Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (15 page)

As educators we need to find our way into such conversations, not only because they benefit our communities but because they strengthen our capacity to help our students have them. We, whether White or of color, need to deepen our own understanding of the systemic nature of racism, its impact on each of us, and how to interrupt it. Such a shared understanding not only creates common ground for the cultivation of friendship, it also is a prerequisite for the transformative education we need for a more just society.

These lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Choruses from ‘The Rock’” were written more than seventy years ago, yet they still resonate with power today.
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Our students have grown up in the information age. They have easy access to so much information—but will they use it wisely? There are difficult decisions to make in our increasingly complex world. How do we adequately prepare our students for wise ethical and responsible leadership?

This is an important question, because while there are certainly wise students among us, their development may have occurred in spite of our efforts, not necessarily because of them. At colleges and universities across the nation, too often we see students seeking success at any cost, reflected in the rising tide of plagiarism and other forms of academic dishonesty. We are confronted by the loss of civility in increasingly diverse communities. We witness the feelings of fragmentation and increased psychological distress reported by campus counseling centers around the country.
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We see a loss of balance, too often a lack of integrity, and limited vision. And yet we need all of these—balance, integrity, vision; a clear sense of collective responsibility and ethical leadership—in order to prepare our students for wise stewardship of their world and active participation in a democracy.

The technological advances of the twenty-first century will provide unanticipated opportunities for our students. They will have increasing access to ever larger quantities of information, but will they have the wisdom to use it for the common good? How do we cultivate the knowledge of self and others, the clarity of vision, the sense of perspective needed to make wise choices? Further, how do we do this in the context of ethnically and religiously diverse student communities, where we cannot assume shared cultural norms and values?

These questions are especially important in the context of a changing world order. We need an educated citizenry prepared to join an increasingly interdependent world. The American psychologist and educator John Dewey told us long ago that education could prepare people for life in a democracy only if the educational experience were also democratic. Louis Menand, in “Reimagining Liberal Education,” drew from the wisdom of Dewey when he wrote, “You cannot teach people a virtue by requiring them to read books about it. You can only teach a virtue by calling upon people to exercise it. Virtue is not an innate property of character; it is an attribute of behavior.”
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We must ask if our learning environments create opportunities for practicing the behaviors required in an effective democracy.

And what is the relationship between wisdom and social justice? In my mind, you cannot have one without the other. There is no wisdom in inequity. Justice seeking requires the recognition of multiple perspectives and the opportunity for thoughtful reflection and dialogue. To quote the education leaders Lee Knefelkamp and Carol Geary Schneider,

Again, how do we create the opportunities for reflection, integration, and application of ideas that lead to greater self-knowledge and social understanding, that help students gain perspective and a greater recognition of the interdependence that necessarily exists within communities? What curricular and pedagogical strategies will lead us to the cultivation of wisdom? If wisdom is our goal, how can we be more intentional in our practice to facilitate its emergence? These are questions that should be at the heart of what we do as educators.

Throughout this book I have tried to suggest ways in which we are at an important historical moment with regard to education and our nation’s legacy of dealing with race. It is a moment that contains both dangers and opportunities. We can allow the forces leading to greater segregation to drive us further apart as a nation; or we can use our leadership—as educators or as active citizens—to use and value higher education as a location where crucial connections can be forged. I started the book with a recounting of the drama of desegregation and now de facto resegregation that has played out in my lifetime. As the current president of a great institution of higher education who has spent a lot of time working with and studying the work of K–12 educators, I see important and overlooked connections between what happens in schools and what happens in colleges and universities. I want to end the book with some thoughts on what this historical moment means for higher education.

First, I must point out that the affirmative action era that opened the doors of historically White public and private universities in the early 1970s changed higher education significantly. For example, a sample of twenty-five selective public and private universities whose Black enrollments averaged 1.0 percent or less in 1951 had increased their share of Black undergraduates to approximately 7.0 percent by 1998.
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One might argue whether that pace of growth in a forty-seven year period is equivalent to “all deliberate speed,” but certainly it is change.

However, the retreat from school desegregation that is occurring at the K–12 level is certainly also a threat to higher education. It is a threat because both White students and students of color will come to college without the preparation that they need. Many students of color will have had reduced access to high-level college preparatory courses and the facilities that support such a curriculum. Many White students will have had less effective social preparation for diverse campus life. Further, the current legal assault on affirmative action in higher education can be seen as parallel to the resegregation of public education effected through the Supreme Court. Just as one legal case after another chipped away at the possibility of full implementation of the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision for public elementary and secondary schools, the anti–affirmative action cases directed toward higher education threaten to further the restrictions that have already been placed on special recruiting efforts and other affirmative action initiatives designed to increase the enrollment of students of color at predominantly White institutions.

Yet those of us who were the beneficiaries of
Brown
, both White and of color, and who came of age before the retrenchment of the 1990s, are now in positions of influence. We can use our spheres of influence to interrupt this backward movement. Those of us in higher education have a particular obligation to do so. The decision makers of the future are the college students of today. They need to have an understanding of the social history that has shaped their current context of racial isolation, and the choices they can make to change it.

Because of the persistence of elementary- and secondary-school segregation fifty years after the
Brown
decision, today’s American youth have had few opportunities to interact with those racially, ethnically, or religiously different from them before they go to college. In a recent conversation I had with a White male colleague who lives and works in a largely White community, he lamented that his son had no Black friends, and to his dismay, his son was expressing some negative attitudes toward the African American students he did encounter. My colleague, also in his fifties, was like me a child of
Brown
who had been able to develop close cross-racial friendships in school, and he was worried that his son would not benefit from such an experience himself. His son’s story illustrates well the fact that lack of direct experience means that what one learns about the “other” is too often secondhand information, conveyed in the form of media stereotypes. Even when parents have positive racial attitudes, children can absorb the prejudices of their peers and the wider cultural milieu. The specific content of those prejudices, and their targets, will vary depending on where students have grown up and what their life experience has been. But we can be sure that all members of our campus population have come to college with stereotypes and prejudices about some other segment of our student body. How could it be otherwise when there is so much misinformation circulating in the environment?

As a result, colleges, of all the institutions in our country, have some of the greatest responsibility to challenge misconceptions and explore differences—and to help our students develop their capacity to connect across them. Most of our students do not come with this capacity for connection already developed, yet it is a capacity that
can
be developed. Increasingly, educators are recognizing the need to foster this capacity as an essential outcome of a quality education. A recent study conducted by leaders at the nation’s institutional accrediting bodies in conjunction with several higher education associations revealed a remarkable consensus on fifteen key outcomes that all students, regardless of major or academic background, should achieve while in college. Among them were civic responsibility and engagement, ethical reasoning, teamwork, and intercultural knowledge and actions.
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Each of these competencies requires or is enhanced by the opportunity to engage with those whose perspectives and life experiences are different from one’s own—perspectives and experiences that when shared can challenge and stimulate one’s own critical thinking.

Empirical research has supported what many educators have observed through our classroom experiences about the educational benefits of learning in a diverse community.
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Drawing on national data from colleges and universities across the country as well as from data specific to the University of Michigan, the social psychologist Pat Gurin and her colleagues concluded that those students who experienced the most racial and ethnic diversity in and out of their classrooms benefited in terms of both “learning outcomes” and “democracy outcomes.”
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Greater engagement in active thinking processes, growth in intellectual engagement and motivation, and growth in intellectual and academic skills were among the benefits to students actively involved in a diverse campus community. These students also showed the most involvement during college in various forms of citizenship, the most engagement with people from different races and cultures, and they were the most likely to acknowledge that group differences are compatible with the interests of the broader community—all outcomes important to the health of our democracy. When we consider the problems posed by the current trend of school resegregation, it is encouraging to know that students who had the most diversity experiences during college continued that pattern of cross-racial interaction—in their neighborhoods and at work—several years after their college graduation.

The last finding is a particularly powerful one in light of the self-perpetuating power of segregation in U.S. society. Those who grow up in segregated environments tend to stay in them. As Pat Gurin commented in her expert testimony in the University of Michigan affirmative action case, “If institutions of higher education are able to bring together students from various ethnic and racial backgrounds at the critical time of late adolescence and early adulthood, they have the opportunity to disrupt an insidious cycle of lifetime segregation that threatens the fabric of our pluralistic democracy.”
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These are the students—today’s young college students—who have the potential to interrupt our well-established patterns of residential segregation and can perhaps begin to make the ideal of
Brown
a reality.

This may seem like an odd point for me to make, given that I am the president of Spelman College, the oldest historically Black college for women. If cross-group interaction is so important, why are Black colleges still relevant fifty years after
Brown
? For me, the answer lies in the clear pattern of resistance to desegregation. Racism (and certainly sexism) persist in ways that leave Black women (and men) on the margins of too many learning environments.

Consider this: In the summer of 2005, six young Black women represented Spelman College at the International RoboCup, an annual robotics competition in Osaka, Japan. There they competed with twenty-four other teams from around the world, including technology giants like Georgia Tech and Carnegie Mellon. The SpelBots, as the team is called, made history as the first ever all-female and all-Black team to compete in this competition. Would six Black women be leading the robotics team anywhere else? It is unlikely. In a world where, as recently as 2005, an influential educator such as Lawrence Summers, then the president of Harvard University, can publicly question the intrinsic aptitude of women to excel in science, it seems quite unlikely.
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Yet what a fantastic opportunity it has been for young Black women from Spelman to pursue excellence in robotics and other sciences without the barrier of lowered expectations to impede them. We still need such environments where those who have been historically left out are expected and encouraged to stretch themselves to their highest potential. There is still power, and empowerment, that comes from the historically Black college experience, just as there is still power in the mentoring and leadership opportunities offered by women’s colleges. At Spelman, both of these aspects of identity are affirmed for young women of African descent in a powerful way.