In the preface to his columnpromoting the Supreme Court decision on race in public schools, George Will states:
The court ruled 5 to 4 that Seattle, which never had school segregation, and Louisville, which did but seven years ago completed judicially mandated remedial measures, must stop using race in assigning children to schools to produce particular racial ratios in enrollments.
By stating this one source of information on Seattle's race history, Will intends to create a frame that the left-wing is attacking cities that have never had racial problems, at least against those of African-American descent and that these cities do not need any type of help with diversity.
The problem with George Will's frame, however is that it is patently false. Seattle may have not ever had segregated schools; for one, the African-American population was much lower than in other areas of the country, and still is in the majority of the Pacific Northwest, than it is in the rest of the country. Despite this, Seattle most certainly has had its share of race problems.
As James Gregorydescribed,
Seattle thinks of itself as a liberal city, one that has a reasonable record of racial integration. But we are also a city with a short memory. One of the things we have been forgetting is that only a few decades ago, Seattle was a sharply segregated city. It was a city that kept non-whites out of most jobs and most neighborhoods, even out of stores, restaurants, hotels and hospitals.
Until the late 1960s, Seattle north of the ship canal was a "sundown" zone. After dark, a black man in particular was likely to be stopped by the police, questioned about his business and informed that he had better not be seen in the neighborhood again.
North Seattle was not alone. Queen Anne, Magnolia and West Seattle also were sundown zones. The suburbs were even worse. Shoreline, Lake Forest Park, Bothell, Bellevue, Burien, even White Center, vigorously and explicitly excluded people of color.
The point here is that, Seattle most certainly had its share of racial problems, much of which could best be described as below-the-surface racism instead of the more obvious in-your-face racism of other parts of the country, but some of which, such as the fact that the majority of Seattle and its suburbs consisted of sundown zones, which shows George Will's frame to be complete fiction.
The most frustrating part of this error, is how someone who writes in the Washington Post has horrificly ignored the history of Seattle, or more sinisterly, completely fictionalized his own version of it. This is a small, yet, important example of the lies that our informed citzenry must protect ourselves against. It is easy to say that either our race problems did not exist or that they are a thing of the past, as Mr. Will seems to suggest throughout his column. It is much more difficult on the other hand, to confront these issues and actually work to correct them which we as citizens must do in our country.
Mr. Will's frame, though, is more troubling in what it seems to suggest. Not only does it try to capture a complete fiction, that idyllic town that never has had a race problem, but it does so in a very sinister, cyncial, backwards way. Mr. Will uses cherry-picked evidence in order to substantiate a claim that the entirity of the evidence would seem to argue against. The evidence of a sun-down town, where African Americans were systemically and purposelly kept in the margins of society would suggest that more protections based on race would be necessary in the society. However, using his frame, Mr. Will ignores, or lies about, these problems, pretending that they never existed. This is the most frightening issue with his argumentation, that he builds it upon frames that are not only nonsensical but tend to also be backwards. While this is not the frustrating part of the overall problem, it is certainly the most dangerous because it is so brazenly disingenuous and occurs throughout the frames used by our media.