The utter stupidity of a moat

Why it is inevitable that we open the borders of Connecticut's cities and towns

The school board in Darien, Conn., which has a median household income of $232,523 and is 91% white, recently said no, in a 5-4 vote, to the state’s Open Choice program, which, according to the link, is an

interdistrict public school program intended to improve academic achievement; reduce racial, ethnic and economic isolation; and provide a choice of educational programs for public school students.

The program would have brought as many as 16 kindergarten students from Norwalk, Conn., which has a median household income of $85,768 and is 72.4% white.

What those five members of the board sought to do was dig the moat around their pleasant little town a little deeper.

You can certainly understand why. Digging the moat a little deeper has worked fabulously in the past, most particularly here in Connecticut, where we try to keep our racism genteel.

How well has that worked? The state of Connecticut is among the most segregated in the union. We have some of the deepest poverty one ZIP code away from some of the country’s most fabulous wealth. Our Gini coefficient — a measure of economic inequality — is the second-highest in the country. Health outcomes in the state can be predicted by ZIP code. Exclusionary zoning has dug its claws into the land and isn’t letting go, despite the state Supreme Court’s efforts.

Not for nothing does the state compete for the title of Mississippi of the North.

The dirty little secret — the thing no one seems to talk about — is that this exclusionary vision hurts white kids. Those white kids in Darien are growing up in a bubble that renders them ill-suited for what’s to come. For more on this, let’s go to “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together” author, Heather C. McGhee in this TED talk.

(If you want to listen to the conversation she references in that talk, with Gary from North Carolina, go here.)

(If you haven’t read her book, I highly recommend it.)

As state Sen. Bob Duff, D-Norwalk, told The Darien Times:

I firmly believe Norwalk kids will be fine in the end. It's Darien kids that I worry about. Norwalk’s already a diverse community. Darien is not.

The board of education needs to reconsider Open Choices, and buck against some firmly embraced racism that has been codified into law. Here’s just one example of that, from Darien’s Republicans, in an attempt to dismiss attempts to change the town’s zoning laws. Note the first bullet point and then read the second one out loud.

Yeah? I call bullshit. Moats don’t work, and voting to keep 16 5-year olds out of your schools tells me all I need to know about your agenda. We in the can’t-we-just-get-along pew are told that calling someone a racist is the quickest way to shut down a conversation, so I am left with one question: How do they keep their sheets so white?