You obviously didn't actually read the piece. Because they don' really "struggle" to name the benefits of integrated schools for white children. The benefits are just, as they remark, somewhat intangible when compared to these badges of capitalist merit:
One of us certainly didn't.
Goldberg: How does it benefit white families, though, in a practical way?
Hannah-Jones: In a practical way, because you get to hoard resources. You get the best of everything. Even in a community where the schools pretty much suck, if there’s a school with black kids, it’s going to suck worse.
What you describe as 'capitalist merit badges' are actually important to most people,
which is why they make the decisions they do.
Your characterization as "woolly statements about making them a better person" is interesting, because of course there's nothing woolly about them - you're just responding in exactly the way they say most white people respond to this issue. Which isn't surprising given your more-or-less explicit endorsement of scientific racism upthread.
It's a question of perception. It sounds woolly and vague to me; you take a different view. I've interacted with more non-whites than my grandmother did: does make me a better person? That's just odd. It sounds like the sort of thing one says when one can't think of anything else.
I expect white people think in diverse ways. But what's telling here is that you seem to equate white with bad, which is not surprising I suppose given all the anti-white things you like to post.
And they do also point out that the benefits of segregation for white children are much more immediately tangible.
Yes, and parents make decisions based on what is best for
their children.
When I was in Brazil I remember seeing a school at the bottom of slum. To my surprise, I discovered it was a private school. All the pupils were kids from the slum. There was another, state run, school farther up the hill. Some of parents told me that the private school was much better than the other, and so the better-off residents of the slum sent their children there. Obviously, this made the state school worse, since its pupils were from the poorest families. But the parents at the private school, like parents everywhere, were motivated primarily by what was best for
their children.
Not really. It costs far more to incarcerate someone than to give them a decent primary education. And that's reckoning without the fact that educated people can then become highly productive members of society who pay taxes. The United States has been shifting resources quite consciously from educating African-Americans to incarcerating them for thirty plus years.
Yes, but whites are already, as Cutlass put it, paying for black children not getting a better education. It's a known factor for them. They also know that for their children to have a good future, to get their 'capitalist merit badges', they need to go to a good school.
