Algernon Austin presents an excellent, concise, and wonderfully read scholarly examination of the complicated landscape of race, class and popular perception. Besides the prison industrial complex, black strides in education, poverty rates, crime and other indices contradict claims that blacks are “moving backward.”--Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Director, Institute for African American Studies, University of Connecticut and author of Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (The Johns Hopkins University Press), 2004 and Hip-Hop Revolution: The Culture and Politics of Rap (University Press of Kansas), 2007.
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[On June 28th, the Supreme Court eviscerated the Brown decision. The article below was first posted January 1, 2007.]
If Brown stands for anything, Brown stands for integration. --Wendy Parker, law professor, Wake Forest University
“Segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever,” proclaimed Governor George C. Wallace in his 1963 inaugural address. In regards to America’s elementary and secondary schools, it looks like Wallace may turn out to be correct: segregation forever.
This year the Supreme Court will issue decisions on two cases involving school desegregation policies in Seattle and Louisville, KY. It is likely that they will find these plans unconstitutional because they use race as a criteria for school assignment. (See Linda Greenhouse, “Court Reviews Race as Factor in School Plans,” New York Times, December 5, 2006.) Such a decision will continue the reversal of integrated schooling in America that has been taking place since the 1990s.
With the 1954 Brown decision, the Supreme Court joined the vanguard of the struggle for black civil rights and racial integration. Since the 1990s, the Supreme Court has been the vanguard of the struggle against black civil rights and racial integration.
The Civil Rights Project has documented that the Supreme Court’s decisions terminating school desegregation plans have resulted in more segregated schools. In every school district with 30,000 students or more, the termination of desegregation resulted in more segregation.
While the nation as a whole produced more integrated schools from the 1960s through the 1980s, schools have been becoming more segregated since the 1990s. In 1991, 66 percent of black students attended majority nonwhite schools. In 2003, 73 percent of black students were in these schools according to the Civil Rights Project’s report.
As bad as increased school segregation is, the greater damage from anti-integration rulings would be the codification of the Brown decision as standing for “colorblindness” and not for integration. Everyone knows that in the Brown decision the Court took a stand against segregation and more generally for policies designed to achieve racial equality, but the anti-integration arguments in the current cases assert that the Brown decision simply opposed the use of race and is indifferent to the existence of racial segregation. This is a travesty.
Any one interested in racial equality and racial justice should be outraged. The “colorblindness” logic represents a resurgence of Jim Crow. It does not institutionalize Jim Crow policies, but it bolsters any and all of the legacies of Jim Crow. If the line of argument of the opponents to school integration wins any attempt to address racial inequality could be ruled unconstitutional. During the hearing, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy asked if a school district could deliberately place a new school in a location that would—without any additional intervention—achieve a racially mixed student body. The lawyer representing the parents challenging the Seattle plan said no. (See Greenhouse.) Any plan for a new school, therefore, that does not yield a school as segregated as the already existing schools is subject to court challenge. By preventing the state from doing absolutely anything to address racial inequality the “colorblindness” advocates do a great deal to ensure the persistence of racial segregation and inequality.
“Colorblindness” means being willfully blind and indifferent to racial inequality and injustice. “Colorblindness” advocates are winning. Why aren’t more people outraged?
--Algernon Austin, Ph.D.
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