It's funny, but what's integrated more than anything else is small-town rural South," [Columbia Law professor Jack Greenberg] said the other day in his office in Morningside Heights. "What's not integrated are the major metropolitan centers, where most black people live. It's a function of residential segregation, essentially city versus suburb."
We New Yorkers often view ourselves as sophisticated progressives, swearing we'd never live in the South and deriding the narrowness of small-town life. But the fact is that I went to segregated schools from kindergarten through high school -- New York City public schools where black and white students were rigorously separated except perhaps in gym class.