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so with Trump's latest bout of white flight fearmongering, I'd like to tell you a story about where I grew up, near Augusta GA. 1/x
Augusta Georgia is in the super-racist part of the state (which is anything outside of 285). But like, there's a road named Tobacco Road that the slaves used to roll the tobacco down to the river. 2/x
Anyway, Augusta the city is essentially rich whites living in the plantation houses their slave-owning ancestors built and poor blacks living in the city itself. 3/x
(James Brown is from the area and when he bought one of the big old plantation houses, people were SCANDALIZED). Anyway - 4/x
When desegregation came to the south, some 20 years after it was mandated in Brown v Board of Education (yeah), they were NOT HAPPY ABOUT IT. 5/x
So what did the white folks do? They pooled their resources and started private or "magnet" schools - AR Johnson, Davidson, and Augusta Christian. 6/x
So all the rich white kids went to those 3 places while all the poor black kids got stuck in underfunded public schools. 7/x
Fortunately, I grew up in the bougie white suburbs outside of Augusta proper, where the white folks weren't as stupidly rich but there also wasn't the permanent underclass either. 8/x
And our public schools were fucking EXCELLENT. I got a first-rate education, access to AP classes, a band program, etc. For the nonwhite folks in the area, their kids were on an equal footing. 9/x
Oh, and the suburbs didn't have - or need - charter/magnet/private schools. Because BY AND LARGE the suburbs were bougie and white. 10/x
So some time after I graduated college, the economic environment in the city had improved, and finally some of the historically oppressed black folks were getting out and into the suburbs. 11/x
Which was great for them - home ownership and, more importantly, access to quality education that would get their kids into college. 12/x
So what did the bougie white suburbanites do? CHARTER SCHOOLS! In a county that had never needed them and offered first-rate public information. 13/x
And of course the charter school hid behind some bullshit about "teaching arts in education" or whatever. But it was obvious what the real goal was. To give bougie white kids a leg up on the competition. 14/x
And restore the racial imbalance that the black people moving out of the city were desperate to escape. Anyway, cool to see the President of the United States preaching more of that bullshit. But he's not a racist, or whatever. 15/15
