Integration in San Francisco schools - 8 August 1997

The plane touched down – thundered would be better – in San Francisco on a very atypical August day: clear blue sky, the deep blue waters of the bay twinkling and choppy.

“The temperature in the city just now,” announces the captain, “is, believe it or not, 74 degrees.” The “believe it or not” would have puzzled only visitors who had never been to San Francisco before in August.

The Chamber of Commerce is, I’m sure, grateful for those people, for the naïve newcomers who will come here in August for the first time and decide there will never be a second time. For this is the dependably cool to cold month of the year, often sunless, but swirling dramatically with great, white plumes of fog.

What no foreigner or American who lives anywhere else does not know, or won’t believe, is that San Francisco is the only city in the country – come to that, it’s the only city I know – that has its own micro climate. Just the city.

Most of us from any other part of the country, and certainly from Europe, live in wide, spacious weather systems. For instance, when last week it was 96 degrees in New York City, 200-odd miles to the north in Boston, it was 92; 200-odd miles to the south in Washington, it was 98.

When London shivers, so does Manchester.

But here, when I arrived and opened the evening paper to get a line on the coming weather, it said the range not of temperatures, high temperatures, for the next two days will range from the upper 60s to a 105 degrees.

And there you have it! A city by the bay will be in the 60s. So it was. But cross the Golden Gate Bridge and, only a mile or two to the north, it’s in the 80s. Worse – cross the Bay Bridge and drive just over the hills, and only 10 miles inland from San Francisco, that same day, the high was 109. For once you drop down the eastern slopes of the coast range you’re in the central valley and, it seems, a whole planet away from the city by the bay.

Mark Twain had spent several infernal summers in the dry hills and sweating valleys of Nevada before he was run out of town for having written rude things about the few worthy matrons of Virginia City. He beat it – or, as he wrote, "I absquatulated to the coast. And after the sage brush and alkali desert of Nevada, San Francisco was heaven on the half-shell."

His more famous remark about this city was the reaction of a typical easterner or southerner coming for the first time on the puzzle of San Francisco’s summer climate. It was, you’ll have guessed, slightly exaggerated for comic purposes, "The coldest winter I ever spent was summer in San Francisco".

I can see from my hotel window now little clusters of tourists basking in the brilliant sun and the silver light, but when the weather goes back to normal two days from now, they’ll stand hugging their chests, shivering in the drifting fog and saying to anybody who’ll listen, “Is this California?” Needless to say, no travel agent, no hotel keeper ever warns, ever hints at this peculiarity. If they did, they’d get an earful from the clothing stores and the importers of sweaters.

Well we arrive now at my hotel room, and I’m shown up to it by a comparatively new young man. An alert, cordial fellow; one of the new Americans, or (you might say) the new Asians. A Chinese name.

So what’s new about him? It’s hard to explain. I suppose everybody knows that the Chinese poured in here in the mid-19th Century. They were imported to help build the railroad going east that would eventually meet, at a point in the Utah Desert, the other company’s railroad racing west from the east.

Some Chinese went back. More stayed and created a town in a town, their own Chinatown. A rather superior immigrant conclave to some others you might name, but they kept to themselves from then till now and did the things they did best in the beginning. They ran little restaurants – first for themselves, later on for tourists – and they did laundry better than anybody; still do.

However, as we say when we’ve strayed from the beaten path, I was roughly painting the picture of Chinatown as it was a hundred years ago and seems much the same today.

But about 30 years ago, America began to encounter a new attitude from immigrants not, as in the earlier century, having an urge to meld as quickly as possible into the new culture to become – as Teddy Roosevelt put it – “to become Americans and stop anymore talk of hyphenated Americans: German-Americans, Italian-Americans and so forth. The language itself will unite us and must.”

Well now in the past 30 years or so, as I’ve often noticed, there have appeared immigrants, especially from South and Central America, with a new attitude. They want to remain Puerto Ricans, Cubans or whatever.

Only a month ago, I had a cab driver in New York from Morocco. He was whining about the time it took to become a citizen. “You want to be a citizen then?”, I asked him. “Of course,” he said, in pretty fluent English. “You get better jobs. I want to be an American citizen, but not an American. I want to remain a Moroccan.”

This is, in the 300-odd year history of immigration, something new. It opens up the promise, but also the problems of a multicultural society.

So here in San Francisco, we’ve set up the old Asians as people more or less imported as cheap labour. Anything they were paid here was five to ten times what they’d earn at home, and it’s still true of the people who in the Far East make our slippers and sports shoes and shirts.

The sons and daughters of those originals who stayed on, did for generations the same humble jobs – cooking, fetching, carrying, laundering – and now largely staff the hotels.

But what I have in mind in even coining the phrase "The New Asians" are the New Americans – young Asians just graduating (usually at the top of their class) from high school or college. Asians who came here without a word of English; fled with their parents when the North Vietnamese moved down to conquer the South. And they’re now moving easily into the professions – doctors of several specialties, lawyers, professors, scientists – some of them in their 30s already getting ahead of the best in their field. They do not live in Chinatown. They are the children of the refugees from Hong Kong, from Korea, from Vietnam, and (later) from Pol Pot’s dread Cambodia.

The most striking thing about them in the mass is that they do better in school, better in college; and when they move into a profession are superior to the other two big minorities: the blacks and the Latin Americans.

This very day, the first big story I read in a San Francisco paper was a six-column spread carrying the bleak headline, "Grand jury calls San Francisco school integration a failure".

I don’t know how I can convey the truly shocking impact of that headline. It would have been an impossibility 40 years ago, shortly after the Supreme Court handed down its historic ruling which abolished the old rule for blacks of separate but equal – they were never equal – and now required the integration of all public services: schools, theatres, restaurants, buses, jobs and so on; the most dramatic ruling of my time and the most promising.

We guessed then that within 10 years, say 20 at most, blacks and whites would go to the same schools together and we should see, if not the millennium, then a newer, freer America that had shaken from its society the stigma or the inferiority of race.

What an inhuman hope. It developed that the integration of schools required a minority – sometimes of white, sometimes of blacks – to be bussed five miles, 10 miles, 30 miles every day to the common school.

We now know (but didn’t imagine) the appalling social complications of doing this, of taking children of whatever colour out of their neighbourhood, their life, for a part of the day and then back; for the whites, usually to the comfort of a better neighbourhood; for the black children, too often a return from an undreamed-of outer world to something they recognised for the first time as a ghetto.

It would take from now till Christmas to detail the social and legal problems that the cities encountered in trying (in good faith) to maintain integrated schools.

We can now admit, sadly, that in many (if not most places) it has not worked. Why? I think because there has not yet been born what the Supreme Court might call a “colour blind generation”.

Anyway, the conclusion of the report turned in by this civil grand jury, which has been sitting for a year reviewing the state of integrated public education in San Francisco, is that while the courts have succeeded in producing a racial balance in the 64,000 district students, it has failed in the ultimate – that’s to say the original – purpose. There is no equality of scholarly achievement between the whites and the blacks and the Latin American students; they’re still way behind.

The most striking thing about this report to me is what isn’t there. No mention of Asian Americans who do better than anybody in any school.

I’ve thought about this and talked about this in this city with many sorts of people and to the question why do Asian children excel in school. The answer, I believe, which I’m afraid is not susceptible to statistical proof, comes from the students themselves often quite spontaneously. “We study hard to have our parents proud of us.”

I find that this impulse, emotion, desire for family pride is paramount in young Asians. Perhaps their children, the first Americans, will lose it. But there it is now. It cannot be legislated, I doubt it can be taught. It is a part of an Asian tradition.

As a child said, “To be worthy of my family. That’s why I work hard.”

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