Outlook: A Bus Bound for Equality?

Writer Reflects on School Days in Desegregating Florida -- and How Far We Have to Go

"For me it was ultimately a good experience, a chance to get outside the bubble of the white Southern Baptist neighborhood where my eccentric Unitarian, single-parent family had always lived. But I wonder, to this day, whether it was truly a major step toward a more egalitarian nation, or just a momentary spasm in a society that has remained essentially befuddled by race."

Washington Post Outlook writer Joel Achenbach was online Monday, July 9 at 1 p.m. ET to discuss his memories of desegregation in Gainesville, Fla., and to consider the Supreme Court's recent ruling and the current state of U.S. race relations.

The Boy on the Bus| Annotations (Post and washingtonpost.com, July 8 and 9)

The transcript follows.

Archive: Transcripts of discussions with Outlook article authors

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Joel Achenbach: Stand by ... gotta tighten down the widgets...

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Silver Spring, Md.: When I first arrived in Gainesville in 1982 for my freshman year at the University of Florida I heard stories about the unspoken segregation that still existed in the town. Specifically, I was told that it was understood that there were certain days of the week when the whites did their grocery shopping and other days when African Americans did theirs. I've always wondered if that was indeed true, as I never witnessed it myself.

Joel Achenbach: I never got that memo. I vote myth on that. But yes, segregation still existed then and still exists today, though it's more along class lines, I believe. My formerly all-white neighborhood in Gainesville is more integrated now, for example.

I guess I should say hello to everyone. Thanks for joining me today. When we're done here, head on over to the Achenblog, where you'll find, I think, some interesting and thoughtful folks. We operate pretty much 24-7.

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Joel Achenbach: For example, here's a great comment posted there by someone who goes by CJ. It's a different perspective on the same issue:

"I enjoyed reading The Boy on the Bus as it brought back memories of my childhood in the greater D.C. metro area and participating in the great social experiment of busing from an exclusively black neighborhood (re: apartment complex) to a suburban all-white neighborhood elementary school in Maryland. The 45-minute bus ride each way was an early introduction to the long commutes for work that are a staple of my adult life.

"Although I was just 9 yrs. old when my busing experience began in the third grade (1974) I remember conversations with my mother about the legal battle that led to busing, the benefits of a quality education, the systemic, life-long challenges I would face as a poorly-educated black man, and the sacrifices and lost opportunities of black generations past who were never given an opportunity to go to 'better' schools. As a 9 year old, I had to trust in my mother's assessment of the advantages of busing versus my desire to go to school with some of my friends.

"I recall the sense of trepidation I had on the first day I rode the bus and was greeted by a white bus driver whose smile conveyed the gravity of this experiment and the hope (that I shared) that it would work out. I also recall the masked anxiousness of my new teachers who were both the 'guardians/educators' of the suburban white kids who could not afford to go to private school and the 'gladiators' who had the unenviable task of fighting on the front lines this country's battle with racial ignorance.

"I remember some of my teachers being scared. I remember some of the parents of white kids being scared & others being welcoming. I remember the parents of those black kids whom were bused being hopeful and apprehensive. I also remember the optimism and eagerness of my teachers and in particular my school administrators to make good on the promise of racial equality in education.

"In many ways, mending of the country's racial divide was the responsibility of all the elementary children and their teachers charged with making this experiment work. It was a lot of responsibility to place on both subsets of the American population.

"It is somewhat disconcerting to now watch the pendulum swing back towards what existed before integration. Although the motivation for racial segregation sometimes now is the result of self-selection and less so systemic societal racism, I believe that classism is the greater challenge of this generation. It tends to have the same effect as racism but is borne out of the socio-economic differences & prejudices of the masses.

"The one institution that continues to have the most profound impact on this issue it has held for the past 40+ years is the U.S. Supreme Court. I disagree with the Supreme Court's interpretation on whether race should be a formal consideration (primarily because I believe that it remains an informal consideration despite the gains of the last 40 years) in doling public education, government contracts, etc. I personally benefited from earlier Supreme Court decisions giving rise to educational programs that accounted for race in providing me with opportunities I would likely have never enjoyed otherwise. I still had to work hard to achieve whatever modicum of success I now enjoy. (By the way, I define success as owing a car, owning a house and putting food on the table.) I simply know that the educational opportunities of which I took advantage were not available to my father or mother's generation or others that preceded them. I was fortunate in their eyes.

"I am concerned that the past 40 years cannot make up enough ground to erase the disadvantages of the 400 years that preceded it. For those kids who come along now, I can only hope that they find a way through devoted & diligent parenting, caring teachers, hard work, and/or a little bit of luck. They are going to need it."

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Baltimore: Are people really that naive to believe that whites and blacks want to merge as one? I for one want to keep my white European heritage and culture alive as long I can breathe. Multiculturalism and integration is a waste of time.

Joel Achenbach: Don't you feel silly, typing on your computer with that hood on your head?

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McLean, Va.: I also walked to Stephen Foster Elementary School in Gainesville Florida, only it was 1958-1960 and I attended there for kindergarten and first grade. By 1970, I was a junior at Gainesville High School. GHS already was integrated partially when in 1970 the school board (or judge) closed all-black Abraham Lincoln High School in order to bus those students to GHS.

Prior to integration, the GHS school band waved the rebel flag on entering the football stadium and played Dixie. This practice was stopped after integration in 1970. The former ALHS students were angry at the unfair closing of their school and busing to almost all-white GHS. When about 70 white students tried to raise the rebel flag that year (1970) at GHS, the former ALHS students rioted and caused GHS to be closed down for several days. The riot was serious enough to make the national evening news.

Joel Achenbach: Thanks, McLean, for sharing that story. Yeah, there was briefly rioting at GHS, and if you read the Buddy Davis editorials that won the Pulitzer -- see my blog for a link -- it was a very disturbing moment in the process. The transition at the high-school level was difficult -- unlike my own experience in fifth and sixth grade at Duval, where things went smoothly.

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Annapolis, Md.: Hi Joel. Just curious -- what kinds of schools do your children go to?

Joel Achenbach: That's a fair question. They all three went to a public elementary school in upper-northwest Washington, a majority white school. Private school for middle school. And the older two are now at Wilson High (a rising junior and a rising freshman), a public school which is majority-black, about 20 percent white I believe. My youngest probably will go there too.

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East Lansing, Mich.: How do you think attending an integrated school at the age of nine affected your attitude regarding race? I was the only black in my junior high in 1964; the next year there were 12 of us, but while whites got to know us as normal people it didn't really seem to translate to the grand scheme of things.

Joel Achenbach: Do you mean, it didn't seem to make a broad societal difference in how blacks were viewed by whites? I'd like to hear more from you on this -- I'm guessing you have some stories.

Certainly it demystifies those formerly viewed as "the other" when you have direct and daily contact with them and realize they are, to use your phrase "normal people." My family was very self-consciously liberal and "nonprejudiced." You know, people didn't say racist then, I don't think -- they said "prejudiced." And going to Duval I think helped me in that regard, but I don't want to make a big deal about it because the point of desegregation was not to enlighten whites about blacks -- it was to give blacks a shot at a decent education, previously denied them by segregation and Jim Crow and years and years of not having the resources in their schools. For every $6 spent on a white student in 1940, Florida spent 80 cents for a black student.

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Bill Cliett: Joel, One question I never asked you -- because I left Duval for a job at the University of Florida after that first year of integration, I was wondering if you found your second year in sixth grade at Duval very much different than the first year, and if so how?

Joel Achenbach: Hi, Mr. Cliett!

Yes, I'm pretty sure the second year wasn't quite as good as the first. My sixth-grade home room teacher wasn't in the same league as Mr. Terrell. Also -- and I could be wrong but this is how I remember it -- the second year at Duval we didn't have the "enrichment" program that you started when I was in fifth grade. That was a gas. I still try to remember to avoid the fallacy of Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc (sequentiality confused with causality). (Though my brother said he used it as an all-purpose excuse to avoid going to his regular class.)

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Alexandria, Va.: I was surprised that you didn't end your article about your "good experience" being bused to a racial quota school in Florida in your youth by going on to mention that in order to ensure your children had the opportunity to experience the benefits of "diversity" you made sure that they also attended public schools whose student populations "looked like America."

Because that's what you did do, right? You surely wouldn't have sent them to private schools whose only pupils of color were the children of elected officials or foreign ambassadors like so many other well-off progressive individuals like Bill Clinton and Gov. Mark Warner have done, like those who think that social experimentation is fine when the "benefits" are received by the ignorant lower and middle classes but prefer to choose the educational institutions for their own children on the basis of their getting a good education. (Which I believe, by the way, is the entirely sensible and reasonable approach.)

Joel Achenbach: Rather than anticipate my answers you could formulate them more directly, and I'll be happy to respond. See earlier in the chat for a discussion of where my kids go.

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Brooklyn, N.Y.: Mr. Achenbach, I look forward to reading a transcript of the discussion on school integration. In the fall of 1970, I was a black kid entering fifth grade at Mayfair Elementary School in Baton Rouge, La. Before that time my school, in a black middle-class neighborhood, was a sea of black faces. That fall, by court order, there was going to be a mix. As most of us from the South know, blacks and whites lived cheek-by-jowl before school desegregation. We might have attended separate schools or lived in separate neighborhoods, but we often shopped in the same stores, worked for the same bosses, and labored in the same heat. Sometimes the younger kids played together; on occasion I worshipped with whites; as part of the first Head Start summer program in St. Louis, I had been educated with whites. So the interaction I was facing as I entered fifth grade was, on its face, not new. What was new was the depth and degree of the interaction.

Like you, I too wonder "whether it was truly a major step toward a more egalitarian nation, or just a momentary spasm in a society that has remained essentially befuddled by race." My ugly psychic scars remind me of the psychological and emotional wounds I received during the implementation of this grand experiment. Being in the same room did not necessarily result in integration. In the fall of 1970, my intellectual gifts -- prized in a segregated environment -- physically set me apart from my black peers (ability grouping) and set up a tense dynamic with my white peers and my white teacher. As I grow older, the scars become more uncomfortable and my questions about the whole thing become more pointed.

Joel Achenbach: Wow. That's a powerful comment. And I think you're touching on something really important, which is that desegregation was hardly a instant blessing for many young African Americans -- quite the opposite, as Rev. Wright told me. Hang on and let me give you a quote from Rev. Wright, who was the black minister who sued to integrate the public schools in Alachua County. (See my blog for his daughter's harrowing account of being the first black senior at GHS.)

This is from Rev. Wright, in an interview with me last week:

"I was thinking the other day, what really caused it to happen (the schools drifting back toward segregation)? After so much effort we put into the fight for integration. Lawsuits. Demonstrations. You name it. We had the idea that over on the other side, the schools were like a panacea. They were it. And in many ways, they were it, because the supplies, the equipment, the building, the resource materials, everything was better. But I think what really caused the breakdown is African American students recognized that the equipment and everything were better, but the relationship between the majority teachers and the minority children were not the same as they had in segregated schools. At segregated schools the average African American child felt that, regardless of what they were going through, these people love us. They're concerned about us. And that was the key to the breakdown."

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Washington: Thank you for the glimpse into another time and place that your article provided. I would generally describe myself as liberal and progressive, yet as a child of the Baby Boomers (Gen X I guess) who grew up in the wake of these reforms -- and who has employers, colleagues and friends who are of different races and genders and orientations -- I find myself agreeing with the recent Supreme Court decision. If we're all to be judged by the content of our character, why continue to segregate by skin color? How do you classify someone who has a half black/half Asian mother and a white father? Which school does that kid go to?

Joel Achenbach: Hmm ... this is a great chance for me to get out of my depth on the recent Supreme Court case, but I'm pretty sure the issue is not how you categorize/classify individuals by race, it's whether school districts can try to achieve racial balance in schools by taking race into account at all when assigning kids to one school or another.

And the court's decision was very odd: A 5-4 ruling in which four said you couldn't take race into account, but in which the swing vote, from Anthony Kennedy, dissented -- saying yes, you can sometimes take race into account. So go figure.

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Jefferson City, Mo.: Eerie. We're both 46 and we both were part of the first round of court-ordered desegragation -- only for me, it was in Norfolk, Va.. I lived in a blue-collar (at the time) area of town, nary a person of color in sight. Did it work? I'm not sure if you're looking at this at a strategic level. But if you look at it at the one-person-at-a-time level, it did. It gave me my first up-close look at an inner-city black neighborhood (and this from a D.C. native). And while none of us white kids and close black friends, we had to interact, and I've discovered that that's paid off over the years in a real subtle way.

When I'm back in the Washington, I'm often the only white guy who doesn't think twice about going into allegedly "rough" neighborhoods. I don't fear people I don't know. And since I've moved to the Midwest and subsequently been surrounded by what I call "the bigotry of never having left one's birthplace," I appreciate my busing experience more and more.

Joel Achenbach: Very interesting comment -- thanks for sharing your experience.

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Former Prince George's County: Hasn't almost every urban or suburban jurisdiction that has had school busing experienced "white flight"? In Prince George's county I can tell you that there has been radical demographic change in the 35 or so years since school busing was forced upon the county in January of 1974.

Joel Achenbach: I don't know the numbers and precise history on white flight and busing. I think some cities had more of a direct connection than others. In Alachua County the stats I looked at indicated that the public schools are still majority white, as they were 37 years ago. (I believe, anecdotally, that white flight began in the District in the 1950s, predating integration of the schools.)

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Washington: Joel, I remember that as a student at the University of Florida from '65-'69, I would have been hard -pressed to say with certainty that there were any black people living anywhere near Gainesville. I do remember the time in 1969 that the Duke Ellington Orchestra was hired to play for the very restricted and segregated (of course) ROTC Ball on Campus. It became known on campus that the black community had protested, and as a result the ROTC group had agreed to sell tickets up in the gymnasium balcony to the black community. A number of us music students bought tickets too. That was the first time I saw an actual assembly of black people at the University of Florida, and the first time I found myself in an integrated audience! We do seem to have made some progress since that sad era in our all-too-recent history.

Joel Achenbach: Interesting story. Of course there's a long-standing African American community just a few blocks from the university -- based along 5th Avenue. But the crux of your point is right. Bill Cliett told me that of one of his colleagues, an African American, said he'd never been to the "white" part of town prior to integration -- never. Never even seen it. He wound up as principal at Gainesville High School.

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Richmond, Va.: Joel, great article, in my opinion one of the best you have done (ranks up there with the Coleman cooler Rough Draft and the 2000 election coverage). A couple of questions:

Re: The Supreme Court decision -- what would be the purpose in Seattle using a race based method of assigning children to schools when they have no history of segregation in the city (this information is based off The Washington Post news articles covering the decision)?

Can busing or any other large-scale social policy fix what is wrong with current inner city schools? The obvious example is the District, where per-pupil spending (again according to The Washington Post) is above average for the nation.

Joel Achenbach: Wow -- forgot all about that column on coolers.

I would be making it up if I told you what the Seattleites were thinking when they came up with their integration scheme. My general impression is that the Louisville plan made more sense, given the city's history and given, I believe, a direct federal judicial order to desegregate.

Keep something in mind: Throughout the country there have been school districts under court supervision because they haven't achieved "unified" school districts, meaning they haven't proved that their schools are desegregated. That's going on to this day.

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Curmudgeonville, Md.: Hi, Joel. Great piece. I gather from your reminiscence you didn't have much idea at the time that the busing and integration you experienced were all part of a massive national social revolution, and as you say, you were just one small cog in that machine. But at what point in your life did you come to understand the larger picture? And did that understanding change your thoughts about what had happened?

Because I'm 15 years older than you, I observed the bulk of the Civil Rights Movement as an adult, a college student (and sometime-participant) and later, so of course I have an observer's perspective. And as such I get kind of irritated at the discussion about whether busing "worked" or not. First, there was no way to predict ahead of time whether it would "work"; it simply had to be done, and the people implementing it and enforcing it had no realistic "Plan B" alternative. In short, they were doing the best they could under the prevailing circumstances, and to "do nothing" was an infinitely worse alternative. Your thoughts?

Joel Achenbach: I think you're on to something -- whether it "worked" or not implies that this was a one-trick event, a stunt almost, when in fact we're in a very protracted march toward creating a fairer (multicultural) society.

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Detroit: I too was a part of "desegragation" in the mid 70's. Along with my white fellow class-mates, we were loaded up in a bus and sent to a school in Downtown Detroit. A total waste of a year as far as educating is concerned. I learned nothing. Did it work? I don't believe it did. The only thing it did do was speed up the process of whites moving out of the city and into the suburbs.

Joel Achenbach: Thanks for sharing that. Your experience was different from mine -- and Detroit's was different from Gainesville's.

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Washington: In the 1970s I worked on school desegregation issues for HEW and its successor, the Department of Education. We were the federal bureaucrats people blamed for those two-hour bus rides. (Many others, of course, were the result of court orders.) In a perfect world, where white people would let black people live in their neighborhood, such busing wouldn't have been needed, and everyone could walk to their neighborhood school. Education is not just about learning how to read and multiply -- it's about learning how to live with other people, specifically about how to live with other people who are different. Not everyone gets to grow up in an environment that is as heterogeneous as our country is, but those who do have a big advantage.

Joel Achenbach: Thanks for the interesting comment. (But I bet some people will think: Yeah, it's important to be exposed to folks of a different race or culture, but it's also really really important to go to a good school where I can learn things. Some people might not make the cultural mixing the highest priority.)

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Silver Spring, Md.: My mother grew up in Alabama in total segregation. Like the Reverend said, she also said it was not that bad in that there was a black-owned store for everything -- cleaners, barbers, clothing stores, etc. Like your teacher's colleague, she just never went to "that part" of town. As I get older, I wonder what actually was sacrificed with integration. How many businesses closed up because once black were free to shop where they wanted, they stopped frequenting the local stores? I am thinking that while we should have fought for the right to go where we wanted and shop where we wanted, after it all was said and done maybe the black community cut off its nose to spite its face to a certain extent.

Joel Achenbach: Thanks for sharing. I'm guessing that no one would turn back the clock, though. Before integration, blacks couldn't live in most parts of a white community. An African American colleague told me this morning about her fateful decision to get an apartment on the east side of Route 1 in 1985 in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Much abuse was hurled her way by whites who believed she had moved to the wrong side of the highway.

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Brooklyn, N.Y.: I am pleased with the way the chat is progressing. I worried that it might take a nasty direction. I will go back to the blog and read about Rev. Wright's daughter. I know you can't respond to all of the questions and comments that will come your way during this chat period, but I do want to add one more. It seems that there was no one method for implementing desegregation plans. This diversity of implementation is at the core of the variety of desegregation experiences and perspectives reflected in the discussion. This is why such dialogues are important and it is why the dialogues have to be ongoing.

Joel Achenbach: Thanks, Brooklyn. Please jump in over at the blog.

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Seattle: Seattle is segregated by population distribution, which was brought about by restrictive housing covenants. Schools in the south end are black, Asian and Hispanic; schools in the north end are white. I think there was court-ordered busing in the early '70s, and there was fear of a lawsuit if the racial imbalance was not addressed. Ironically, it was a lawsuit by white parents that went to the Supreme Court.

Joel Achenbach: Thanks! It's always nice, and sometimes novel, to have people chime in who actually know what's going on (much better than having me make something up).

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Washington: I am also a member of Generation X and I could not disagree more with the previous Generation X poster. I think institutional racism has returned and is worse than ever, only this time it's undercover. I work in a majority-white company, and the few African Americans here know that the Caucasians here are not into integration or camaraderie. Although they wouldn't outright say they didn't like African Americans, it's pretty obvious.

It was the same thing in the majority Caucasian college I went too. Personally, I prefer my parent's era -- at least racists in that era just came out and said it instead of pretending integration was all okay. Saying all of that, I am positive that Caucasian people are not voluntarily going to integrate their schools. The Supreme Court basically has guaranteed a return to institutional prejudice. How long will it be until these laws apply in the workplace?

Joel Achenbach: You write: "I work in a majority-white company, and the few African Americans here know that the Caucasians here are not into integration or camaraderie. Although they wouldn't outright say they didn't like African Americans, it's pretty obvious." Really? All your Caucasian colleagues are racist? It strikes me that you have made a rather sweeping statement about a lot of individuals, based solely on their race. I hope you're wrong!

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Front Porch, Va.: It seems that the reason behind busing wasn't so much to really mix kids up, but to give dark kids the same benefits as light kids. I know a lot of people support single-sex education for the reasons Joel points out (via Rev. Wright's points about feeling wanted). Without the competition between genders, it's usually easier for girls (or boys) to rise to the top. Is it the same with race? Without looking at the effects that diversity and integration bring socially, do you (or the folks you talk with -- or the folks here in the chat) think it would be better just to make sure that all schools are supported with the same money, talent, infrastructure and fervor for the best education possible, and then just let diversity find its way into a well-educated society?

Joel Achenbach: You're right about the initial impulse to desegregate: It was to improve the educational opportunities of blacks who always had been in schools that, contrary to Plessy v. Ferguson (SC, 1896), were not "separate but equal."

Frank Terrell, my wonderful teacher from fifth grade -- and doing this article was a great experience for me if for no other reason than I got to talk to Mr. Terrell for the first time in 37 years! -- talked with great pride about how well the students at Duval are doing today. And the school is, I believe, 97 percent black. It has a fine-arts magnet program now, and has gone from being rated "F" to being rated "A."

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Washington: Regarding an earlier comment "I'm often the only white guy who doesn't think twice about going into allegedly 'rough' neighborhoods." Good luck, you will become a statistic on a future visit. I am a black native and I know better then to go into some areas in the city.

Joel Achenbach: Well, maybe when he says "rough" he has a different definition than you do.

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Washington: Hello -- thanks for the interesting, thought-provoking piece. I am about your age, from the South and had a similar experience, although I continued to attend my neighborhood school while some new students joined us. It went smoothly overall, but being a part of that made a very big impression on me at the time. I have gone on to marry a person of a different race and couldn't even imagine living somewhere that was completely segregated by race -- obviously, my family brings its own diversity wherever we go. However, I was also the child of the "community iconoclasts," and I'm not sure if my attitudes today are a product of my own family's values and example or if it is a product of the great social experiment that was desegregation. I would be curious to know the perspective of the (now adult) children of the white parents who were against desegregation.

Joel Achenbach: You know, sometimes the harsh edge in the comments about race can make us forget that the world surely is more enlightened today than it was when I was a kid. Think back to 1967: Wasn't that the year of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" The entire plot line was, a white woman brings her boyfriend (fiance? I never actually saw it) to dinner with her parents, and he's black. Indeed, he's Sidney Poitier! Very edgy then, no? (Where are the film buffs to help me out on this...)

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Arlington, Va.: Culture and class is a bigger divider these days than race. Most people don't care about what race anybody is. What is race, anyway? I'm serious.

Joel Achenbach: Geneticists say it doesn't exist -- certainly not in the classic categories used in Western Civilization for however many centuries. Anthropologists seem to be more willing to take race into account as a cultural construct.

So it's important when it's important, and nonexistent when it's not important. Thank God I'm here to clear these things up.

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Anonymous: Your sneering liberal condescension is readily apparent in your reply to Baltimore. If you wonder why conservatives despise liberals so, look in a mirror. We are truly two countries at war with each other.

Joel Achenbach: When I'm done with the chat I'm heading straight to the loo to look in the mirror and see what's got conservatives so riled.

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Brooklyn, N.Y.: I have already submitted a comment in which I very briefly recalled my experiences of the first day of school in the Fall of 1970 in Baton Rouge. I do have a question. Errol Louis of the New York's Daily News cited Melvin Oliver's study about housing patterns in an article yesterday wrote that a better antidote to resegregation would be to address discriminatory practices in housing. Did housing patterns in Florida in 1970 enable more natural school desegregation?

washingtonpost.com: Sociologists are zeroing in on how resegregation is shaping U.S. (New York Daily News, July 8)

Joel Achenbach: Thanks for that link. In Gainesville when I was growing up, housing was pretty segregated -- there were no blacks in my immediate neighborhood.

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Chicago: Wow, Joel, great story. I too attended the first desegregated schools in Virginia (non-bused because of the local population of blacks in Falls Church) but it was no picnic in Northern Virginia. When black students were allowed to attend white schools, most white parents immediately put their children in private schools. What remained in my school were the following: 70 percent white children from poor (mostly Appalachian) families, who were in the "technical" track, 20 percent black children, who were in the "remedial" track, and 10 percent white children, mostly children of educated liberals, who were the only ones allowed to take college prep classes.

In addition to being denied college-preparatory classwork, black children were not allowed in clubs, sports teams, or in student government, in effect creating a de facto segregation. Race riots between blacks and poor whites were prevalent at our school, with racist attacks ignored and sometimes supported by the school administration. It certainly would have been nice if all that pain had caused some real gains for black children in public schools, but it seems the system is right where it started from in 1970.

Joel Achenbach: Thanks for sharing your experiences.

We have to wrap this up. I've really enjoyed all the provocative comments.

I apologize if I got sneering and, what, liberal and condescensional to the guy wearing the hood.

If you want, post comments at the Achenblog. I'm going to post just a couple more of the questions/comments here and then sign off.

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Arlington, Va.: My perception, from my own experiences and from talking to my teenage son and his friends about the world they inhabit, is that most prejudice and segregation nowadays seems to be along class lines. None of the elitists in my community (and there are plenty!) have any problem including people of any race in their country clubs, exclusive social events or educational institutions, as long as they are wealthy, have certain social connections and/or stand out in some field.

In my community, if you don't have money or influence, people will look right past you at cocktail parties. If you do, they will shake your hand with gusto, no matter your color. I see our country increasingly dividing along socioeconomic lines -- these divisions truly have become the most glaring markers of modern segregation, and the gap between levels is growing. It is true that African Americans and Hispanics are found in the lower socioeconomic strata in larger numbers, but I believe that poor whites or Asian people probably feel as cut off from opportunity and access to certain things in society as those groups. And unlike those groups, there are no affirmative action tools in place to give them a foot in the door.

Unlike in the busing and forced integration days of the '60s and '70s, when blacks wouldn't be welcomed in some places no matter what their education or socioeconomic status, it is my impression that those same types of people who feared integration of people of different races (fast forward to 2007) no longer would have an issue with people's race but rather with "where they come from" socioeconomically. I mean, nowadays, nobody is going to turn down Tiger Woods' application to join his neighborhood country club. They would welcome him because he is rich, famous, successful and well-educated -- has all the markers of the upper class. In that way, our society is almost reverting to what our ancestors left behind in Old Europe.

Joel Achenbach: Segregation by class: A topic for another Outlook story, one day...

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Near Washington: I find my own recollections of that late '60s early '70s era -- and I'm about your age, Joel -- rather strange when I reflect upon them now. And not just because of what was going on in America at the time, but because of how we as a country really didn't build on our successes and learn from our failures. America underwent a spasm of youthful creativity and change and remarkable progress on many fronts, but just could not sustain it in the face of the Vietnam War, Watergate, gas crises and domestic inflation. Somehow the societal hope drained off, and we entered the Me decade. I think things are better in this country for minorities than they were 40 years ago, but are they 40 years' better?

Joel Achenbach: Great last line -- no, I don't think they're 40 years' better, which is what I guess I would have told my 9-year-old self in that imaginary conversation.

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Silver Spring, Md., by way of Texas: I support integration -- I support it wholeheartedly. As a thirty year old African American woman from a small town in Texas I see how integration can move a community past the politeness and etiquette of certain roles to see people as individuals with the same desires, needs and fears. Bill Moyers is from my hometown, and in the early '80s he did a story on it entitled "Marshall, Texas, Marshall, Texas." Viewing the documentary cemented my thoughts on integration. When we are allowed or forced to separate into two communities both communities suffer. Misconceptions fester and grow along with resentments and stereotypes. The only way you get beyond that is to get to know the unknown and to experience the unspoken. My move from my hometown was eye-opening. Integration meant that not only was I given an opportunity to know and befriend White people, but also Asian people, Indian people and Hispanic people. And we are all the same...

Joel Achenbach: Beautiful final words to end this chat today. Thanks so much for sharing that.

And thank you all for joining in! Please check out the blog.

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