Seeing our way to diversity

"I don't have to sit next to someone of another color to learn," the late Seattle Schools Superintendent John Stanford once said.

That was more than a decade ago. What he was talking about — whether racial diversity is essential to a good education — has made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. On Dec. 4, the court will weigh whether it is constitutional for Seattle to consider race in deciding who goes to which school.

Stanford, who was black, wasn't saying segregation is good. But that having racially diverse schools is not as important as what you learn in them.

I'm inclined to agree. Then again, I wonder what Stanford would have thought of the story of Zaid Abdul-Aziz.

"Integration transformed my life," Abdul-Aziz says.

This Seattle man grew up in the ghetto, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant part of Brooklyn, N.Y. At 17, he got a chance to play college basketball for Iowa State.

To do it, he had to make a leap most of us would find unsettling, from "a place that was 98 percent black to one that was 98 percent white."

"I was nervous," he says. "But if I hadn't gotten on that plane — if I'd said 'I don't want to be around a bunch of white people' or 'I want to stay with my own kind' — it would have stifled my life forever."

Being tossed together with people of different races and economic backgrounds helped him as much as anything he learned in class, he says today.

You may have heard of Abdul-Aziz, perhaps by his old name, Don Smith. He played for the Sonics in the 1970s. Today, he's 60 and lives near Northgate. He's just out with an autobiography, "Darkness to Sunlight, the Life-Changing Journey of Zaid Abdul-Aziz."

I called him because he recently co-signed a legal brief to the Supreme Court. He and 27 other former NBA players, including former Sonics Fred Brown and Don Kojis, argue that integration has such intrinsic value that the Seattle School District was right to use skin color as a factor in assessing who gets in where.

"It's a tough call, because you want to move beyond race, to be blind to it," Abdul-Aziz says. "But how can we do that if we're still so segregated?"

He's saying we first have to be mindful of race in order to become blind to it. He might be right. Since Seattle stopped race-based busing in the '90s, and quit using racial admissions in 2001, many schools have become more segregated.

Local leaders have noticed. Every Seattle mayor since 1969 filed a brief in defense of the district's race-based policies, as did 13 former school-board members, the current state attorney general, both U.S. senators, Seattle's congressman and civil-rights groups.

That's impressive, but I'm skeptical this Supreme Court will go along. To me, there's another way out of this endless debate: Give admissions preference to poor kids.

It's a policy that's color-blind, but not blind to need. It would still foster the jumbling of peoples that so profoundly affected Abdul-Aziz.

"One day race won't be the issue," he says. "But we still have to come out of our little boxes and come together before we get there."

Danny Westneat's column appears Thursday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.