To this day, liberals in general and black liberals especially love it

Though not if it affects their own kids.

Love what?

It used to be called "forced busing", but the author is perfectly right: it was never about busing per se.

It was about coerced imposition of racial uniformity of student bodies across entire school systems.

And that was mostly about ensuring equality of funding, quality of teaching, staff, and so on.

But it was also a finger in the eye of whites who did not want their kids subjected to the violence typical of black students, or their hatred.

And it was supposed to be, and still is.

It Was Never About Busing

To this day, whites of all ages and descriptions, and generally nonwhites who are not Afro-Americans, mostly try not to live in areas that are majority black, or even where blacks are too large a minority.

Ditto, in fact, for blacks who can find a way out.

Bear in mind that, back in the day, the oxymoronic PC expression "de facto segregation" was coined to refer to unevenness of the distribution of races in schools that was not mandated by law but the effect entirely of the residence patterns you would expect.

And the point of that was to disguise that segregation, legally mandated by definition, was not at all the issue, and the point of bussing was to coercively create race ratios in public schools that liberals of all races desired, for their own purposes, though most of the nonblacks affected positively opposed both that means and that goal.

This from Matt Yglesias at Vox is a good history lesson, though he does nothing to unmask the fraudulence of the expression, "de facto segregation" and instead himself commits the fraud, repeatedly.

[M]uch of the United States, most notably the entire South, had a longstanding policy of de jure school segregation into the 20th century — it was formally illegal for an African American student to attend a white school. 

It didn’t matter where you lived or what taxes you paid; some schools were for white students and others were for black students.

Such policies were deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954[.]

. . . .

Then litigation began to turn toward de facto segregation and, crucially, to the North, based on a 1971 Supreme Court precedent from North Carolina that ruled that Charlotte’s formerly de jure segregated school system had to achieve actual racial mixing in its schools, even if that meant assigning students on a non-geographical basis. 

That legal reasoning proved to be a conceptually powerful lever for attacking de facto segregation in the North.

. . . .

A common situation in Northern cities was that there was no rule against black kids attending a white school. 

There was, instead, a long legacy of policy decisions (restrictive covenants, redlining) and informal norms that had created a stark pattern of residential segregation. 

School assignment boundaries were then drawn to reinforce the underlying pattern of residential segregation and create a situation where, de facto, the schools were segregated, even if there was no law preventing black students and white students from attending school together.

And here we are more than fifty years on from the last moment such chicanery could have restricted anyone's residential choices and liberals are still doing their best to brand this sort - or any sort? - of residential separation of races utterly illegitimate, along with the differences in racial makeups of student bodies in different areas that result.

A point that he as much as admits, thus.

An optimist 40 or 50 years ago might have hoped that de facto segregation would simply fade away over a generation or two, as the formal policies that undergirded de jure segregation were no longer there to support it.

But this hasn’t really happened. 

Measuring segregation across time is difficult because the underlying demographics have changed so much — these days, white kids are a much smaller share of the school-age population and Latino and Asian kids are a much larger one — but depending on how you look at it, progress on de facto desegregation has either stalled or reversed.

MY goes on to cite evidence suggesting that, even controlling for disparities in income and parental education, black students do better in schools with more whites while white students do worse in schools with more blacks.

He also pretty convincingly shows both white and black parents prefer that their kids attend schools where the students are as much as possible of their own race.

And that includes white liberal parents moving heaven and earth to keep their kids in the whitest possible schools.