a Supreme² Court decision that came down 45 years ago today.

NPR's Elissa Nadworny visited Long Island, N.Y. She has this story.

ELISSA NADWORNY, BYLINE³: Often called the first modern suburb in America, Long Island stretches out from New York City north and east toward the sea, water on both sides. In the middle, it's one of the most racially and economically segregated places in the country. Case in point - two neighboring towns, Hempstead and Garden City.

ELAINE GROSS: I'll just turn down Front Street here.

NADWORNY: Elaine Gross, who runs a local nonprofit called ERASE⁴ Racism⁵, is driving me back-and-forth between the two communities.

GROSS: You know immediately that on this one street, you've left Garden City and now you're in Hempstead.

NADWORNY: Behind us, big houses, a country club. In front of us, a commercial strip with a laundromat and an auto⁶ repair shop.

GROSS: The schools - they mirror the residential⁷ segregation⁸.

NADWORNY: Hempstead's public schools are only 2% white, while Garden City schools are almost 88% white. The difference in funding is also stark⁹. Hempstead gets almost $5,000 less per student per year.

REBECCA SIBILIA: There are kids who see this every day.

NADWORNY: That's Rebecca Sibilia, the founder¹⁰ and CEO of EdBuild, a nonprofit out with a new report today on school segregation and funding inequities.

SIBILIA: Kids are living sometimes across the street from their neighbors who are going to whiter and wealthier schools.

NADWORNY: This inequality - it's happening all over the country, not just Long Island. According to EdBuild's massive database, there are nearly a thousand school districts that have substantial race and revenue gaps with their neighbors. And the whiter, wealthier sides of those lines - they're also getting more money - on average, about $4,000 more per student per year. EdBuild estimates about 8.9 million students go to school in the districts on the losing side of those borders; that's about one in five public school students. The fact that schools can look so different just across district lines, Sibilia says...

SIBILIA: That's all thanks to Milliken.

NADWORNY: Milliken - she's referring to the Supreme Court decision in Milliken v. Bradley, a decision that came down 45 years ago today. The case centered around a desegregation plan in Detroit, a predominantly black city, and its white suburbs. Up for debate - would neighboring districts have to integrate across district lines? No, the court found. Borders couldn't be crossed.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

THURGOOD MARSHALL: The court, today, takes a giant step backward.

NADWORNY: That's Thurgood Marshall, the lone¹¹ African American justice on the court in 1974, in his dissent¹². The majority decision had said that the white suburbs had played no role in the creation of the segregated schools in Detroit and, therefore, they didn't have to assist in the plan to integrate. Marshall, who two decades before had argued Brown v. Board as an NAACP lawyer, predicted that the decision would make integration¹³ nearly impossible.

Here's audio from oyez.org.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MARSHALL: Under such a plan, white and Negro students will not go to school together. Instead, Negro children will continue to attend all-Negro schools. The very evil that Brown was aimed at will not be cured but will be perpetuated¹⁴.

NADWORNY: In the North, racist¹⁵ housing policies had made where you live largely a reflection of your race. So after Milliken, if white families didn't want to send their children to schools with kids of other races, they could simply move to white communities with different school districts, often just a mile or so down the road.

SIBILIA: Milliken has basically created the school district border as a fundamental tool to further fracture society.

NADWORNY: Sibilia of EdBuild says after the decision, borders became shields warding¹⁶ off desegregation.

SIBILIA: Once you're in your own school system and once you have a border anywhere, then the courts have no justification¹⁷ and no jurisdiction¹⁸ to order desegregation across that line.

NADWORNY: And because school funding is largely tied to local wealth, like property taxes, these invisible-yet-powerful district lines also create unequally resourced schools. In most places, states have not been able to make up the difference in that local money, despite decades of funding formulas designed to do just that.

Take Hempstead and Garden City in Long Island. The state of New York does give more money to Hempstead, but it's not enough to make it equal to its neighbors. EdBuild found these divisive school borders are most prevalent in the North.

SIBILIA: What Long Island shows us is how Milliken has been used to reinforce all of these negative and detrimental¹⁹ policies of the past. And what I'm talking to specifically here is housing segregation.

GROSS: We are now in Garden City again.

NADWORNY: As we continue our drive, Elaine Gross recounts the history of that discrimination, the legacy²⁰ of which we see right out our window. The houses are getting bigger, their yards greener.

GROSS: And you see the difference in the houses.

NADWORNY: It used to be just potato fields out here. But then the housing developers arrived and created new homes, many of which were only sold to white families. The deeds on those houses kept that going, saying original owners could only resell to other white people.

GROSS: The intention was to forever keep out black people. Talk about a structural²¹ impediment. You can't get any more obvious than that.

NADWORNY: History sets these notions in place, says Gross. And that is hard to shake.

DARAENO EKONG: It takes a lot to change the way people think.

NADWORNY: Daraeno Ekong is a senior at Hempstead High School. I met up with her on one of the last school days of the year.

EKONG: Today I have AP literature, AP biology.

NADWORNY: She's heading to Yale University in the fall. And a few weeks ago, when she visited the campus, she got to talking with other students from other school districts. And their experiences - they made her a little nervous to start college.

EKONG: They have more resources that they've had at their schools, so kind of finding a way to kind of catch up to them.

NADWORNY: When I ask her about Garden City just next door, she said she's never been to their schools or spent time with any of their students.

EKONG: They see what Hempstead is on the news or, like, in the newspaper, but they don't actually interact with Hempstead students to see that, oh, we might be thinking the same way or we might do the same things.

NADWORNY: That's the very point Thurgood Marshall was trying to make in that dissent 45 years ago today.

Elissa Nadworny, NPR News, Long Island.

(SOUNDBITE OF AKIRA KOSEMURA'S "KALEIDOSCOPE OF HAPPINESS")

1 segregated   

分开的； 被隔离的

参考例句：

• a culture in which women are segregated from men 妇女受到隔离歧视的文化
• The doctor segregated the child sick with scarlet fever. 大夫把患猩红热的孩子隔离起来。

2 supreme   

adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的

参考例句：

• It was the supreme moment in his life.那是他一生中最重要的时刻。
• He handed up the indictment to the supreme court.他把起诉书送交最高法院。

3 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

4 erase   

v.擦掉；消除某事物的痕迹

参考例句：

• He tried to erase the idea from his mind.他试图从头脑中抹掉这个想法。
• Please erase my name from the list.请把我的名字从名单上擦去。

5 racism   

n.民族主义；种族歧视(意识)

参考例句：

• He said that racism is endemic in this country.他说种族主义在该国很普遍。
• Racism causes political instability and violence.种族主义道致政治动荡和暴力事件。

6 auto   

n.(=automobile)(口语)汽车

参考例句：

• Don't park your auto here.别把你的汽车停在这儿。
• The auto industry has brought many people to Detroit.汽车工业把许多人吸引到了底特律。

7 residential   

adj.提供住宿的；居住的；住宅的

参考例句：

• The mayor inspected the residential section of the city.市长视察了该市的住宅区。
• The residential blocks were integrated with the rest of the college.住宿区与学院其他部分结合在了一起。

8 segregation   

n.隔离，种族隔离

参考例句：

• Many school boards found segregation a hot potato in the early 1960s.在60年代初，许多学校部门都觉得按水平分班是一个棘手的问题。
• They were tired to death of segregation and of being kicked around.他们十分厌恶种族隔离和总是被人踢来踢去。

9 stark   

adj.荒凉的；严酷的；完全的；adv.完全地

参考例句：

• The young man is faced with a stark choice.这位年轻人面临严峻的抉择。
• He gave a stark denial to the rumor.他对谣言加以完全的否认。

10 Founder   

n.创始者，缔造者

参考例句：

• He was extolled as the founder of their Florentine school.他被称颂为佛罗伦萨画派的鼻祖。
• According to the old tradition,Romulus was the founder of Rome.按照古老的传说，罗穆卢斯是古罗马的建国者。

11 lone   

adj.孤寂的，单独的；唯一的

参考例句：

• A lone sea gull flew across the sky.一只孤独的海鸥在空中飞过。
• She could see a lone figure on the deserted beach.她在空旷的海滩上能看到一个孤独的身影。

12 dissent   

n./v.不同意，持异议

参考例句：

• It is too late now to make any dissent.现在提出异议太晚了。
• He felt her shoulders gave a wriggle of dissent.他感到她的肩膀因为不同意而动了一下。

13 integration   

n.一体化，联合，结合

参考例句：

• We are working to bring about closer political integration in the EU.我们正在努力实现欧盟內部更加紧密的政治一体化。
• This was the greatest event in the annals of European integration.这是欧洲统一史上最重大的事件。

14 perpetuated   

vt.使永存（perpetuate的过去式与过去分词形式）

参考例句：

• This system perpetuated itself for several centuries. 这一制度维持了几个世纪。
• I never before saw smile caught like that, and perpetuated. 我从来没有看见过谁的笑容陷入这样的窘况，而且持续不变。 来自辞典例句

15 racist   

n.种族主义者，种族主义分子

参考例句：

• a series of racist attacks 一连串的种族袭击行为
• His speech presented racist ideas under the guise of nationalism. 他的讲话以民族主义为幌子宣扬种族主义思想。

16 warding   

监护，守护（ward的现在分词形式）

参考例句：

• Magina channels a powerful warding magic damping the negative effects of spells. 敌法师用守护魔法来抵御负面法术的攻击。
• Indeed, warding off disruption is the principal property of complex systems. 的确，避免破损解体是复杂系统主要的属性。

17 justification   

n.正当的理由；辩解的理由

参考例句：

• There's no justification for dividing the company into smaller units. 没有理由把公司划分成小单位。
• In the young there is a justification for this feeling. 在年轻人中有这种感觉是有理由的。

18 jurisdiction   

n.司法权，审判权，管辖权，控制权

参考例句：

• It doesn't lie within my jurisdiction to set you free.我无权将你释放。
• Changzhou is under the jurisdiction of Jiangsu Province.常州隶属江苏省。

19 detrimental   

adj.损害的，造成伤害的

参考例句：

• We know that heat treatment is detrimental to milk.我们知道加热对牛奶是不利的。
• He wouldn't accept that smoking was detrimental to health.他不相信吸烟有害健康。

20 legacy   

n.遗产，遗赠；先人(或过去)留下的东西

参考例句：

• They are the most precious cultural legacy our forefathers left.它们是我们祖先留下来的最宝贵的文化遗产。
• He thinks the legacy is a gift from the Gods.他认为这笔遗产是天赐之物。

21 structural   

adj.构造的，组织的，建筑（用）的

参考例句：

• The storm caused no structural damage.风暴没有造成建筑结构方面的破坏。
• The North American continent is made up of three great structural entities.北美大陆是由三个构造单元组成的。