Charles Meeker, mayor of Raleigh for the last decade and a 35-year resident of the city, was merely stating the obvious. Several members of the Wake County school board's controlling bloc - four among the five members who want to remake the school system in the fond image of how they do things up North - are in fact, as Meeker observed, not from this area. Not originally, in any case.
And the mayor could make a plausible argument that those folks now running the school board don't share the values of long-time residents who have placed a priority on keeping the schools from separating out into racially distinct enclaves of rich and poor.
If they did, Wake wouldn't be having the huge debate over school diversity that now looks as though it will be punctuated with a throwback-style civil rights demonstration planned for July 20.
The mayor's remarks at an East Raleigh community meeting nevertheless picked at the old Southern scab involving resentment of outsiders who think they know better and don't have the good grace not to throw their weight around.
But there were some odd role reversals in play.
Don't be shocked, but Southern resentment of Yankees once was focused on the Northerners' determination to stamp out the Confederate rebellion and the practice of slavery, on which the ruling class of Southern whites believed their way of life depended.
Now we see a Southern mayor - albeit a District of Columbia native educated at Yale and Columbia - articulating that familiar cultural tension, but from the standpoint of someone convinced that the perspective of long-time Southerners (of whatever race) is more closely aligned with black residents' interests.
There is of course a disconnect in Wake between 1) the old-timers who went through desegregation of the schools, merger of the former city and county school systems and the crafting of diversity policies, and 2) the many newer arrivals, often settling in the rapidly growing suburbs, who put prime importance on stability in school assignments and on having their kids attend school with kids from the same kind of background.
In a twist of political fortunes that reflected both a quirky ballot (four suburban seats being contested) and a local Republican Party ready and eager to take advantage, the newcomers were the ones who came out of last fall's election asking the old-timers, "Who's your daddy?"
And then, perhaps in the strangest flip-flop of historical viewpoints, the dreaded C-word could be heard in the land.
After the Civil War, Northerners who turned up in the vanquished Confederacy were called carpetbaggers. The term became one of the nastiest in the Southern lexicon.
Not only were the outsiders seeking wealth and power in competition with the natives, but they also made common cause with newly freed blacks and Union-sympathizer scalawags. For Southern whites holding fast to notions of racial superiority and embittered by defeat, carpetbaggers were the embodiment of all their woes.
So these days, it is wildly ironic to hear the carpetbagger label applied, even if it's just muttered for private consumption, to school board members who have managed to get themselves utterly crosswise with the state NAACP and with a range of church groups that see the school system being driven into the civil rights ditch.
The carpetbaggers of Reconstruction times did share one conspicuous trait with members of the Republican-aligned school board majority. They were political opportunists flying in the face of the old order.
But in Wake, the old order was committed to the ideal of socioeconomic parity among schools as a means of making sure that some kids - poor and usually black - didn't lose out.
The new order claims to be about giving every child the advantage of attending a school in his or her neighborhood and thereby providing an academic boost. Too bad, though, that the national experience with inner-city schools suggests that socioeconomic segregation is an almost impossibly high hurdle to leap.
One of the board's majority contingent, son of the Northeast John Tedesco, went so far as to paint the neighborhood-schools push as following in the tradition of the Supreme Court's monumental 1954 ruling that barred legally segregated schools as inherently unequal. He said black students have the right to attend schools in their neighborhood.
Again those pesky ironies: The attendance zones Tedesco is working to devise could easily end up creating schools that are almost as segregated as the ones I attended in Virginia. And civil rights groups are supposed to be thrilled?
Don't look for Charles Meeker to call anybody a carpetbagger. But there's no reason for him to back away from his premise that the school board's new direction is being set by folks whose values are out of kilter with those shared by a great many residents who have been around here long enough to understand why the Wake schools have been operated the way they have. Good Southerners understand that diversity is an important means to worthy ends.
