Cambridge Forum; WGBH Forum Network; Garrison Keillor: Christmas Blizzard

We need to help our suburbs that are going through racial change there's lots of almost all of the growth of minority population from now on out it's going to be suburban. So there's thousands of suburban communities that have almost no diversity right now that are going to experience either re segregation or integration. Right now we don't have very many policies to make sure that it ends up as integration which is a very positive experience for everybody if it's properly managed. Re segregation is a very negative experience for everybody. Basically the whites leave the middle class African-Americans Latinos and moved out of the city to get into better and more diverse schools end up isolated and segregated and with increasing poverty it once again. You can't really solve these problems without deciding to solve them. I think that's what we learned during the civil rights era. We have plenty of models of success that we could build on if we wanted to solve them. We just have to decide to do it can't be done by accident. If you just let these problems go you always have a spread of segregation and inequality in our society because there are so many

institutions and so many beliefs that are linked to that system. So what I think we need to do is to say what kind of society do we want to be. Are we willing to take some steps to make that happen. And are we willing to define that as our goal. And what is our goal. Are we going to be a society that has a majority of people who are excluded from the mainstream and subordinated in where their human talent isn't developed and a minority of whites trying to hold on to power and are not able to function successfully in that kind of society. That's a recipe for a national decline and division. I think the goal that was and then seated in Brown is really the only goal that will work for the future of the country. And we really need to be talking about it seriously.