Barack Obama, Child of the '70s

Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia last week showed such deep understanding of America's racial ills not just because he has experienced life in a white family and a black family, but because he came of age during the only decade when the races seriously tried to live together — the 1970s.

The '70s weren't just about generous Afros and disco collars, the look that Obama sported in his yearbook photo. They were about TV shows like The Electric Company, with its multi-racial cast and funk soundtrack, and The White Shadow, a drama about an inner-city basketball team with a white coach. Salt-and-pepper bands, like Sly and the Family Stone and the Allman Brothers. The American Basketball Association, starring flashy black forward Julius Erving and gumpy white center Swen Nater. The World Series champion Pittsburgh Pirates, who had a black slugger, a Latino base stealer, a gangly white relief pitcher, and an R&B theme song — Sister Sledge's "We Are Family."

During that multi-racial era, Obama went to high school with whites, Asians and Polynesians in Hawaii, the most diverse state in the union. In his speech, he praised the value of a rainbow education, condemning segregated schools for "the inferior education they provided, then and now." But he also pointed out the errors that ended the integration experiment, and created a white backlash that was still evident in the reaction to inflammatory remarks by his ex-pastor, Jeremiah Wright. In a passage that showed his ability to look at race from both sides of his heritage, Obama noted that whites become resentful "when they are told to bus their children to a school across town" and "when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced."

That hit me where I once lived. Like Obama, I grew up in the '70s, and went to schools where blacks and whites sat side by side. I was part of the busing experiment he spoke about, and I saw how it briefly brought blacks and whites together, but ultimately drove us farther apart than we'd been before. In 1973, I was a six-year-old, living in Lansing, Mich., just as the city was about to integrate its schools. Lansing's blacks and whites both lived prosperously, because the auto factories paid equal wages. But the blacks lived on the West Side, and we lived on the South Side.

I was about to enter first grade, but I was precocious enough to read the paper, so I knew that a judge had ordered busing in the Lansing School District. I didn't know what that meant, though, until one of my friends told me "the nigger bus" was coming to Lewton Elementary. At the time, the prospect of going to school with blacks was frightening. We had heard rumors about the high school: some bathrooms were controlled by blacks, others by whites, and you dared not step in the wrong one. The black students had taken over the principal's office, demanding passing grades. White girls couldn't wear ponytails, because black girls carried scissors in their purses.

So my friend had a plan. Every afternoon, four of us would line up outside the school and give the bus the finger. For four straight days, we acted out our not-so-massive resistance against integration. On the fifth day, the bus stopped. The driver stepped down. My friends ran for a nearby field. I stood there, frozen with the fear of authority. The driver took down my name and phone number, and called my mother. That afternoon, for the only time in my life, I was spanked with my pants down.

The bus was from Main Street Elementary, a West Side school near the Oldsmobile plant. We weren't actually thrown into the same classes with black kids until the third grade. Before that happened, we white kids were driven to Main Street and assigned a black "partner" for a day of total immersion with the opposite race.

That sounds as sappy as a Davey and Goliath episode on racial tolerance, but it worked. When I got to high school, the student body was half white and half black, but there were no office takeovers, because the principal was a respected black minister. There were no black bathrooms or white bathrooms. We all got high in the same bathrooms. The homecoming king was a black football player, the queen a white cheerleader. We were a statewide power in basketball and golf. There were tensions — at a post-game dance, Bruce Springsteen's "Dancin' In The Dark" was hooted down by a crowd that wanted to hear Cameo. Dan Oberdorfer's parents wouldn't let him take Janine Morris to the prom. You had to step around breakdancers to get into the library. But the one time I got into a fight, it was with a redneck who was dating my ex-girlfriend.

I knew that Sexton was unusual — that most other schools were lily-white suburban, or all-black inner-city — but I didn't realize how unusual until I went to Michigan State University. Most of my college classmates had come from segregated backgrounds in metro Detroit, and the campus was constantly sparking with racial controversies: one spring, a group of black students occupied the Administration Building for nine days. The young men inside that building were acting on grievances I naively thought had been settled 20 years before. But they hadn't been settled then, and obviously they still haven't.

I went to high school just as Lansing's falling white population and its rising black population were intersecting. Since then, my hometown seems to have given up on inter-racial education. On the one hand, it opened an Afrocentric charter school named after Malcolm X. On the other, a "schools of choice" policy allows white city kids to defect to suburban schools. Today, Sexton is 66 percent black and 19 percent white. My alma mater is no outlier. According to The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, public school integration peaked in 1988, when 43 percent of black students attended integrated schools. Today, that figure is 31 percent.

By the ‘80s, there was less idealism about the races living side by side. Ronald Reagan rode into the presidency by bashing "welfare queens," and popular culture took its cues from the political mood. Archie Bunker may have been a bigot, but at least he lived next door to a black family — unlike Jerry Seinfeld, who always looked as though he was soiling himself when he interacted with minorities. Fred Sanford feuded with white cops and his Puerto Rican neighbors — but Sanford and Son had a more diverse supporting cast than The Cosby Show, which almost never challenged its audience with scripts about race relations. Instead of Stevie Wonder's spiritually-motivated explorations of ghetto traumas, the decade's most socially conscious music was Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and N.W.A.'s "Fuck tha Police." Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing questioned whether whites and blacks could even occupy the same neighborhood without a riot breaking out.

Obama's speech made me think: "Maybe we can try integration again." My children should not live in a more segregated nation than I did. American history, which has been a narrative of greater and greater inclusion, is not supposed to run that way. Obama was right when he said that "segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools." They're not just inferior academically. They're inferior socially. Today, I live in a Chicago neighborhood that's one-third white, one-third black, and one-third Latino. It seems normal to me, but I'm not sure I'd be comfortable in a multiracial neighborhood if I had graduated from a suburban, mostly-white high school. Segregated schools are bad for both races.

To abandon the goal of integration, to call it nostalgia for my old school days, would be to admit that it was a noble failure. It wasn't, but this time around, it can't be done through laws, or court decisions. Busing was the wrong approach. It did lessen racial tensions by introducing black kids and white kids before we hit puberty and were ready to beat the crap out of anyone who looked different. But ultimately, it made segregation worse by driving white families to the suburbs. My parents stuck it out in the city, but most of their friends moved away — taking my friends with them.

This time, integrating America has to be accomplished through leadership, and example — not by law. Maybe seeing a black family in the White House will make folks less anxious about seeing a black family in the house next door — or in the schoolyard. Obama was part of that brief moment of racial togetherness in the 1970s, and he can revive it.