"It Was a Fault Li[n]e For a Lot of These Liberal Politicians"

"The way racism functioned in the North was much subtler. In the South it's easy to picture how racism operated—colored drinking fountains and white drinking fountains. The system of Jim Crow segregation was so visible. It was still incredibly difficult to overturn that system, but it was easier to visualize. For Northern white citizens and white politicians, the way their schools and neighborhoods were structured was just normal, they didn't know or chose not to understand that it wasn't just a matter of white families choosing to live in white neighborhoods and black families in black neighborhoods. There was a whole history of mortgage redlining, zoning decisions, public housing discrimination, and real estate discrimination that created those separate neighborhoods. But the subtlety of that allowed white people to just see it as common sense, just how our neighborhood and schools should be."

Jake Blumgart in Slate interviews Matt Delmont, author of Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation.