Presidential candidate Julian Castro said on Friday that he supports tackling “housing segregation” in addition to “voluntary busing” to desegregate more school districts across America.
At the National Education Association’s presidential forum in Texas, Castro was asked how he would live up the the “promise and commitment” of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.
Castro said the country must “tackle housing segregation” and invest in more “fair housing enforcement” because too often “when a family of color goes and they look for an apartment of a house in certain neighborhoods, they are turned downed simply because of the color of their skin.”
Castro, former President Barack Obama’s Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary, said housing segregation “continues the segregation that too often limits thee ability” of students of color. He said when he was Obama’s HUD secretary, the administration passed “the most groundbreaking rule called affirmatively further fair housing” to “further desegregate our country.”
The former San Antonio mayor also said he supports “tools like voluntary busing so that within school districts, folks are able to go to different schools.” He also pushed for more housing opportunities in “higher opportunity areas” so students can be in districts “traditionally they couldn’t afford to be in.”
Castro, who comes from a family of public school teachers, told the audience that he attended an “intensely segregated public school district in San Antonio” that was “80-85 percent Mexican-American” before going off to Stanford for college.
“I know from firsthand experience the impact of growing up in a segregated school district,” he said. “The challenge is that today we’re grappling with so many of the same issues that we were grappling with 30, 40, 50 years ago.”
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