Can We Talk about Race?: And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (3 page)

What I have called here the “affirmative action era” officially began in 1965. The term “affirmative action” became part of our language and legal system in 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed Executive Order 11246. This order required federal contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” By law, contractors were obligated to make a “good faith effort” to use procedures that would result in equal employment opportunity for historically disadvantaged groups. The groups targeted for this “affirmative action” were White women, and men and women of color (specifically defined by the federal government as American Indian/Alaska Natives, Asian or Pacific Islanders, Blacks, and Hispanics). In the 1970s, legislation broadened the protected groups to include persons with disabilities and Vietnam veterans. Although Executive Order 11246 required affirmative action, it did not specify exactly what affirmative action programs should look like.
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Given this lack of specificity, it is not surprising that there is great variety in the way affirmative action programs have been developed and implemented around the country.
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The executive order had as its goal equal employment opportunity. But in practice, because of continuing patterns of discrimination, that goal could not be reached without positive steps—affirmative action—to create that equality of opportunity.
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And in the 1970s, historically White institutions of higher education were taking positive steps—affirmative action—to extend opportunity to those who had been previously denied.

When I entered Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, as a first-year student in 1971, I was part of a cohort group of Black and Latino students who were infusing racial and ethnic diversity into the institution for the first time in any significant way. And most of us sat together in the cafeteria. Given the social history that I have reviewed, it is not surprising that we did. Both casual interracial contact and close interracial friendship are positively associated with having attended racially mixed schools as a child.
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Most of us—born in the 1950s and coming of age in the 1960s and early 1970s—were children of Brown’s promise, not its eventual implementation, and were products of segregated schools, as were our White classmates. My own experience of growing up as a young Black woman in a White community was not a common one then, and it had been socially isolating for me, especially in my adolescence. I was thrilled to escape it in college, and relished every day that I sat at the “Black table” in the cafeteria.

Why were we sitting together then? It was an affirmation—a time to relax—a creation of community based on a shared experience of being one of few in an environment unaccustomed to our presence. Did all Black students share in it? No. Were White students intentionally excluded from it? Not in any active way. They were not usually the focus of our attention. We were primarily interested in ourselves and the experience we were having as what W.E.B. DuBois would have called the “talented tenth,” exploring our dual consciousness as young Black men and women in a predominantly White college setting.
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We were having what has been described by the psychologist William Cross in the terms of racial identity development theory as an “immersion experience.”
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This particular phase of identity development is characterized by a strong desire to surround oneself with symbols of one’s racial identity, and actively seek out opportunities to learn about one’s own history and culture with the support of same-race peers. Anger and frustration experienced as the result of encounters with individual or institutional manifestations of racism might fuel the impulse to gather together, but the connections are sustained through the joyful exploration of one’s own culture and the positive affirmation of one’s group. Such reasons are still relevant today, perhaps even more so in some places.

When I entered college in 1971, the opportunity for interracial contact was a new experience for most, but such opportunities were expanding in our public schools. Under President Johnson, the federal government began vigorously enforcing desegregation laws, and by 1970 the schools in the South were far more racially mixed than those in any other region of the United States. However, the election of President Richard Nixon in 1968 marked the end of such vigorous enforcement and the beginning of the ideological reconfiguration of the Supreme Court, with four Nixon appointees.
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In a tape-recorded conversation with the attorney general, John Mitchell, President Nixon discussed his criteria for selecting a new Supreme Court justice: “I’d say that our first requirement is have a southerner. The second requirement, he must be a conservative southerner….I don’t care if he’s a Democrat or a Republican. Third, within the definition of conservative, he must be against busing, and against forced housing integration. Beyond that, he can do what he pleases.”
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And indeed, in a 5–4 vote with the four Nixon appointees (Warren E. Burger, Harry A. Blackmun, Lewis F. Powell, and William H. Rehnquist) voting with the majority, the 1974
Milliken v. Bradley
decision was the first of a series of Supreme Court decisions that moved away from the government’s efforts to desegregate schools. In this case, the Court prohibited court-ordered busing across district lines unless there was proof that the actions of the school districts had created the racial disparities between them. In other words, the Black inner-city schools of Detroit could not be desegregated at the expense of suburban children, most of whom were White.
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This ruling led to more busing
within
cities, creating a backlash among White working-class families who had not been able to afford the move to the suburbs. Nowhere was this more clearly visible than in Boston, Massachusetts, where the nightly news covered the racial violence associated with court-ordered efforts to desegregate the Boston public schools. “White flight” was the result. In 1970 the Boston public schools enrolled 96,000 students, 59,000 of whom were White. By 2000, only 9,300 White students remained in the Boston public schools, just 15 percent of the current total.
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Judicial oversight in Boston and other cities ended in 1990 on the heels of yet another pivotal Supreme Court decision, this one focused on Oklahoma.
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The Oklahoma case began in 1961 as the result of a lawsuit to integrate the schools, which had been segregated by order of the state constitution ever since Oklahoma achieved statehood in 1907. In 1963 the federal judge Luther Bohanon ruled that the “dual” system of education be ended. The school board adopted a “neighborhood zoning” plan in response, but because of residential segregation (the end result of racially restrictive real-estate covenants supported by state and local law), the neighborhood zoning plan was ineffective. Finally, in 1972, because little progress toward desegregation had been made, Judge Bohanon ordered a busing plan designed to achieve racial balance. Five years later, in 1977, the Board of Education of Oklahoma City asked Judge Bohanon to close the case and he did, expressing his confidence that the board would continue to comply with constitutional desegregation requirements. However, in 1985 the school board reinstated the neighborhood zoning plan, and Robert Dowell and the other original plaintiffs asked that the case be reopened. In 1989 the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in their favor, instructing the Oklahoma City school board to design a new plan to integrate the Oklahoma City schools. The school board appealed, and the case went before the Supreme Court. The Court sent the case back to Judge Bohanon to decide whether the state had satisfied the original desegregation order. In the end, Judge Bohanon ruled in the state’s favor and closed the case.
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In his book,
Jim Crow’s Children
, Peter Irons concludes,

Indeed, the
Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell
decision had the ripple effect of federal judges releasing other school districts from their court-ordered desegregation plans. This and other related court decisions in the 1990s have contributed to
increasing
rather than decreasing school segregation. This shift has been particularly striking in the South, in part because southern school districts made the most visible progress toward desegregation in the 1970s and 1980s, even in rural areas that had seemed particularly resistant in the early days of the civil rights era. However, in the 1990s, the Supreme Court moved from a period of setting limits on desegregation methods (as in
Milliken
) to what Gary Orfield, the director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, has called a “period of retreat and reversal,” symbolized by decisions such as
Board of Education of Oklahoma City
, which supported resegregation. In response, for the first time since the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education
decision, segregation in southern public schools is steadily increasing, and has been for more than a decade, while the largely intractable segregation of northern cities has intensified.
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While this brief overview of fifty years of judicial decisions and educational impact may be quite familiar to some of my generation, I focus on it here because there are many people who may remember
Brown v. Board of Education
but who have no recollection of
Milliken v. Bradley
or
Board of Education of Oklahoma City v. Dowell
or the other Supreme Court decisions that collectively facilitated the return to public school segregation. As a culture, we celebrate the symbolic importance of the anniversary of
Brown v. Board of Education
, without fully acknowledging the reality of K–12 public school resegregation. We need to understand this recent history and its implications for schooling in our society today.

If our focus is on the multiracial representations of a few evening TV dramas, or the increasing presence of people of color in many work environments, or the discourse of diversity in the popular culture around us, we might easily labor under the assumption that we now live, work, and go to school in an integrated society. But for many in the United States, that simply is not true. According to the 2004 Census data, the U.S. population is now approximately 67.4 percent non-Hispanic White, 14 percent Hispanic, 12.8 percent Black, 4.2 percent Asian American, 1.2 percent American Indian, Alaska Native, or Pacific Islander; 1.5 percent of census participants identified themselves as belonging to “two or more races.”
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That diversity, however, is not reflected in most neighborhoods. Certainly as immigration increases in our border states and the population of color multiplies in cities across the nation, one can find a rich urban mosaic of varying cultures and ethnicities, but more often than not, these diverse cultural communities are separated neighborhood by neighborhood, and often school by school. Most African Americans, Latinos, and Whites still live in neighborhoods with people from their same racial group.
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Racial segregation is also associated with economic segregation. In 2000, 76 percent of those living in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty were Black or Latino. While Black-White residential segregation declined somewhat between 1980 and 2000, Blacks continue to experience the most residential segregation (as compared to other groups of color).
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Approximately one-third of all Blacks live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty.
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Black-White residential segregation is highest in the Northeast and Midwest, a factor in the intensity of school segregation in those regions.

It is clear that those of us who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s are products of a historically unique period of progress toward integration that is not widely shared by young people today. As educators, it is important for us to understand the resegregating experience of students today and what it means for our educational practice and our society as a whole.

What is the significance of continuing residential segregation and increasing school resegregation? One possible outcome is that while interracial contact and more-tolerant racial attitudes increased during the last half of the twentieth century, the same may not be true in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, particularly in our public schools. For example, when high school students were asked, as part of an annual survey, how often they interacted with people of other races—engaging in activities such as having a conversation, eating together, or playing sports—the percentage of White students who said they did this “a lot” increased significantly over the time between 1976 and 2000, doubling from approximately 15 percent to 30 percent.
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While conversely this statistic suggests that 70 percent of White youth do
not
have such experiences with great frequency, the increase in interaction reported in this study can be seen as a positive result of improving race relations in America. What will the answers be in 2010? In 2020?