Leftists would call conservatives objecting to forced integration “racists.” So what do you call liberals in a posh New York City neighborhood balking at minorities being moved into their kids’ middle schools?
Well, “angry,” for one thing.
The brouhaha has erupted in the Big Apple’s Upper West Side (shown), a limousine-liberal area that gave Hillary Clinton 89 percent of its votes. (Trump got less than eight percent.) Here’s what’s going on: The rare exceptional schools in NYC are virtually always in affluent neighborhoods — such as the Upper West Side. Entry “into them is based on statewide test scores,” according to American Thinker’s Peter Skurkiss, and these schools are predominantly white.
This doesn’t sit well with NYC racial bean counters, so enter the Distinct 3 desegregation plan. “This is a call to reserve 25% of the seats in the 16 high-performing schools of this Upper West Side district to students with low standardized test scores in math and English,” relates Skurkiss. “It will be blacks slated for those 25% reserved seats. This isn’t going over well with the wine and brie set. But to make matters worse for them, in order to make room for the low performers, about 25% of their kids will have to go to schools of, shall we say, color. That’s a game-changer.”
For sure. As I’ve reported in the past, things often don’t go well for white children when they’re a racial minority in schools. And they’re not going well in NYC, where the desegregation plan has sparked a battle among leftists, as a recent meeting at the Upper West Side’s P.S. 199 evidences (video below).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Jk6TI6nM1M
At the meeting, Henry Zymeck, principal of The Computer School, chastised the complaining parents for essentially saying, as he translates it, “My already advantaged kids needs [sic] more advantage! They need to be kept away from those [minority] kids!” He said this attitude was “tremendously offensive” to him (hey, at least he didn’t roll out the white-privilege tripe).
This is the Offensiveness Ploy, used regularly to stifle dissent. Of course, the person isn’t really offended; he just doesn’t happen to like what you’re saying. But stating as much would make him seem intolerant, so he instead shifts the onus onto the dissenter by claiming the latter is being “offensive,” today’s version of a heresy charge.
Also virtue signaling was school chancellor Richard Carranza, who expressed, “Wealthy white Manhattan parents angrily rant against plan to bring more black kids to their schools” in a tweet that made the New York Post’s cover (below).
If Zymeck and Carranza appear more committed to leftist principles than those they condemn, note that they likely don’t have skin in the game. Zymeck is 60 years old and lives in posh Millwood, NY, outside of NYC, where the average annual income is $245,000 and the population is only 2.3 percent black. His income is listed at MyLife.com at $250,000-plus, and there’s no indication that he has spent recent decades anywhere but wealthy Westchester County. So it’s a good bet his kids never attended NYC government schools; they could even have gone to private school.
It’s harder finding information on Carranza. We do know that Bolshevik Bill (a.k.a. Mayor de Blasio) recruited him from the Houston school system, that he has been accused of sexual misconduct, and that he’s paid a whopping $345,000 a year for his Big Apple position. In other words, there’s no ghetto living or schools in his two children’s futures.
But we’ve heard this story before. I reported in 2015 on a similar integration controversy in a neighborhood appropriately named Dumbo, in Brooklyn, which National Review writer Reihan Salam called “the Capital of Liberal Hypocrisy” (though the Upper West Side may now steal that title). And Salam explained the leftists’ opposition to Dumbo diversity thus: “Of course they want integration, they’ll tell you, but only if it entails no sacrifice on their part.” He quoted one Dumbo parent who actually said, “It’s more complicated when it’s about your own children.” But as I wrote:
Really, though, it isn’t.
It just seems so when you stop being feelings-oriented and actually start to think.
It’s easy to operate emotionally and embrace feel-good ideology — which polishes up leftist credentials and guarantees invitations to the right cocktail parties — when someone else’s ox is being gored. It’s easy to be idealistic when you don’t have to live with your ideals. As learned, however, by the lad who’d dreamt of being an astronaut but then balked upon embarking upon the process and coming to understand the difficulty involved, fantasy can be simple. Reality, though, is often complicated. And actually living your policies brings their reality home to you.
And living in a fantasy-world leads to fantastical accusations. As Salam opined remarking on leftist hypocrisy, “It’s easy to imagine how these Dumbo progressives might have reacted had this story unfolded in Atlanta or Birmingham — they’d surely chalk up resistance to the rezoning to racism.”
And what of the virtue-signaling Zymeck, who claimed he was pained that the Upper West Side parents were rejecting the introduction of “tremendously disadvantaged” youth into their schools? Why doesn’t he leave his posh Millwood neighborhood and lilywhite school and work in inner-city schools to improve test scores there, so that more impoverished kids can be accepted at better schools based on merit — which is how it should be?
Ah, yes, that would mean giving people the shirt off your own back — not just off someone else’s.
Photo showing townhouses in Manhattan’s Upper West Side: tupungato/iStock/Getty Images Plus
