Busing ends, but anxieties continue

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By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 13, 2000

At week's end, the white people I know went back home to their neighborhoods.

The black people I know went back to theirs, in another part of town.

Whatever U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday did in ending court-ordered busing in Pinellas County amounted to not even a fire ant hill in our lives.

The big exciting headlines heralding the news -- "Judge Ends Pinellas Busing" -- tended to provoke a sigh.

Who are we kidding?

Your children, whatever their color, will still go to school with kids of the other color and still have some teachers of the other color. And your children will still come home with stories that upset you, stories you cannot help but see through the lens of your race, about kids the teachers are too hard on, or not hard enough. About pushing and shoving and the fear of worse violence.

If you're white, you'll still know what is meant by the code word, good school. It means a school without a lot of blacks in it.

If you're black, you'll still carry like a stone in your pocket the suspicion that the walls you once brought tumbling down might go back up. You'll still hear a subtext in the kindly, bureaucratic words school administrators use.

Who are we kidding?

There was only so much anybody could do, and it's been done.

No one will ever again get away with what Merryday so theatrically called "that infamous and offensive system . . . that insufferable insult to liberty," the two-tier school system in which whites were always on top. The books at all schools will be the same, and just as new. The gym equipment will be the same, just as much the latest.

Of course, if one PTA can raise money for more computers than another school whose kids need to be just as techno-literate, there won't be anything to be done.

No court order can rewrite the rules of where people live. This was the naivete of court-ordered busing. It was wrong to expect children to do what their parents could not do, namely, get along. It was impossible to expect what happened in a classroom of third-graders to fire up a revolution in the way we live.

I say this as though I know what I'm talking about.

I am a product of the North's segregated schools, both public and private.

Race was never on the plate of my conversations, at home or away from it. We lived in the suburbs. Black people lived in the city. We left the city. Nobody spoke of why.

As I went to college, whites and blacks, suddenly thrown together, were seeking their separate corners. There were already unofficial blacks-only dorm floors, cafeteria tables. To be part of that, if you were black, was a matter of pride. To be left out because you were white was to be made uneasy, uncomfortable. Weren't we supposed to be trying to get along?

Today, I am uncertain of what wisdom I have.

My child does not get on one of those buses that takes children 20 miles in the dark.

And because I'm white, I've never been forced to go to some school in a neighborhood I would not otherwise enter to have a conference with a teacher who doesn't look like me and is afraid of the streets where I live. I've never had my differences rubbed in my face.

The best that can be said of school busing is that it revealed the complexity of all things racial. How simple-minded a solution busing now looks. How hopeful people must have been once. We are not now. In Tallahassee we have a white governor who believes he can tear down university affirmative action without sending black students into the cold. In St. Petersburg, we have a black minister going into orbit over his son getting tossed from a mall over his hat, without minding that the hat advertised the teenager as a "pimp." We've come so far. We've lost our way. That headline last week didn't declare victory. Defeat is closer to it.

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