Joy Reid has never been afraid of stating her true opinion of the Republican Party. On the June 23 edition of her eponymous program The Reid Report, the MSNBC host invited colleague Chris Hayes of All In With Chris Hayes to talk about his newest segment, “Behind The Color Line,” which investigated de facto segregation in American schools.
When Hayes told Reid that this segregation was occurring in her hometown of New York City Reid sought to clarify, “The blue state, New York, and you're talking about this. So it's not parents who are making these decisions based on race.” Reid’s implication, of course, is that if it were in a red state, de facto segregation would obviously be due to racist Republicans. [See video below. Click here for MP3 audio]
To the left-wing Reid’s surprise, the most “vehement and virulent” segregation is found in the North, where affluent (liberal) white parents choose to put their children in private school. Of course, both MSNBC hosts failed to note that the same wealthy white liberals in the Democratic base – along with another component of the base, public sector union employees – tend to oppose school voucher programs which give predominantly African-American students access to academically-superior religious and private schools.
Hayes explained how integration in schools is “best in the South,” as white “rebellion” to the abhorred bussing programs of the 1970's prevented proper integration in the North.
Chris Hayes did not bother to challenge Reid’s outrageous hypocritical statement. It seems that all of the anchors of MSNBC abide by the same radical, left-wing playbook.
See transcript below:
MSNBC
The Reid Report
June 23, 2014
2:34 p.m. Eastern
3 minutes and 18 seconds
CHRIS HAYES: Right, or this sense that what ends up happening in this very perverse way is that when socioeconomic status, right, is so related to race and that is so related to test scores, that bad schools are poor schools are black and brown schools. All three of those things get squeezed together. So parents look at the school and think, that's a bad school. And they're not saying necessarily that's a bad school because there are black children or Latinochildren. They're saying, those numbers aren’t very good, its test scores aren't that good. It's serving kids in a poor community. And what a bunch of parents in the neighborhood, parents of white children discovered in this story we tell in All In America is actually there was a really good school sitting in their neighborhood that they never saw as a good school because their mental representation of “bad school” was everything that they saw, the kinds of kids going in, the kinds of test scores it got. They sent their kids in, they integrated this school, right. The reverse of what we saw in the South 60 years ago. White kids going into an all black school, or not all black school: black, Latino, Arab-American. They've discovered, oh, there's this gem sitting here right in our backyard.
JOY REID: And what's really fascinating about this is, of course, you're in a blue state. The blue state, New York, and you're talking about this. So it's not parents who are making these decisions based on race. There's a counter argument to what you were reporting in your All In series and John McWhorter is one of the people who makes it. And it says just focusing on the percentages of white students in the classroom is the wrong way to look at it. And that segregation in and of itself that's no longer the problem. It's really the quality of the schools themselves, even if they're all black.
HAYES: I think we have to go back to the original finding in Brown and ask ourselves whether we think that holding is true. Right, the genius of Brown was to say there's two ways that race in America play themselves out. One is separateness. Black people do this and white people do this. They're apart from each other. The other is hierarchy, right. Some people have power and some people don't. The people who tend to have power are white. People who tend to not have power are black. And the genius of the Brown ruling is those two things are completely bound up in each other. There is no universe in which we maintain that separateness and that separateness doesn't also have an aspect of hierarchy, doesn’t have an aspect of powerful differential, bigotry, dispossession. And so I don't think you can come back 60 years later and say, well, we can just have a world -- what we have decided collectively as a society is screw the Brown holding. Our goal is to close the “achievement gap.” Do you know what that “closing the achievement gap means”? It means separate but equal schools, literally. Closing the achievement gap says we are not going to reintegrate schools. We're going to have black schools and white schools, but we're going to make sure that they're equal. Well that's the exact logic that Brown took a sledge hammer to 60 years ago.
REID: Did you find it ironic when you looked at the data, and you looked at where segregation is the most pernicious that it is so vehement and virulent in the North, in New York.
HAYES: And in fact, it’s not just that it’s so bad in New York and in the North. It's the best in the South. And the reason is, an entire generation of policy was put in place to desegregate the South over criminal violence, looting, rioting, bottles being broken, right? People died in Ole Miss, right? There was a structure put in place to desegregate those schools. And the legacies is that those schools remain less segregated than in the North. In the North, that structure was never put in place because basically there was a white rebellion in the North which made sure there never was.
