We’re going to start with some questions.
I’d like to turn to the topic of segregation.
What I find interesting is that according
to some metrics, in this country, racial segregation
has become worse rather than better.
Just a simple example — in 1988, 43
percent of black students were in majority-white
schools. Today, that’s gone down to 23 percent.
Now we have an African-American president.
In some ways, the country seems less prejudiced.
How has this happened? What has gone wrong?
KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR: My opinion on that is
the fact that the Voting Rights Act and the
Civil Rights Act led to other acts that tried
as hard as they could to eliminate segregation
in housing, the practice of redlining and
those types of things, where blacks and other
minorities were denied access to neighborhoods
that had been all white.
Now that we’ve dealt with that situation
changing for a good 30 years or so, the majority
of the housing patterns that have developed
from that is what we used to call de facto
segregation — people moving to where
they want to move, and living with the people
that they want to live with.
Maybe — and this is just a maybe, but
I think it’s pretty accurate — that
has caused another round of de facto segregation,
where people are now living where they want
to live, but the racial makeup of the neighborhood,
or the composition of the neighborhood, is
still quite similar to when segregation was
the law, and people didn’t self-segregate.
I think that’s what it’s all about.
