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Segregation, Boulder style
- - - - - - - - - - - - Ku Klux Klan leader Thomas Robb nailed it in '93 when he told me that Boulder had done everything right. He explained that by planning and zoning to exclude—complete with growth caps known as the Danish Plan—Boulder had made itself inhospitable to working-class minorities who reproduce. If more communities would plan and zone and use municipal power to "exclude," Robb explained, then more of them would be predominantly white like Boulder. Our town, Robb said while revealing his bare chest, was the only place he felt safe without a bulletproof vest. It was an epiphany for me, which kicked off 12 years of observation and contemplation: Do the exclusionary, regulatory, leftist politics of Boulder reflect a kind of Pollyanna liberal fascist elitism that excludes minorities? Wouldn't the leaders of this community—who speak non-stop about their love of "diversity," "tolerance," "inclusion" and "multiculutralism"—be better off down the road in someplace less glitzy but more "multicultural" like, say, Topeka? More than a decade after the Pearl Street Klan rally, the genie's out of the bottle and too fat to slide back in. Robb had brilliant insight, and Boulder has attracted his kind of people. Today, Boulder is one race crime after another. Though the leftist politics have clearly crafted an environment attractive to white supremacists, nearly everyone who knows me says Boulder has no widespread race problems. My critics—which include all family, friends and colleagues—assure me that Boulder's high-profile racial incidents are the work of a few "cowards" who do not reflect the values of Boulder. They tell me the "liberal" Boulder collective really is consumed with a love of "diversity," "tolerance," "inclusion" and "multiculturalism." So what do the just-plain-folks of Boulder do, while a handful of racists send hate e-mails to minorities, scream racial epithets from cars and break the jaw of a black man? They segregate our schools. The Rocky Mountain News reported on Dec. 19 that parents throughout the Boulder Valley School District have engaged in wide-scale "white flight," leaving schools behind as Hispanics enroll. Columbine Elementary, which serves a neighborhood that's 87 percent white, has an enrollment that's 82 percent Hispanic. Julie Phillips, Boulder's former school board president, told the Rocky Mountain News "we aren't looking so liberal in the white flight we've experienced" for the past 10 years. That's because Boulder's not "liberal," Julie. It's an elitist, leftist, regulatory nightmare. Ernest Emilio Endrizzi, a veteran Boulder Valley School District psychologist, told me he has witnessed voluntary segregation of the Boulder schools for more than a decade. Endrizzi, who attended an all-Hispanic Catholic school as a child in San Antonio, is concerned about segregation because he teaches Hispanic children they can't enjoy the full freedoms of the United States if they over-identify with Hispanic subculture. "An Anglo parent will pull a child and drive him across town and then say it's because there's a really good art program at Baseline," Amelio said. "What's really in their hearts? I don't know. But the Latino families are not driving their children all over town to exercise school choice, so we have this voluntary segregation going on." Richard Garcia, a member of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education who put six kids through Boulder schools, told me the segregation is nothing other than blatant racism. He told the Rocky Mountain News that white parents don't want their children "to be with brown kids," simple as that. His statement offended several segregationists, who wrote and called to tell Garcia he was wrong. Here's what one caller, who identified himself as a Boulder man, said on Garcia's voice mail: "You racist son of a bitch. I'd like to have two minutes with you, you bastard. You should go back to Mexico, you piece of shit. The reason parents are leaving is they don't want their kids to go with a bunch of illegal alien kids—a bunch of wetback kids who have no business in this country. We don't want our tax dollars going to educate a bunch of third-world peasants from Mexico. If they were American and they spoke English nobody would care. But they're not. They're third-world peasant kids. So get that through your mother-fucking head, you son of a bitch." One e-mail to Garcia came from a man who signed as "Jim Jennings" in Boulder (sent from jimj122680@yahoo.com), but wrote me back as "Jim Jackson" in Boulder with the same e-mail address. His letter to Garcia said: "Diversity is GREAT with Asian kids or Eastern European kids because they are smart and they VALUE education. It seems the only things Mexican boys value is joining a gang or spraying graffiti. The only thing Mexican girls value is getting pregnant... Mexicans are nothing but a modern-day plague on American society." In an e-mail to me, "Jennings/Jackson" quoted from a recent article I wrote about racism and explained that he couldn't waste time talking to the likes of me. "M. Jiroch"(sent from mjiroch@mac.com) claims to be a schoolteacher and sent an e-mail to Garcia arguing that the Latino community doesn't value education, which is why whites segregate. "Bob Jackson and family" (sent from bjackson445@yahoo.com) assured Garcia that racism isn't at play, merely a concern "that Mexican children are slowly destroying Colorado schools. The issue is that Mexicans DO NOT CARE about learning." Chalk me up as convinced. Race isn't a factor in Boulder's two-tiered school system, consisting of schools for whites and schools for Hispanics. This simply has nothing to do with race, but rather the propensity of Mexicans to breed, form gangs, spray paint walls and generally threaten the comfort of whites. How dare anyone mention race. Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com |
