Kamala’s Biggest Lie on Race and Inequality

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is being hailed as practically Joan of Arc for having been bused to a white elementary school in Berkeley in 1969. At the Democratic National Convention last week, Oprah Winfrey whooped that being bused helped instill in Harris “a passion for justice and freedom and the glorious fighting spirit necessary to pursue that passion.”

But what if school busing instead epitomizes the folly and dishonesty of iron-fisted progressive decrees that force other people to pay any price for a mirage of equality? 

During her failed campaign for the 2020 presidential nomination, Harris’s touting of her busing experience was “perhaps the biggest moment of Harris’s [presidential] campaign,” the Washington Post reported on Sunday. The Harris campaign even sold t-shirts in 2019 hyping her confrontation with Joe Biden during a candidates debate on that issue. Harris declared that forced busing was necessary “because there are moments in history where states fail to preserve the civil rights of all people”—and thus the federal government must intervene. Harris championed Senate legislation to increase the federal push for school desegregation. 

But busing in Berkeley actually illustrates the folly of letting politicians domineer kids and parents in the name of equality. 

In 1967, the Berkeley school superintendent proposed a sweeping busing program to “set an example for all the cities of America.” The first step was effectively to scorn federal law. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 specified that “‘Desegregation’ means the assignment of students to public schools and within such schools without regard to their race, color, religion, or national origin, but ‘desegregation’ shall not mean the assignment of students to public schools in order to overcome racial imbalance.” There was no history of government-mandated segregation in Berkeley. But politicians decided they could no longer tolerate black children going to school in black neighborhoods and white children going to school in white neighborhoods. Busing kids far from their homes destroyed neighborhood schools in the name of equality and made it far more difficult for parents to be involved in their kids’ education. 

More than 50 years after Berkeley started busing, the city’s schools have the worst racial achievement gaps in America, except for those of the District of Columbia. Black students are on average five years behind white students despite endless special programs and interventions to close the gap. Five years is not “close enough for government educational work.”

Politicians and policymakers are responding by relabeling the “achievement gap” as “the opportunity gap”—as if the vast inequalities are solely resulting from differences in services that children received. A local Berkeley paper noted, “The opportunity gap continues to dominate Berkeley’s school board races, budget decisions and superintendent priorities, as it has for decades.”

The Washington Post boasted that Berkeley’s program wasn’t court-ordered but “created by people living there who believed in the promise of shared community.” But that didn’t work for Carole Porter, a childhood friend of Kamala, and her sister, who were part of the busing program. The Post admitted, “The Porter girls were running into so much conflict—mostly the harassment from Black students because they were biracial—that their parents eventually sent them all to Catholic school.” 

Did busing beget domestic tranquility in Berkeley? Crime data doesn’t inspire confidence. Since 2014, the number of sexual assaults in Berkeley have almost tripled since 2014 (from 35 to 97), aggravated assaults and auto thefts have more than doubled, and arson has increased more than fivefold. In a single year, between 2022 and 2023, robberies increased 32 percent, and auto theft and arson jumped 62 percent.

Harris’s record on education and federal intervention ignores government failures far beyond Berkeley. In recent decades, federal initiatives including the No Child Left Behind and Common Core sought to narrow the test differentials between white and black students. But despite soaring government spending, the racial achievement gap “is now 30 percent larger than it was 35 years ago,” according to Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond.

Valorizing Kamala’s experience being bused is an attempt to expunge the record of forced busing disasters that permeated scores of urban areas in the final decades of the last century. That was the biggest diversity, inclusion, and equity crusade in American history.

Forced busing was sometimes the equivalent of throwing a bomb into a classroom. In May 1974, Bostonians voted overwhelmingly—15 to 1—against busing schoolchildren to achieve racial integration. A month later, U.S. District Judge Arthur Garrity ignored them and made himself the Boston schools’ sole tyrant. The New Republic noted in 1983 that “the early years of busing [in Boston] furnished to the student passengers an educational experience of value only to those aspiring to careers in urban guerrilla warfare.” The National Guard was deployed to restore order after violent public protests and racial clashes in the areas around the schools. 

Forced busing epitomized the local dictatorship of the “best and the brightest.” As Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom noted in their 1997 book, America in Black and White: “The plan that Garrity imposed upon the city was punitive in the extreme…. The judge’s advisers and the state Board of Education believed that those against whom it was directed—in their eyes, localist, uneducated and bigoted—deserved to be punished.”

Initially, any Boston school with less than 50 percent white enrollment was deemed illegitimate. By the late ’90s, the schools were seeking to impose a quota of at least 9 percent white students in each school. Study after study found that forced busing in Boston and elsewhere simply did not provide an academic boost to minority students.

Boston’s busing regime perpetuated contempt for both students and parents. Although only 13 percent white students remained in local schools by 2013, almost two-thirds of students were still bused away from their neighborhoods. Students were dragged out of bed starting at 6:05 a.m. to glorify a long-dead judge’s vision. School achievement levels have plummeted in Boston, and a quarter of the students no longer even show up regularly for class. 

Across the nation, localities and school systems with no history of intentional racial discrimination were commandeered by federal judges who made themselves tinhorn dictators to control every aspect of the classrooms. As long as judges or other government officials promised that their decrees would reduce inequality, their power grabs were considered sacrosanct—at least by most of the media. Censorship routinely shielded the failures of busing decrees. Law professor Lino Graglia noted in his 1976 classic, Disaster by Decree: The Supreme Court Decisions on Race and the Schools, “School officials [under forced busing orders] are often virtually enjoined from publicizing race-related incidents; to do so is to risk a judicial finding of an insufficiently cooperative attitude or inadequate enthusiasms for integration and to risk subjection to further court-imposed restrictions.”

Harris has vowed to create an “opportunity society” if she is elected president. She is vague on how that would work, but politicians would presumably have far more pretexts to forcibly intervene to rectify any inequalities. The lofty goal would absolve all the injustices and constitutional violations inflicted on the path to Valhalla. Unfortunately, the long history of judicial weaseling on compulsory affirmative action programs signal how the next round of pro-equality interventions will be scored. 

Harris touts her personal experience to portray busing for desegregation as a moral triumph. But any government program that leaves black students five years behind white students is no model for the nation. The debacles of forced busing should live in infamy as a warning on the danger of elitists with boundless contempt for the lives and rights of other Americans. Don’t expect the Kamala “amen” corner to recognize the busing wreckage before Election Day.